Necromancers in early Tudor England were generally not involved with the dead, and secular courts showed a curious disinclination to prosecute magic, while ecclesiastical courts punished it harshly. The book examines two case studies: William Neville, a minor poet who consulted a cunning-man and faced Thomas Cromwell in 1532 but was not convicted, and the Mixindale Fellowship, nine men tried in the Archbishop's Court in 1509 for treasure hunting with demonic conjuration, who were convicted of heresy, excommunicated, and did public penance. The authors challenge assumptions that magicians worked alone and that institutional Christianity uniformly opposed magic, highlighting the complex accommodations between permissible and prohibited occult practices.
The academic study of Esotericism emerged alongside Religious Studies and Sociology, with pioneering work in the 1970s by sociologists and historians of religion. The field proper began with Antoine Faivre's 1994 book Access to Western Esotericism. Over the following three decades, the field expanded and fragmented. The article argues that both Religious Studies and Esotericism Studies underwent a parallel shift: rejecting universalist typologies and text-based studies to focus on lived experience, establishing deconstructive relativism as the dominant mode. More recently, postmodern trends have given way to a retheorized realism that remains aware of researcher positionality and contested access to knowledge.