The second is that there seems to be little space here for the role of science or of ideas more generally.

After all, although most historians in the 1960s pushed back on attempts to absorb social scientific methods into the historical discipline, for a time it seemed to many younger scholars that this might soon be the only game in town. The book introduces us to countless charming tales, such as that of the Cambridge scholar ‘Ashbourner’, who went missing after selling his soul to the devil in exchange for a doctorate and a round trip to Padua. There are good grounds, then, for endorsing the Oxford roots the book’s author has repeatedly emphasized. Historians have recently asked, for example, whether astrology really fits into a book about the history of magic).

In a 2010 article in the London Review of Books, Thomas reflected on his working methods, describing them in terms used by Geoffrey Barraclough: ‘an omnium gatherum of materials culled from more or less everywhere’. Thomas has pointed to a third-year special subject, ‘Commonwealth and Protectorate’, which he co-taught at Oxford with John P. At times] it is like flicking through a card-index, when every now and then one glimpses an unusual card and wishes to cry: “Stop! In 1972, it won an inaugural Wolfson History Prize, while the American Historical Association allocated it a session at its annual conference. Although indebted to the Annales school’s preoccupation with collective mentalities, Trevor-Roper for the most part saw the witch-hunt through the prism of the world war in which he himself had served.

In any case, Thomas later found the ‘lucidity’ of older social anthropology preferable to the ‘inflated pretensions’ of more recent anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, which were ‘harder to relate to historical writing’.

Thomas’s pose as author is reminiscent of a physician who is benevolent and kind, but nevertheless knows more — and knows better — than the patients they are diagnosing.

Thomas’s 1961 lament about Oxford’s history curriculum was prompted by a lecture on ‘Anthropology and History’ in Manchester by the All Souls anthropologist E. Importantly, this historicization could also prop up emerging cultural oppositions between ‘enlightened’ and ‘vulgar’, as the latter could be dismissed not only as unlearned but also as atavistic throwbacks. Reading RDM fifty years later, we can even on occasion notice an undercurrent of wry amusement hovering underneath Thomas’s anecdotes. Geoff Eley, reflecting on his experience at Balliol College in the late 1960s, remarks that in those years Oxford’s History Faculty ‘seemed organized precisely for the purposes of restraining imaginative thought, keeping our perceptions tethered to the discipline’s most conservative notations’.This was a pioneering thesis that foreshadowed some recent scholarship and, as Robert Scribner pointed out, ‘might have led to a reconceptualization of the Reformation’s understanding of religion had less attention been devoted on [Thomas’s] discussion of witchcraft’. In RDM, Thomas regretted being unable to provide ‘exact statistical data upon which the precise analysis of historical change must so often depend’, coming to the conclusion that there was ‘no genuinely scientific method of measuring changes in the thinking of past generations’. The present journal, for instance, had already been founded in 1952 by Marxist and non-Marxist historians with the subtitle ‘A Journal of Scientific History’, with the anthropologist Max Gluckman joining the editorial board in 1957.