The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment: by Michael Hunter. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. 288 pp. Illus.£ 25.00 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-30024-358-1

Michael Hunter’s new history of scepticism takes as its starting point the end point of Keith Thomas’s classic Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). In a succinct Preface, Hunter points out that while it is now ‘widely accepted that some kind of “Decline of Magic” occurred [in Britain between about 1650 and 1750], its exact nature, and the reasons why it occurred remain obscure’(vi–vii). Having built his career as a historian of science, Hunter is categorical: it was not scientists ‘who tested magic and found it wanting’. Instead, scepticism about supernatural forces in general was pioneered in the late seventeenth century by the kinds of freethinkers that contemporaries dismissed as ‘atheists’.