Rex Utriusque Siciliae : Neo-Medievalism and Revolution

SOVEREIGN, SACRED Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany. By Matthew Head. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. [xxi, 326 p. ISBN 9780520273849 (hardcover); ISBN 9780520954762 (e-book), $65.] Music examples, illustrations, tables, appendix, bibliogra- phy, index.What better can temper manly rude- ness, or strengthen and support the weak- ness of man, what so soon can assuage the rapid blaze of wrath, what more charm masculine power, what so quickly dissipate peevishness and ill-temper, what so well can while away the insipid tedious hours of life, as the near and affectionate look of no- ble, beautiful woman? . (J. C. Lavater, Physiognomy, 1775-1777) (p. vii).With this epigram, Matthew Head points readers to the new perspective unfolded in his Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany, that the late eighteenth century in Germany repre- sented view of women, gender, and music distinct from that of earlier periods and especially from the role of music in the idealization and confinement of women commonly considered in German romanti- cism of the nineteenth century. Head argues instead that women in the late eigh- teenth century were seen as civilizing, cultivating force over men, and that, as result, some women were granted greater cultural agency, especially through the fine arts. Head states: [I]n highlighting discourse-an ideology-of female sover- eignty in polite culture and the fine one could argue that (some) women achieved symbolic power, and cultural capi- tal (p. 7).Head thus captures what he presents as special moment in the history of women's relationships with music, moment that al- lowed for women's greater agency in soci- ety due to the view of women as civilizing influences on men. Head further argues that this agency was particularly communi- cated through music performance by women and through music composition by both women and men. He characterizes such view as a focus on music as part of the culture of sensibility (p. 13) which also valued man's capacity to feel as woman, at least within the dominion of sen- sibility and the fine arts (p. 15).Head's Sovereign Feminine is significant contribution to the musicological discourse on gender, particularly on representations of, and participation of, women in music performance and composition. Head en- gages the significant dialogue about music and gender that has been ongoing in musi- cology since the early 1990s (marked by Susan McClary's Feminine Endings [Minne- apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991], which Head appropriately recognizes as groundbreaking, p. xvii). But, as Head highlights in his preface, even with this far greater attention to gender in musicology and with the influence of feminism in the field, there have been almost no studies of gender in the late eighteenth century.After framing the book within the larger discourse on music and gender in the pref- ace, Head presents his thesis and approach in the introduction. Through the example of Sophie von La Roche's novel Die Geschichte des Frauleins von Sternheim (Leip- zig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1771), Head highlights the brief period in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when figures of womanhood enjoyed ex- alted status as signs of reform, progress, morality, and civilization (p. 4). Head also introduces Berlin Kapellmeister Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752-1814), highly influential voice in discourses on music in the period, but one who has been largely forgotten in modern musicology. Head employs Reichardt's writings, musical activities, and compositions as unifying thread throughout the book, as Reichardt provided significant arguments for and support of the view of the sovereign feminine.The remainder of the book, with the ex- ception of brief afterword, includes six case studies to support and illustrate Head's conception of the sovereign feminine. …

Virtual Citizenship and Revolutionary Transatlantic Republicanism in the Musical Lives of Exiled United Irishmen

The establishment of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in the late eighteenth century, whose chief goal was to introduce the civilizations of Eastern societies to the West, encouraged a series of enquiries by British writers and travelers on the history, culture, art, antiquities, and literature of Eastern countries, including Afghanistan. This chapter analyzes the writings of three enterprising British explorers who traveled to Afghanistan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It focuses on the travel accounts of George Forster, Mountstuart Elphinstone, and Charles Masson, men separated in time, interests and ambitions, but whose work, when examined collectively, delivers from personal observation an expansive picture of Afghanistan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such detail has not been found anywhere else, even within indigenous sources, which makes their writings essential and indispensable resources for studying the history, culture and society of Afghanistan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Together, their enquiries concerning ethnographic, cultural, and social life in Afghanistan have formed a topographical and cultural template for future researchers.

Visitors who dcribed the Lake District in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw its society as distinctively different from the rest of England and were struck by the survival of a numerous group of small, independent owner-occupiers. These farmers were often called ‘statesmen’, a term applied by outsiders rather than locals and not of great antiquity. Lakeland owner-occupiers preferred to use ‘yeomcn’. A good deal has been written about this social group. However, much of this relates to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries or has focused on problems of nomenclature. Research on parliamentary enclosure in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has established some general trends regarding changing numbers of small proprietors, while census enumerators' books have provided the basis for work on Cumbrian owner-occupiers in the second half of the nineteenth century. Less attention has been paid to, how this society changed in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the Lake District was drawn into the mainstream of English society and economic life. The use of the term ‘peasant’ in the title of this article is deliberately contentious as there has been considerable debate on whether the term can be justified for English society after medieval times. Marshall has suggested that one has to go back to the early eighteenth century to find a real peasant society in the Lake District. but Searle has claimed that a peasantry with a near subsistence economy, little penetration of market forces, much mutual assistance and collective regulation of assets survived until the end of the eighteenth century.

A rare combination of theoretical acumen and dense historicist research, Disaffected Parties makes two crucial interventions in how to understand the political and literary landscape of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. First, Havard orients the period around a long shift to the right in English politics, culminating in what he calls a Tory cultural politics. Looking at the way such literary figures as Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen engage, often obliquely, the construction of this cultural politics produces a narrative of the period that is long and continuous; the book thus “takes a diagonal approach to the Romantic age,” one that displaces “the centrality of the French Revolution.” Second, Havard’s analysis reveals a skewed political topography in which there are no clear lines to mark the distinction between the inside and outside of English politics. The most redolent example of this is the importance that Ireland assumes throughout. In his chapter on Laurence Sterne, for instance, Havard refers to Ireland as a “cracked mirror” of English politics which is at once its “constituent element and awkward appendage.”Unusually for a work that takes much of its concept of the political from continental philosophy (in this case through Jacques Rancière), this book is intimately concerned with the nitty-gritty of party politics (la politique) rather than with more abstract or ontological questions about the political (le politique). By paying attention to the details of partisan political wrangling, Havard illustrates how the limits of the political scene are drawn. Writers who expressed a frustration with, disdain for, or disaffection from party politics, he notes, nevertheless maintained an off-center and potentially transformative relation with it. Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812) “leaves politics behind . . . by exposing the unassimilated demands not encompassed within emerging principles of unity,” for instance, while Byron’s removal from party politics, and from England itself, in fact “enabled him to trouble English politics as a figure of continued political agitation.” In both of these cases, the removal, or disaffection, of the author from particularized and partisan positions produces a different form of engagement in politics that is not easily mappable within conventional accounts of the political scene, or of the relationship between literature and politics.Havard also demonstrates the ways in which Boswell, in his attempt to make Samuel Johnson into a representative of the new cultural Toryism of the 1790s, and Austen, in constructing a far-reaching cultural conservatism in Mansfield Park, both reveal Toryism as a cultural movement that stretched far beyond partisan or parliamentary politics. Literature and politics, however, do not quite neatly overlap. Johnson’s own authoritarian reputation, and “obsessive, even borderline unhinged attachment to an unquestionable source of legitimate power,” clashed with Boswell’s attempts to assimilate him to the new post-Revolution cultural Toryism. Similarly, the “playful, wilful, anarchic impulses” of Austen’s novels sit uneasily within the Tory cultural politics her novels otherwise seem to underwrite. In all the major literary examples Havard uses throughout Disaffected Parties, the relationship between literature and politics is described as having the same kind of skewed topography as that he identifies between England and Ireland. This is ultimately the biggest payoff of Havard’s close attention to the partisan turmoil of late eighteenth-century England.What I have described of Disaffected Parties so far are chapters 2 to 6—the book takes a relatively long time to get to these chapters. The Introduction sets up the conceptual grounds of the book, before a long chapter on the prehistory of disaffection in the eighteenth century looks at writers from earlier in the century who do not quite fit into the conceptual pattern Havard outlines in the rest of the book. While Havard’s careful historicism in the later chapters made the structure of disaffection clear, in the more abstract conceptual terms of the Introduction this was not always the case. Indeed, in several places the conceptual framework had to be anchored by repeated references to the example of Byron. The first chapter does dig into historical detail, and the distinction between Swiftian disaffection—which involves a desire for utopian alternatives that involve a complete removal from society—and the disaffection of writers later in the century is useful. However, the chapter ends with a discussion of the relatively obscure late eighteenth-century political periodical Egeria (1802–1803), which is not clearly motivated enough, and the longer and broader view given by this chapter is not as compelling as the densely argued examples later in the book.That a book gets better as it goes is minor criticism indeed, and should merely serve as a recommendation to all readers to read all of this book. It gives new perspectives on often read and often taught authors, as well as a historical instance of partisanship and disaffection which goes some way to encouraging us to address political problems in our own time. In the spirit of this book, any such work would have to begin with close attention to the details of contemporary party politics, asking even the most disaffected of literary critics to look seriously at polemical partisan writing.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries we have grown used to using the term “fellow creatures” to refer to non-human animals — from dogs and cats to horses and hippopotamuses. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the term was also used to refer to non-human animals. But from the late eighteenth century (when the term began to be used for several decades with much greater frequency), through the nineteenth century, and through most of the twentieth century too, “fellow creature” was a term used to connect like to like — horses to horses, sheep to sheep, or, much more commonly, humans to other humans. Why the change in the late eighteenth century? And why the further change in the late twentieth century? This paper argues that political activism played a key role — and that the activism of those leading the fight against cruelty towards animals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was implicitly in competition with the struggles to improve the lot of black Africans, the poor, women, and other oppressed categories of humans — causes that sought to end the treatment of these groups as “no better than animals.”

This is the first monograph devoted to Ducray-Duminil, one of the most popular novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His literary career spanned decades, from his first novel in 1787 to a volume of fairy tales in 1819, and he demonstrated considerable political flexibility, moving from writing republican short fiction during the Terror to praising the Restoration in 1815. The volume begins with a biographical sketch to give the reader a sense of the range of Ducray-Duminil’s activities — for in addition to being a novelist, he was also a journalist, playwright, musician, songwriter, and poet. Łukasz Szkopiński then takes a structural approach to the novels in order to move away from the prevailing view of nineteenth-century critics that Ducray-Duminil’s work was homogenous, although he nevertheless admits that there is a ‘caractère réitératif’ (p. 58) to Ducray-Duminil’s plot construction: many of his protagonists are young people faced with family secrets, persecution, and increasingly dramatic obstacles to being reunited with loved ones, but they are always rewarded in the end when good triumphs and vice is punished. The analysis considers the various narrative strategies that the author uses to involve readers, an important element of the novels, and explores characterization, with a particular focus on Roger (from Victor, ou, L’enfant de la forêt) and Jules (from Jules, ou, Le toit paternel) as some of his more complex or unusual characters. Questions of morality and didacticism in the novels are considered, alongside the theme of education. Szkopiński rightly highlights the fact that, despite the didactic content and the young age of many of the protagonists, these novels were not written as littérature de jeunesse but were intended for all readers. There is also a detailed exploration of the use of the merveilleux. For the main part, Ducray-Duminil follows the French tradition of explained supernatural, despite his inclusion of dreams of a prophetic nature that fall outside of this. The mutual affinities between Ducray-Duminil and Ann Radcliffe are highlighted, although Daniel Hall’s work on French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005) is surprisingly absent from the bibliography. In many ways the novels of Ducray-Duminil are ‘l’expression de son temps’ (p. 275). His recurring themes of social identity, bigamy, secret marriages, and disguised identities are to be found in numerous other novels of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary era, even if no other writer had quite the success that Ducray-Duminil had. Victor, ou, L’enfant de la forêt, to give but one example, went through thirty-seven editions in the course of the nineteenth century (the last in 1893). The study concludes by sketching out Ducray-Duminil’s literary legacy, most visible on the stage with Pixerécourt’s adaptations, but Szkopiński also explores writers such as Balzac, Sue, and Hugo, for whom Ducray-Duminil was an influence. Overall this is a useful volume for those interested in fiction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: it puts Ducray-Duminil in a broad context and helps us to understand better how he marked a whole generation of readers.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Antipodean Myths Transformed: The Evolution of Australian Identity

Playing on the Map:An Educational Game from the Age of Revolutions Emily Bruce (bio) and Elise Klarenbeek (bio) The use of games as an instructional tool might seem characteristic of pedagogy today. Yet the years around 1800 actually offer important clues to understanding the emergence of play as part of an idealized education in the modern world. As a proto-example of today's "edutainment," our object lesson is at once remarkable and ordinary. The German geography board game The Journey from Prague to Vienna (Die Reise von Prag nach Wien) was produced sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Its spatial orientation, colorful narration, and, it turns out, gameplay itself reveal much about how middle-class German-speaking children were situated socially and politically in the world. Children playing The Journey from Prague to Vienna likely drew on their experience of other games.1 Board games have existed in some fashion for thousands of years around the world, but during the late eighteenth century in Europe they began to be marketed for children's use in particular.2 At the same time, geography emerged as the quintessential topic for board games. In 1752, John Jefferys released A Journey through Europe, or the Play of Geography, which, like The Journey from Prague to Vienna, took players on a tour of distinctive features such as might be noted in the long-standing genre of travel narratives.3 But the form of a game may have more directly elicited players' desires, as Koca Mehmet Kentel argues: "Through playing those games, travelling to distant parts of the world, learning to look at 'things' of the world as legitimate objects to acquire . . . children were made to orient themselves within an imperial horizon, to take it as a mundane experience."4 This fantasy of consumption fed the ideology of domesticity as much as it did imperial knowledge production. Since board game scholarship has often focused on England, our early German-language example is especially intriguing.5 The very different political contexts of Britain and the shifting borders of Central Europe before German [End Page 9] unification at this time are also salient. But the most important difference between The Journey from Prague to Vienna and the English games by Jefferys, John Wallis, and others is that the latter group provided key geographic facts as an integral part of the game.6 By contrast, German children playing The Journey from Prague to Vienna were expected to supply their own geography answers based on their education. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The German geography board game The Journey from Prague to Vienna (Die Reise von Prag nach Wien). [End Page 10] It is not a coincidence that this game dealt with geography.7 The standard European approach to geographical education in the eighteenth century was purely descriptive and students learned through rigid, memorization-driven instruction. However, the early nineteenth century saw developments in pedagogic philosophy and shifts in geographic epistemology that, by the middle of the century, began to produce a modern form of geographical education. Factors that contributed to changes in geographical thought include the map-scrambling Napoleonic wars, the beginnings of colonial knowledge production, and intensifying travel activities in a world of improved roads, ships, and postal networks. These led to new, distinctive features of children's geographical education: growing concern for child readers' amusement, an association of learning about the world with the family and the home, the orientation of children as explorers and armchair travelers, an increased emphasis on map reading and the use of atlases in schools, and the influence of nationalism and colonial ambitions. The new geographical pedagogy developing in the years around 1800 was marked by a move toward method and away from topical classification, the specialization of learning based on students' age and, most importantly, an emphasis on individual experience and observation.8 The format of a board game thus afforded Enlightenment pedagogues an ideal, amusing instrument for encouraging children to problem-solve, read maps, and engage with the world. The first copy of The Journey from Prague to Vienna that we encountered (the only extant, according to WorldCat) is held in...

Recent research has transformed our understanding of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a phase in the wider process of the Gothic Revival. While historical writing on the Gothic Revival had previously tended to see the significance of the period between 1790 and 1820 largely in terms of its academic contribution to the later development of Victorian Gothic Revival architecture, emphasizing especially the role of antiquarian scholarship in providing a basis of archaeological accuracy upon which subsequent architects could draw, more diverse angles have been opened up within the last couple of decades. Research by Simon Bradley, Chris Brooks and others has illuminated debates on the origins of the Gothic style itself and the patriotic language underpinning them, and has added greatly to our understanding of the associations between Gothic and ‘Englishness’. Rosemary Hill has investigated the ambiguous and problematic religious connotations of Gothic. Simon Bradley has authoritatively anatomized the increasingly enthusiastic take-up of Gothic by the Anglican Church in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, and has uncovered a rich prehistory of ecclesiological principles before the foundation of the Camden Society and all its powerfully misleading retrospective propaganda.

Reviewed by: The Portrait and the Book: Illustration and Literary Culture in Early America by Megan Walsh Carla J. Mulford (bio) The Portrait and the Book: Illustration and Literary Culture in Early America megan walsh Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017 259 pp. Walsh's The Portrait and the Book embraces new methods in studying the history of print media and argues that American reading and visual tastes were driven by the market in illustrated British and European books. This sounds straightforward enough, but it is actually breathtakingly important. Walsh helps us recognize how much our attention to the words of our beloved historical books has enabled us to write literary history in the absence of the more palpable cultural investments of early readers. They loved illustrations! By tracing illustrated imports and [End Page 611] American reprints of British and European books, Walsh demonstrates that readers sought to participate in a visual media culture that evolved, in the hands of American printers seeking to meet the needs of American readers, into a specific form of nationalist (and antinationalist) literature. Her important contribution to study of the early national era relates to her insistence that Americans' visual literacy has been occluded in discussions of the literature, discussions that tend to feature themes like sentimentalism and coquetry or critiques of enlightenment. Walsh argues that early readers would have sought not just the written words but accompanying images as marks of their culture. Walsh's notion of Americans' visual literacy includes not just actual illustrations in books but the writerly method of ekphrasis, graphic verbal descriptions of scenes and works of art. Speculating on readers' "imaginative experience of reading illustrated books," Walsh argues that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, "Americans made use of verbal descriptions of images in order to speak to one of the most pressing visual questions of their day: the profound trade gap in illustrated books" that existed between North America, on the one hand, and Britain and Europe, on the other (12). Her primary goal is to illustrate for her own readers the literary culture of North America as it formulated its own cultural goals from the middle eighteenth century onward. As Walsh tells the story, illustrations in books from Italy, France, and the Netherlands were common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Britain lagged behind. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, "British books were suddenly bursting with images" (2). The result was that "formal experimentation, especially the emergence of the novel, was inextricably tied to authors' and printers' use of visual paratexts" (2); "[f]rontis-pieces in particular influenced readers' conceptions of novels" (2). Even as frontispieces began to be used more regularly, other kinds of illustrations in novels tended to fall off during the second part of the eighteenth century. Yet changes in technology made many different kinds of illustrations possible, so that "by the first decades of the nineteenth century, the demand for engravings, both in books and as stand-alone prints, was booming" (3). In British North America during this same time, printers and booksellers tended to import books from abroad and sell them in their shops. Books that would sell well—Bibles and literary materials—were imported with greatest frequency. By the end of the eighteenth century, [End Page 612] printers often reprinted British books for American readers. This began, of course, with Benjamin Franklin's "reprinting" (really a much watered down version) of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, but the practice gained momentum and solidified in the very late eighteenth century, and American consumers grew fond of British books and British-authored books. "It was this investment with the culture of the mother country through the patterns of consumer culture that gave the United States its own distinctive culture," Walsh notes, "a culture built on appropriation, adaptation, and reinvention" (5–6). Walsh summarizes the printing techniques used by American printers, pointing to two kinds of printmaking methods, relief printing (in both wood and then in metal, by the mid-eighteenth century and later) and intaglio printing. Printers tended to prefer intaglio printing, which employed a "relatively durable and precise technology to produce the illustrations commonly found in expensive...

Advanced Uses of Mode Mixture in Haydn's Late Instrumental Works. Un article de la revue Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes (Volume 9, numéro 1, 1988, p. 1-209) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

The purpose of the study is to reveal the essence, nature and peculiarities of civilizational changes in the territory of Podillia province caused by internal and external factors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The research methodology is based on anthropological, civilizational, cultural and interdisciplinary approaches, application of the principles of historicity, scientificity, objectivity, multifactoriality and systematicity, as well as historical and geographical, historical and genetic, historical and comparative, historical and retrospective, problematic and chronological methods. The scientific novelty lies in the development and comprehensive coverage of modern methodological approaches to the study and scientific reconstruction of civilizational transformations in Ukraine and its individual regions; substantiation and disclosure of a practically new problem for national historical science about the nature, content, essence and features of civilizational changes in the Podillia region in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, caused by the annexation by the Russian Empire after the second partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, incorporation into the state organism through the prism of autocratic policy aimed at rigid political and national-cultural leveling, border location and social transformations on the European continent under the influence of the French Revolution. Conclusions. It is noted that the civilizational progress of Podillia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries took place on its own historical and ethno-national basis and in close interconnection and mutual influence of the Russian factor, national minorities and colonists who inhabited it. The indigenous inhabitants of the region not only preserved their national and cultural identity from destruction, but also, together with Ukrainians throughout the Naddniprianshchyna, acted as a powerful lever of civilizational influence in the Russian Empire.

In the late eighteenth century in Britain, the term “approach” became a noun, with a very specific architectural meaning as “a variety of road peculiar to a house in the country, designed as an experience in perspective to “form new combinations on every movement of the spectator” (J. C. Loudon, 1806). In this essay I use the concept of the architectural approach to the estate as a means to approach the domestic interiors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the narrative and psychological interiors of the novels that house them. The country house tour brought the tourist inside the house; the guidebooks and architectural treatises and novels, increasingly devoted to describing those interiors, brought the reader in as well. And all the approaches – narratival and linguistic as well as experiential – privileged a winding line to form new combinations of perceptions, bringing new kinds of interiors into view.

In his search for the intellectual foundations of America’s contemporary New Age and alternative medicine movements, John S. Haller Jr, concentrates on the Swedish polymath Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) and the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), whose meditative and non-mechanistic worldviews were, the author maintains, deeply implicated in the phrenology, spiritualism, mind cure, Christian Science, and homeopathy movements of the nineteenth century, as well as the osteopathy, anthroposophy, holistic health, and New Age healing practices of the twentieth century (p. xv). Haller attempts to elucidate these connections by examining the thought and healing systems that Swedenborg and Mesmer offered their contemporaries before tracing the uptake and evolution of these philosophies between the late eighteenth century and the present day. In the course of the book, Haller makes clear his conviction that the epistemic space occupied by contemporary complementary medicine in America was first made available by Swedenborg and Mesmer, who fought during the eighteenth century to rescue a vitalist view of mind and body from annihilation at the hands of Enlightenment rationalism and materialism. The first two chapters of the book provide an intellectual biography of Swedenborg, detailing the family background and early years of a man who came to demonstrate genius in areas as diverse as engineering, geology, physics, metallurgy, philosophy, and physiology. Haller shows how Swedenborg’s eclectic interests led him slowly towards a vitalistic worldview, and how a spiritual crisis on a trip to London in 1745 saw him eventually evolve from philosopher to theologian, and finally to mystic (p. 33). The third chapter concentrates on the healing system introduced by Mesmer, arguing for a strong affinity between the spirit-infused universe of Swedenborg, and that of the Swabian physician, who believed that magnetic tides coursed through both the universe and the human body dictating illness and health. Haller argues that both men affirmed the existence of an unseen dimension to the Universe (p. 68) and that although Mesmer’s theory was naturalistic, it was ambiguous enough that, like the writings of Swedenborg, it too could be interpreted as offering access to the spirit realm (p. 69). Looking at the manner in which animal magnetism was spread and filtered by various other practitioners, Haller shows how both its mystical and medicinal aspects evolved through the related practices of phrenology and phreno-mesmerism during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Turning from Europe to America, Chapters Four and Five attempt to trace Swedenborg’s and Mesmer’s legacy in socialism, Owenism, Fourierism, and various communal experiments (Chapter Four), as well as the emergence, from the mid-nineteenth century, of movements such as spiritualism, theosophy, anthroposophy, and psychical research (Chapter Five). Chapter Six deals with the mind–cure or mental science movement, which manifested in Christian Science and the Emmanuel movement, while Chapter Seven looks at biomedicine’s kindred spirits such as homeopathy, Kentianism, osteopathy, and chiropractics. The final chapter considers the continuation of all these traditions within New Age healing. Haller’s concentration on the American manifestation of Mesmer’s and Swedenborg’s ideas allows him to document, in some detail, the New Age movement’s complex genealogy, but also means that he is necessarily brief in his descriptions of the spread of American movements, such as spiritualism, to Europe and beyond. While this brevity is entirely understandable, there are some instances where broad statements about the reception of such movements are unsupported or non-illuminating. The claim that Europeans were more sceptical of spiritualism than Americans (pp. 144–5), for example, begs a range of questions, including ‘in which European countries was this the case’ and ‘why’? While Haller’s book provides a useful synthesis of the disparate mystical, spiritual, and communitarian movements that have, in some sense, been heir to the ideas of Swedenborg or Mesmer, it remains doubtful whether his account adds any analytical depth to our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American alternative medicine and religious practice. Much of the material Haller uses, and the trajectory and links that he highlights, have long been apparent in the work of historians such as James Webb, Laurence R. Moore and Brett E. Carroll, who have all written on occultism and spiritualism in the American context. The attempts at scientification that Haller highlights among New Age healers, which he stresses serve to undermine the mechanistic science from which they draw authority (p. 231), have also been dealt with elsewhere and in more depth by sociologists such as David J. Hess, whose book Science in the New Age (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993) provided a probing analysis of the relationship between science and the New Age movement.