Afterword:The Persistence of the Problem of Magic Claire Fanger (bio) medieval, medievalist, periodization, decline of magic, problematize, problem-oriented approach To the extent that the idea of magic's "decline" has been a part of what shaped fields in Modern and Early Modern studies, it has merely vexed the medievalist, since the Middle Ages is inevitably cast as that which has been left behind by the Modern. The very term "Middle Ages" suggests its in-between nature, bracketed inside the two more important periods of Western Culture, Antiquity and Modernity. Thus, if the Modern can be suggested to be, among other things, a time of skepticism, Entzauberung, fragmentation, and increasingly global shared and disputed interests, the Medieval is implicitly rendered as the time before the emergence of all this, when faith in God was unproblematic, magic was general, and hardly anybody left their village. "Western culture" emerges only after the "Renaissance" has done the work of revitalizing the knowledge of the classical world—a world in which people innocent of Christianity spoke real Latin and understood real geometry. Of course, no one exactly believes this; it has been more of a working assumption that Modernity must somehow be different in various ways. Books are regularly published that seem to sharpen the edges of these historical periods, sometimes giving exact dates, accentuating a novelty of thought in the Renaissance that binds it to the genius of Antiquity across [End Page 415] the intellectual wasteland of the Middle Ages.1 It does make a good story, for narratives of renewal and progress are compelling, especially if they involve ancient secrets rediscovered. In this picture, whatever else may be posited, skepticism is typically seen as "new" (despite the fact that it has always been there) while magic will in some way tend to be seen as "old" (despite its exuberant persistence). As a medievalist, I was happy to be invited to write this epilogue to a suite of considerations of the "Decline of Magic," all written by modernists, in part because the very fact that modernists wanted to put the whole issue more sharply into question seemed hopeful for my area. And indeed I have thoroughly enjoyed this rich, intelligent, and useful collection of essays. I see my primary job here as testing the implicit structures of periodization, to observe what remains of the assumptions about the novelty of modern concerns, and to introduce some medieval counterexamples as necessary. The question that first needs answering (at least for the person charged with testing period boundaries) is a simple one: Was there a decline? Or not? And if so, what, exactly is supposed to have declined? These essays offer an array of perspectives, some positing that nothing really declined at all (Pooley), and others making the case that at least a genuine-seeming appearance of the decline of magic, or of belief, was created (Pfeffer). Some connect this appearance of decline to a rise in elite skepticism or posit it as primarily an elite phenomenon (Smeyers, Pfeffer, and Machielsen). Cornish suggests that the rationalist framework in which magic is largely examined in an academic setting is genuinely repressive; magic has less declined than been strategically suffocated. What I want to do here is to try to bring out the insights these arguments offer to historical scholarship, showing the varied ways in which the ideas expressed here may help to transcend the vexing assumptions about period boundaries. I will also gesture from time to time at something rather neglected in these essays: the intertwining complex traditions of intellectual magic that extended from Islamic and Jewish culture through the Christian Middle Ages and into Modernity, right through the high point of the witch trials, sometimes linked to it and sometimes not. William Pooley, who works on nineteenth-century France, argues that there is no decline in the belief in magic at all of any important kind. He does this not, as he might have done, by emphasizing the amount of magic [End Page 416] actually coming into being in late-nineteenth-century France (via occult revival figures such as Éliphas Lévi and Papus—figures not touched upon in his discussion at all), but rather...