Enchanted Europe is a major contribution to the religious and intellectual history of late medieval and early modern Europe. The culmination of more than a decade of meticulous reading and research, it offers a penetrating new interpretation of the transformation of assumptions about the supernatural between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. Whereas much recent work has refined and questioned claims that the period witnessed a profound ‘disenchantment of the world’, Euan Cameron's book persuasively contests the current consensus that continuity in this sphere was more marked than change. Through close study of learned literature on ‘superstition’ in Latin and a variety of vernacular languages, it traces a series of fissures, fault-lines and shifts within theological and philosophical discourse that led to a decisive reconceptualisation of this category. Dissecting difficult scholastic texts with forensic precision and admirable lucidity, it explores the gradual disintegration of traditional Aristotelian metaphysics and the emergence of rival ideas about the nexus between the spiritual and material realms. In the process it reopens the much controverted question of the roots of modernity in western thought and culture.

Cameron constructs his book in explicit counterpoint to social historians of religion (notably the late Bob Scribner) who have minimised or overlooked the theological writings of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reformers and their precursors. He argues that the method and approach of such scholars has served to obscure the significance of the profound differences of opinion between Catholic and Protestant writers about the operation of divine and demonic power in the world, and, moreover, the extent to which critical elements of reformed thinking about providence and theodicy were anticipated by late medieval nominalist theologians like Jean Gerson and by humanist reformers such as Erasmus and d'Etaples. In particular, Protestantism's emphasis on the devil as the mere instrument of God's will rendered efforts to defend oneself against the assaults of the evil spirits peripheral and irrelevant, not to say impious; simultaneously it precipitated the gradual slide of Satan into ‘the area of metaphor and symbol’ (p. 216). In this and other ways the reformers successfully turned the very weapons that scholastic churchmen devised to impugn popular errors back against them; in turn radicals used the same tools to undermine institutionalised religion itself. Cameron is at pains to emphasise that while Enlightenment critiques of superstition drew on earlier arguments and frequently grew out of a religious rather than secularising context, they also broke significant new ground. They contributed to a growing tendency to combat ‘superstition’ with satire and ridicule rather than reason and to regard it less as an object of anxiety and fear than of fascination and curiosity. By the era of Romanticism and the rise of the folklore movement it had ceased to be seen as the ‘novitiate of the devil’ (p. 20) and acquired the alternative status of a ‘necessary cultural ornament’ (p. 312).

Cameron's nuanced and even-handed analysis has the very salutary effect of restoring to the centre of our vision intellectual trends that have been eclipsed by recent scholarly scepticism about teleological models. He is undoubtedly right to suggest that postmodernism's distrust of paradigms and narratives of progress has resulted in a regrettable neglect of key developments within early modern Christianity. Reacting against the view that ‘the Protestant Reformation inherently had no plan to demystify or desacralise the cosmos’, his book insists that when attention is focused on the intentions of the reformers rather than their pastoral failures a different picture emerges: ‘it makes more sense to dwell on the dynamic forces of change rather than the reluctant voices of tradition’ (pp. 12–13). It reasserts the thesis that Protestantism contained within it a certain ‘modernising potential’: it was not modern but ‘modern manqué’ (p. 22). It was, he argues implicitly, more rational than the Catholicism that rebelled against it. To this extent, it may be commented that Cameron continues to work within rather than transcends the framework of the debate about modernity that has bedevilled the historical study of religion, a debate complicated by the lingering influence of confessional affiliation.

Throughout Enchanted Europe, Cameron recognises and underlines the slipperiness of the term ‘superstition’ and the elasticity of the body of opinion and ritual to which it was attached in the centuries under discussion. But his insistence that it is inappropriate to attempt to determine what actually constituted ‘superstition’ vis-à-vis ‘true religion’ in any given period and his assertion that a relativist stance towards the subject is essential (p. 7) sit uneasily alongside a contrary tendency that can be detected at various points in the book. Even while acknowledging that ‘superstition’ is a subjective phenomenon and a matter of (polemical) perspective, he cannot quite resist the instinct to try to define it ontologically. For Cameron superstition is ‘a great amorphous body of arbitrary and disjointed beliefs’, a ‘disorganized bundle’ of opinions and practices ‘rooted in tradition’. ‘Fragmentary’, ‘eclectic’ and ‘pragmatic’, it lacks ‘an analytical framework’ and ‘a consistent or rationalist metaphysic’. It has an intrinsic ‘incoherence’ that makes it possible for him to draw links between modern superstition and its medieval and early modern equivalents and antecedents (see pp. 5, 18, 246, 314). In this respect Cameron seems vulnerable to the criticism that Hildred Geertz levelled against Keith Thomas in their famous debate on religion and magic in the 1970s: of interpreting ‘superstition’ through the same lens and prism as the controversialists whom he studies. The juxtaposition of these somewhat contradictory positions is more than a little incongruous. Also puzzling is the contrast that Cameron draws between the ‘innate plausibility’ of the discourse on ‘superstition’ and the ‘pure fantasy and illusion’, ‘absurdities and impossibilities’, that characterised witchcraft theory in this period (pp. 70, 111): in a context in which educated contemporaries believed in the existence of a sect of demon-worshipping witches and in which (as Stuart Clark has shown) demonology had a demonstrable inner logic of its own, the validity and helpfulness of these distinctions must be questioned. The attempt made at the end of chapter iv to explore the correlation between the image of ‘superstition’ presented by medieval texts and the ‘reality’ of lived experience on the ground also seems like something of a red herring: if the issue at stake is not the actual existence of a particular corpus of belief and practice but how scholastic writers responded to its putative existence, then why exactly is such an investigation necessary?

These points should not, however, be allowed to obscure the scale of Cameron's achievement overall. By redirecting our attention towards the transformations that took place within medieval and early modern theology, Enchanted Europe yields important insights that future historians of ideas will be unable to ignore. Although he himself prudently eschews the task of assessing the wider cultural impact of the intellectual developments that he delineates as beyond the scope of his book, his findings also raise intriguing questions for historians of early modern society and popular culture. How were reformed ideas and theology about superstition received, adapted, assimilated and resisted at the grassroots? To what extent did they affect how people responded to misfortune and the vicissitudes of their precarious lives? How far did they foster a growing demarcation and distance between the cultures of the educated elite and their social inferiors? Or might they sometimes have brought them into closer proximity and facilitated greater leniency and tolerance? Cameron's speculative suggestion that the trajectory of scientific and Enlightenment thought may actually have lessened rather than increased pastoral pressure on popular superstitions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (p. 311) is just one idea that deserves further exploration. So too does his remark that the political upheavals and strains of the Civil War and Interregnum had a peculiarly energising effect on the religious thought of England in the 1640s and '50s (p. 242).

In conclusion, while some of the assumptions that frame and underpin its analysis might be queried, there can be no doubt that Enchanted Europe is a striking intervention in a debate that has lately been in danger of stagnation. Euan Cameron has written an immensely learned book that greatly advances our understanding of the mental universe of the early modern intelligentsia and seems set to stimulate ongoing discussion of its challenging subject.