The year 2021 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), a book that set the agenda for decades of scholarship on the history of popular religion and supernatural beliefs. The book brought to life a lost world of early modern English magic, its success ultimately confirming popular beliefs and practices as respectable objects of historical study. This review essay, emerging out of a conference celebrating the book’s legacy, explores why Religion and the Decline of Magic came to have such a lasting hold on the historical imagination and why, despite half a century of historiographical development, it has managed to achieve a kind of ahistorical permanence. The essay traces this apparent timelessness, in part, to the book’s contested origins. Religion and the Decline of Magic was an unusual and unexpected work to emerge out of the Oxford History Faculty and the maelstrom of social history in the 1960s. While much attention has been paid to its engagement with anthropological theory, we argue that the book’s longevity owes more to its status as ethnography and to Thomas’s methods as a historian, allowing generations of new readers to gain fresh insights from a work out of time.

中文翻译：

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不合时宜的作品：宗教与五十岁时魔法的衰落

2021 年是基思·托马斯 (Keith Thomas) 的《宗教与魔法的衰落》(Religion and the Decline of Magic，1971) 出版 50 周年，这本书为数十年流行宗教和超自然信仰历史的学术研究制定了议程。这本书再现了一个失落的现代早期英国魔法世界，它的成功最终证实了流行的信仰和实践是值得尊敬的历史研究对象。这篇评论文章是在庆祝该书遗产的一次会议上发表的，探讨了为什么《宗教与魔法的衰落》对历史想象有着如此持久的影响力，以及为什么尽管经历了半个世纪的史学发展，它仍然成功地实现了一种非历史的永久性。这篇文章将这种明显的永恒性部分归因于这本书有争议的起源。《宗教与魔法的衰落》是牛津历史系和 20 世纪 60 年代社会历史漩涡中诞生的一部不同寻常且出乎意料的著作。虽然它与人类学理论的结合受到了很多关注，但我们认为，这本书的长寿更多地归功于它作为民族志的地位和托马斯作为历史学家的方法，让一代又一代的新读者从一部过时的作品中获得新鲜的见解。