This book is not a history of magic, as the author tells us in the very first sentence, but rather ‘a consideration of the entanglement of magic and the discourses of the humanities’ (p. 1). McWilliams does offer many reflections on the history of magic in the context of his larger discussion of the way the sciences and humanities habitually interact (or fail to interact). Magic is a strategic access point into this territory, serving McWilliams as a point de repère because of its perpetually problematic status: within academic discourse, ‘magic’ tends to appear as an extrusion from alien ground, which makes it an interesting vantage from which to try to look at other aspects of intra- and interdisciplinary discourse.

In this regard, Magical Thinking has its closest conversation partners in two other fairly recent works that address themselves to the place of magic in relation to modernity: Randall Styers's Making Magic (2003) and Christopher Lehrich's The Occult Mind (2007). The key difference between McWilliams's work and these precedents may be that Magical Thinking tries hardest to engage writings on the medieval period. It is also, I must admit, the most readable of the lot, pulling together a good deal of diversely interesting data and thought while seldom pressing its agenda too hard. At his best, McWilliams allows the academic discourse on magic to be seen as something more like the comedy of manners I believe it really is than the incarnation of sociopolitical hegemony it is occasionally depicted as being.

The book is structured as a set of linked, open-ended essays, which meditate on a variety of areas and subfields in which magic (and sometimes religion) connect to academic discourse. It begins with a chapter on ‘Magic as an object of study in the twentieth century’ and moves through the necessary discussion of ‘Periodization and the politics of definition’, followed by several chapters that dip a bit more deeply into several connected areas of the history of (mainly medieval) magic. These chapters include ‘The necromantic imagination’, ‘Demonological aesthetics’, ‘Angelic mediations’, ‘Where is the ritual in “ritual magic”’ and ‘The practice of syncretism’. Following this, McWilliams moves back out to offer a more wide-angle view of currently embattled sites of academic culture with chapters on ‘The experimental act’ and ‘Does magic work?’.

In general I enjoyed the framing chapters, the book's start and finish, more than the central chapters on ritual magic. Predictably, I lost touch with the chapters that try hardest to engage the historical-textual areas I am most familiar with. However, this did not dampen my appreciation for the book's central thesis. I especially appreciated the final chapter, ‘Does magic work?’, which reflected on an array of difficult but interesting contemporary topics ranging from Dawkins's fundamentalist atheism to Michael Winkelmann's scientific psi.

In fact, even the central chapters on necromancy and angel magic went down well enough for the most part, despite the fact McWilliams is clearly not deeply embedded in the more recent literature on these topics. This oversight is excusable from the vantange of McWilliams's primary theme, which is how the idea of the ‘occult’ operates in an academic setting, particularly in twentieth-century historiography. (I take the year 2000 as an operative limit since he pursues little of the more recent writing on medieval ritual magic; there is in particular no reference at all to any of the important recent work by Jean-Patrice Boudet, Julien Véronèse or Nicolas Weill-Parot.)

However, the oversight seems slightly less exusable in view of the book's secondary theme, that of ‘the idea of magic … providing the means for its own theorization’ (p. 133). Chapters 6 and 7, two chapters which develop the idea that ritual studies might offer something to the historian, were the most problematic from my perspective – not in fact because I feel that ritual studies has no place here, but rather because McWilliams's sense of what the medieval books actually contain felt skewed because dependent on dated sources. That McWilliams's primary historiographic landmarks should be Lynn Thorndike, E.M. Butler, and D.P. Walker is fair and just; that Thorndike, Butler and Walker should often also be his primary reference point for the content of medieval ritual texts seems at times rather less so, since there is now quite a lot more information both about the content of medieval books of magic in manuscript and about the performance of these rituals than was available before the year 2000. Even the collection Conjuring Spirits (recurrently a touchstone for McWilliams), which broke new ground in 1998, is far from representing the current situation of medieval magic at this point. If the goal is to help magic theorize itself, then surely some account of recent developments in the textual-historical sphere becomes a desideratum.

Despite my difficulty with these central chapters, I enjoyed the book and found its reasoning provocative; where it succeeds it is a useful and delicate representation of the relations of science and the humanities, illuminating the potential of the humanities to reveal us to ourselves in ways that less fuzzy epistomologies (scientific ones, construed both mythically and experimentally) cannot do. I will look forward to McWilliams's future books, hoping that he may eventually have the pleasure of integrating some of the more recent and interesting work on medieval ritual magic into his picture of how the occult may theorize itself.