![]() ![]() Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 9780300260953 Number of pages: 256 Weight: 255 g Dimensions: 197 x 127 x 2 mm MEDIA REVIEWS When it did, this owed less to the testing of magic than to the growth of confidence in a stable world in which magic no longer had a place. ![]() Even if the religious heterodoxy of such men tarnished their reputation and postponed the general acceptance of anti-magical views, slowly change did come about. While some scientists defended the reality of supernatural phenomena, these sceptical humanists drew on ancient authors to mount a critique both of orthodox religion and, by extension, of magic and other forms of superstition. ![]() Michael Hunter argues that those pioneering the change in attitude were not scientists but freethinkers. Credit for this great change is usually given to science - and in particular to the scientists of the Royal Society. Yet in the eighteenth century such certainties were swept away. Among both educated and ordinary people the absolute existence of a spiritual world was taken for granted. In early modern Britain, belief in prophecies, omens, ghosts, apparitions and fairies was commonplace. A new history that overturns the received wisdom that science displaced magic in Enlightenment Britain-named a Best Book of 2020 by the Financial Times ![]()
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