Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800

Man and the Natural World

'Man and the Natural World, an encyclopaedic study of man's relationship to animals and plants, is completely engrossing ... It explains everything - why we eat what we do, why we plant this and not that, why we keep pets, why we like some animals and not others, why we kill the things we kill and love the things we love ... It is often a funny book and one to read again and again' Paul Theroux, Sunday Times 
 
 'The English historian Keith Thomas has revealed modes of thought and ways of life deeply strange to us' Hilary Mantel, New York Review of Books 
 
'A treasury of unusual historical anecdote ... a delight to read and a pleasure to own' Auberon Waugh, Sunday Telegraph 
 
'A dense and rich work ... the return to the grass roots of our own environmental convictions is made by the most enchantingly minor paths' Ronald Blythe, Guardian

Man and the Natural World, an encyclopaedic study of man's relationship to animals and plants, is completely engrossing ... It explains everything - why we eat what we do, why we plant this and not that, why we keep pets, why we like some animals and not others, why we kill the things we kill and love the things we love ... It is often a funny book and one to read again and again.

The English historian Keith Thomas has revealed modes of thought and ways of life deeply strange to us

A treasury of unusual historical anecdote ... a delight to read and a pleasure to own

A dense and rich work ... the return to the grass roots of our own environmental convictions is made by the most enchantingly minor paths

Keith Thomas is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was formerly President of Corpus Christi College and, before that, Professor of Modern History and Fellow of St John's College. RELIGION AND DECLINE OF MAGIC, his first book, won one of the two Wolfson Literary Awards for History in 1972. He was knighted in 1988 for services to the study of history.

Why do we eat what we do? Why do we keep some animals as pets and eat others? Keith Thomas takes us on a engrossing journey to discover our strange relationship with animals and plants.

Keith Thomas

Monumental ... with a living treasure on each page, and probably the book that, in my whole life, I've pressed on other people most energetically. (Selected people, of course. They have to care for history, and they need a sense of wonder and a sense of fun.)

Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England

Witchcraft, astrology, divination and every kind of popular magic flourished in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the belief that a blessed amulet could prevent the assaults of the Devil to the use of the same charms to recover stolen goods. At the same time the Protestant Reformation attempted to take the magic out of religion, and scientists were developing new explanations of the universe. Keith Thomas's classic analysis of beliefs held on every level of English society begins with the collapse of the medieval Church and ends with the changing intellectual atmosphere around 1700, when science and rationalism began to challenge the older systems of belief.

Keith Thomas

Praise for Religion and the Decline of Magic

Monumental ... with a living treasure on each page, and probably the book that, in my whole life, I've pressed on other people most energetically. (Selected people, of course. They have to care for history, and they ...

Books by Keith Thomas

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