Would a world that relies heavily on magic have become stagnant to a degree?

[DAgent]

Let's say we have a fairly standard pseudo-medieval world, say around the early 14th century Western Europe in style and apperance, social norms, religion and technology like horse and carts, swords and armour, ale brewing, medicine and so on. The main difference of course is magic being used so much in so many ways that no one sees the point in trying to make any new technology as you can simply use a magic spell to heat water or cook food or simply use the old fashioned methods of campfires and fireplaces inside the home or blacksmiths and so on.

Assuming magic never goes away, is never banned, people are always able to access it, what would such a society look like by the time they've reached the equivalent time of the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution? Would their timeline have versions of the Victorians and Georgians in the same time period as the real world and would theirs be anything like ours were? What would their society look like around the 1960's, especially around the space race that was going on in real life?

 

[Astro Pen]

Assuming magic never goes away, is never banned, people are always able to access it,

A stunning piece of optimism there @DAgent
History suggests that that is impossible.
My guess is that the use of magic would become strictly controlled regulated by the powers that be, as it was during the witch-hunts. Its evocation outside the establishment criminalised. A world of sanctioned 'Magician Priests' and people living in fear.
Any form of science would likely be its enemy, since it carries an implicit threat to burst the 'power and control' bubble.

 

[Harpo]

Even the Discworld, the most magic-centred world in fiction, eventually reached an industrial revolution age - printed newspapers, post office, banking, railways, etc.

 

[Toby Frost]

I feel this is something a good writer could convincingly argue either way. There's a Dungeons and Dragons setting called Eberron, which uses magic to effectively push its world into the level of the 1940s, with extra elements of pulp sci-fi. It's just driven by wizards rather than industrialists. It makes sense, as much as magic ever does, by which I suppose I mean that the internal logic holds together.

A lot of fantasy worlds seem to have effectively stagnated anyhow: either technology doesn't advance at all, leaving the world stuck for thousands of years at one level (usually a "heroic" pre-gunpowder time), or else technological and magical progress is unrealistically slow (ie the steam kettle has existed for millennia but nobody has thought of the steam locomotive).