Enchanted Europe

Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason and Religion, 12501750
By Euan Cameron
Oxford University Press £35, 486 pages

Euan Cameron, one of the most prominent historians of early modern theology, here turns his attention to how European intellectuals viewed superstition between the central Middle Ages and the coming of modernity. His own definition of superstition is simply one of religion gone wrong, from the point of view of the person using the term. A closer one, which would, for example, distinguish it from heresy, would be religion enacted wrongly by people who thought that they were being orthodox.

As Cameron clearly shows, medieval theologians often used the term to signify folk magic, while since the 18th century it has been more commonly employed to mean any belief system that is held to fall short of a given standard of rationality. His detailed study makes fresh and exciting points about a succession of major thinkers, while tracing important changes in accepted views of the cosmos, which mark the transition from medieval to modern outlooks. It is, therefore, a significant contribution to the history of ideas.

There is a recent consensus that late medieval western Christianity was a relatively homogeneous “traditional” religion. Cameron shows that it was, on the contrary, very sharply divided with regard to superstition. Theologians believed in a cosmos polarised between angels and demons, in which only the power of the Church was effective against the latter. The masses had a more complex view of a terrestrial world teeming with morally ambivalent spirits as well as good and evil, in which charms and amulets could be effective against misfortune and divination rites could tell humans the future. The scholars were convinced that these beliefs were demonically inspired and launched a sustained campaign against them.

Another recent tendency has been to see the Protestants and Catholics who contested the European Reformation as united in a further great attempt to wipe out these popular ideas. This book reminds us that they were fundamentally divided, because Protestantism extended the attack on superfluous and mistaken rites to some of those dearest to existing mainstream religion, holding that the Devil was behind these also. Catholics struck back by demonising their opponents and, as Protestants too fought each other, scholars ceased to agree about the basic workings of the universe as they had hitherto managed to do.

The final orthodoxy questioned is that changes in fundamental attitudes to the cosmos altered slowly between the 16th and 19th centuries. Cameron shows that among intellectuals they raced forward. Some suggested that demons were, in fact, non-existent or only empowered by human belief, and their opponents become more anxious to defend the existence of a spirit world than to combat evil spirits. That opened the way for the Enlightenment philosophers to redefine superstition as all “irrational” and intolerantly dogmatic aspects of any religion.

The reaction to this, the Romantic Movement, prized traditional popular beliefs and customs concerning supernatural power as badges of organic ethnic and cultural identity now under threat from the brutalising and depersonalising forces of industrial modernity. What had been lost was a view of folk magic either as the product of demonic seduction or of ignorance.

Perhaps the finest achievement of a fine book is to suggest that the period between 1250 and 1750 was unified by a unique attempt among European intellectuals to reduce the workings of the whole cosmos to a coherent and rational system of ideas. It failed not because of the nature of the cosmos, but because of the nature of humanity.

Ronald Hutton is the author of ‘Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain’ (Yale)