Vexed Issues Introduction: After Disenchantment

This Forum has both deep and shallow roots. Most obviously it is an attempt to mark two important anniversaries that fell in 2021: the publication of Max Weber's Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (1921) and, especially, Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (1971). The pairing seems appropriate and fortuitous: while Weber did not actually develop his famous "disenchantment" thesis in his Economy and Society, he—like Thomas fifty years later—devoted a great deal of space and attention to the relationship between religion and magic. In other respects, however, these contributions grew out of a response to a much more recent study of the same themes: Michael Hunter's The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment (2020), a work that many of the contributors have reviewed.