 In early modern Europe, Protestants often claimed that Roman Catholicism was "magic" rather than "religion", and as Christian Europeans began colonizing other parts of the world in the sixteenth century they labelled the non-Christian beliefs they encountered "magical".In that same period, Italian humanists reinterpreted the term in a positive sense to express the idea of natural magic.Both negative and positive understandings of the term recurred in Western culture over the following centuries.