He is the author of The Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy, and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (Yale University Press) as well as essays on Erasmus, Milton, and others. He will cover the topic regarding "The Disenchantment of the World." This phrase, which Weber borrowed from Schiller, has long been associated not only with the progressive rationalization of western culture but also, more specifically, with the particular significance of the Reformation in that broader process. On this account the reformers opposed and sought to eliminate the magical, or more magical-seeming, elements of Christianity. In recent decades, historians have challenged Weber's thesis from different angles even as the idea of modernity as a complex configuration of ideas about magic, science, and religion has remained entrenched.