Erik R. Seeman. Speaking with the Dead in Early America.

Abstract

Ghosts, spirits, haunted cemeteries—those realms where life blurs with death never fail to capture our imagination. Historians who seek to illuminate those spaces have typically cast their gaze on the nineteenth century. Spiritualism, séances, and the rapping Fox sisters offer tantalizing glimpses into worlds where humans claim to encounter the supernatural. But Erik Seeman, arguably the foremost scholar of cultures of death in early North America, maintains that Protestant communication with the dead dates back much further than the Victorian era. In this lively and compelling volume, Speaking with the Dead in Early America, Seeman shows that Americans did not suddenly begin speaking with the dead during ­­nineteenth-century séances but rather such efforts had been embedded in Protestant practice since the ­­Reformation. And although we might assume belief in the spirit world lay on the fringes of mainstream American religious culture, such beliefs were in fact fundamental to understandings...