A History of Science, Magic, and Belief: From Medieval to Early Modern Europe by Steven P. Marrone (review)

Steven Marrone begins this useful survey by declaring that the early-modern “witchcraze” and scientific revolution “both arose from a single process of broad change sweeping Europe” (p. viii). While general readers, at whom Marrone is in part aiming, might be shocked to find witchcraft related to science in any way, experts in these fields will be interested in the nature of the connections he draws.

First, Marrone frames the connection of magic to both science and religion through the anthropological theories of James Frazer and Bronislaw Malinowski. He then begins his historical survey by moving quickly from antiquity, when some forms of magic were taken seriously as learned scientia, into the early Christian era, when church fathers resolutely linked magic to demon-worship and therefore to false religion. Throughout the early Middle Ages, however, Christian elites did not respond to magic’s diabolical evil so much as they disdained common magical practices intellectually. This changed in the twelfth century, when the idea of magic as a viable form of scientia re-emerged in medieval Europe. At the same time, however, the Church also developed a judicial apparatus to control popular beliefs and practices more stringently. Initially these mechanisms focused on heresy, but they would eventually be turned against magic.

After a brief moment of intellectual respectability, magic was resoundingly recondemned as evil and demonic by most major Scholastic authorities. Their thought informed the stereotype of the diabolical witch that emerged in the early-fifteenth century. Ironically, there was at that time another brief surge in intellectually serious and respectable magic among Renaissance neo-Platonists. This too, however, never became widely accepted, and the next major intellectual change to affect magic was the advent of mechanical philosophy, which undermined the world of active spiritual and occult forces on which magical thinking depended, leading ultimately to modern science and Weberian “disenchantment.”

The basic outlines of this analysis are well known. Marrone gives the most attention to twelfth- and thirteenth-century debates about magic as a form of scientia. Despite his initial framing of witchcraft and the scientific revolution, he offers little coverage to either, and the balance of the book tips decisively toward the medieval. This is valuable, insofar as many surveys covering these topics tend to skew heavily toward the early modern. That said, readers who are not already familiar with the history of early-modern witchcraft or science will find Marrone’s coverage sparse. For example, his chapter on the “Witchcraze” dedicates more than twenty pages to the intellectual origins of the witch-stereotype in the fifteenth century, but just one paragraph to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-hunts themselves.

By his own admission, Marrone often favors older interpretations rather than more recent ones. For example, he maintains a distinction between “popular” and “elite” magical cultures, where many scholars now stress “common” practices. Marrone’s position is certainly tenable, and he explains his reasoning clearly. Some points, though, are more problematic. He consistently uses the term witchcraze, for example, which many experts reject because it implies irrationality (which Marrone’s analysis also opposes) and because it conveys a sense that fear of witches was rampant throughout this entire era. In fact, witch trials varied dramatically in frequency and intensity across space and time, but Marrone gives no indication of this.

Any book that traces broad developments over the better part of a millennium will have to eschew some details, and a good survey should try to emphasize points not stressed in others. Marrone does this in a book that is at its best when exploring the fraught high-medieval efforts to elevate magic into the sphere of respectable “science.”