ABSTRACT
Keith Thomas was born in 1933. A gifted student, he left his Welsh grammar school for Oxford University in 1952 and remained there for the rest of a distinguished career in several colleges. Thomas was one of a number of influential historians at Oxford in the period immediately following World War II. In Religion, Thomas uses methods drawn from the field of social anthropology to explore the thinking that led medieval people to believe in magic. His argument is that magic had a pragmatic function, and that it was designed to remedy problems, such as disease, for which there were no immediate solutions. Religion achieved the status of a classic in a matter of months after its publication in 1971. At the broadest level, Religion and the Decline of Magic demonstrates the potential for social history to help us understand the belief systems and world-views of the past.
