Magic in the Modern World: Strategies of Repression and Legitimization ed. by Edward Beyer and Randall Styer (review)

This collection has the laudable goal of tracking the course of magic from the early modern period into the modern world, where it is currently flourishing—despite the old chestnut that the world became disenchanted in the eighteenth century. As most historians of magic have successfully argued, Thomas' conviction that the great powers of rational thought would destroy the hoary cobwebs of superstition was inherently inaccurate.¹ By ascribing magic's tenacity to the superstition of women and the poorly educated, Thomas overlooked the rigorous intellectual tradition behind academic magic, its place in the universities and monasteries, and its command over elite and popular understandings of the natural world. This collection addresses that error and examines the adoption of magic and its evolution in the modern world in compelling ways.

Styers' chapter begins the volume by asking what superstition meant at different historical moments and in different contexts—a welcome contribution to magical scholarship, since superstition exists as a category in some very important early modern magical texts and commands great power in magical work.² But superstition is often given a modern and unexamined definition in historiography. By tracing the erasure of difference between superstition and magical thinking that occurred between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a deliberate effort to frame magic as irrational, this chapter shows the path by which magic lost intellectual credibility and science gained it. Styers takes more seriously than may be warranted the fact that much of this work was done by the social-sciences of psychology and psychoanalysis, which stem from a different intellectual tradition than the shared one linking magic and science.

Benedik Lang's chapter, "Why Magic Cannot Be Falsified by Experiments," also has a lofty historiographical goal, wondering why early modern magicians accepted the failure of many experiments without rejecting magical work itself. Lang attempts to strike a balance between the positivist historiographical tradition and the contextualist approach, in which historians strive to understand the subject intrinsically without reference to modern science. He asks an interesting question that motivates many current historians of magic: What role did experimentation play in this intellectual tradition and how did it fit into the theology surrounding early modern magic? But his discussion gets lost in his conviction that "historians can never forget about present-day science; they will always be a bit more interested in what became a successful trend in the history of science than in what proved to be a dead-end" (53). Many excellent books by scholars such as Principe, Copenhaver, Newman, and others show this claim to be inaccurate.³ It takes intellectual discipline to set modern science aside and look at early modern magic in its own terms.

The fourth chapter, an eloquent and intelligent examination of witchcraft framing in eighteenth-century America, is a pleasant interlude before the second half of the book crashes into the modern world. Even for an early modernist, it contains interesting ideas about how magic has been made palatable, and authentic, for modern consumers, linked to the construction of the modern self, theories of social control, and the double-take of historical action through reference to ancient tradition. Magicians would not argue the point; they have claimed ancient authority for their work since time immemorial. See, for example, the first-century Corpus Hermeticum and the magical resurgence that it enabled with its claims to ancient authorship.

This thought-provoking volume struggles to combine theories of the self, social order, and science with a serious history of magic, but it is a worthy endeavor. In these days of "miracles and wonder," it seems an important moment to reckon with the messy, complex tradition that we now call magic.