A Cultural History of Magic in the Age of Enlightenment

This volume, written by leading experts, explores magic in its many forms in the long eighteenth century (c.1660 and c.1830): from harmful (witchcraft, cursing, and the evil-eye) and ceremonial/ritual magic to astrology, alchemy, magical healing, protective magic and divination. It examines how and why magic retained cultural currency in a period of intense change, its gendering in a male dominated society, and its regulation by religious and legal authorities. The book also discusses magical creatures, objects and techniques, how magic was represented in literature and the visual arts, and what happened to it when exported to new lands with colonisation. Although the era covered encapsulates Enlightenment and Romanticism it has often been dismissed as a self-explanatory interlude that bridged the ‘enchanted’ early modern period, when witch trials raged and religious authorities targeted ‘beneficial’ magical practitioners, and a ‘disenchanted’ modernity marked by urbanisation, secularisation, industrialisation, the rise of modern science and medicine and the decline of magic. What emerges from this book is a more complex and nuanced picture that encourages us to challenge any neat categorisation of magical use and practice which was often dependant on context for its meaning. Rather than one of disenchantment and decline, magic is very much alive in the enlightenment period, waxing or waning depending on the country, culture, social class, region, place, or time looked at; always adapting, always changing, always there.