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

Abstract

American Religion 2, no. 2 (Spring 2021), pp. 169–174 Copyright © 2021, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.2.19 Book Review Erik R. Seeman, Speaking with the Dead in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) Ava Chamberlain Wright State University, Dayton, USA While reading this fascinating new book I sensed the presence of the dead all around me. Deceased loved ones appeared repeatedly in my dreams. In the family photographs and heirlooms displayed in my home, I recognized my own desire to communicate with the dead. To feel the loss wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, I began keeping a tally of the relentlessly increasing number of COVID-19 deaths. As Erik Seeman perceptively observes, “the living almost always miss the dead, and some mourners will pursue continuing relationships with the deceased” (272). Taking this ordinary human experience as his object of analysis, he surveys early American history from a fresh vantage point that reveals important new dimensions of Protestant lived religion. In Speaking with the Dead in Early America Seeman aims to write “a history of Protestant communication with the dead before the advent of Spiritualism” (5). Having explored African and Native American death ways in two earlier works, he limits the scope of this history to white residents of America’s northern colonies and states. This seemingly conventional focus belies the book’s truly innovative character. By employing new source material and reading well-known sources in new ways, Seeman reveals an unobserved dimension of the lived religion of early American Protestants. American Religion 2:2 170 Seeman finds evidence of communication with the dead in a variety of interesting locations. He approaches the burial grounds scattered throughout New England as a “physical archive” in which the voices of the dead are preserved on “talking gravestones” (73). These voices speak through the epitaphs engraved on the gravestones. Often written in the form of direct address to the viewer, they suggest that the bereaved regularly visited graveyards to hear their loved ones speak and to feel their presence. Similarly, needlework stitched by young women during periods of mourning facilitated communication between the living and the dead. Although commonly written in the third person, these embroidered epitaphs spoke to the viewer by giving “lasting material expression to feelings of grief, loneliness, and resignation to God’s will” (194). Displayed within the home, they provided bereaved family members a tangible connection with their dear departed. Seeman locates evidence of communication with the dead in a wide variety of texts. If you enjoy a good ghost story this book is for you, for it is filled with accounts of “shades,” to use a popular early American term for ghost, appearing at bedsides and in graveyards to comfort the living, to reveal visions of heaven, and to avenge secret crimes, especially murders. Read widely on a popular level, these stories likewise fascinated educated male elites determined to demonstrate the reality of the supernatural using an empirical methodology. Ghosts also made regular appearances in elegiac verse written to commemorate the dead. Seeman observes that the dead frequently speak directly to the living in this popular literary genre, which mourners read at graveside funerals effectively giving voice to the soon-to-be interred corpse. Elegies also permit dead women to speak with an authority often denied the living. Although less commonly the subject of mourning elegies than men, “when [women] did get such attention, nearly half of them spoke from beyond the grave” (67). Seeman emphasizes women’s persistent interest in communication with the dead. As elites increasingly questioned the veracity of supernatural tales appearing in popular print, publishers began catering to a female audience. Stories about guardian angels illustrate this trend. Seeman traces the emergence of the belief that humans become angels in heaven, who in turn return to earth as guardian angels. Women eagerly consumed these stories, especially when the angels were infants returning to comfort their grieving mothers. Women’s letters and journals testify to the sincerity of this belief, thereby revealing that a “dialectical relationship existed between imaginative literature and lived religion” (242). More important, Seeman argues, women’s engagement with the dead “drove important...