Ancient anxieties or moral panic?

Miss Rider has kindly written in to let us know that although English law provided major penalties against the use of magic throughout the Middle Ages, and individuals were sometimes tried for it, there seems to have been no great fear of it in practice, at any level of society. Divination was more or less consistently permitted if it seemed to use natural means, and did not seem to constrain the freedom of human will. The same test was applied to healing practices, where later mediæval commentators were prepared to allow more latitude to remedies such as amulets and incantations than Augustine of Hippo had done. It helped tolerance of amulets that a natural power was now accepted as inherent in stones and plants, and spoken words were increasingly allowed if they could be interpreted as Christian prayers and not liable to summon any dæmonic entity. Divination by the casting of lots, though, was gradually outlawed, as were prophetic dreams. Educated, pious and respected men were likely to be given the benefit of the doubt. Learned authors had especial trouble in assimilating relics of pre-Christian cosmology, such as fairies and ghosts, to a Christian universe. Accusations against political opponents which included allegations of recourse to magic did become more frequent in the course of the fifteenth century, but only relatively so, and there is no sign yet of the new stereotype of the satanic witch, which was already spreading through some parts of Western Europe and was to be accepted across most of the continent, including Britain, in the early modern period. The mediæval concern regarding magic was primarily with establishing the limits of religious diversity and keeping people from sin; the Elizabethan and Stuart one was far more with attempting to root out a serious menace to society. After the Reformation, we really do seem to be in a different world, raising a new problem for historians, of how much the rapid escalation in trials, as soon as laws were passed to permit them in the 1560s, reflected an opportunity to express ancient anxieties, and how much it represented a new moral panic engendered by a changing theological context.

We know that in "modern physics" there are stones and plants with "natural power," and even the casting of lots. Witches are making a come-back; but both ghosts and prophecy are keeping out of the way for the present.