Overview

In the 1920s and '30s, people gathered in darkened rooms to explore the paranormal through seances. They were motivated by grief, spiritual devotion, or a desire to be entertained. Beth A. Robertson resurrects the story of a small transnational group and their quest for objective knowledge of the supernatural, casting new light on how science, metaphysics, and the senses collided to inform gendered norms in this era. Robertson draws back the curtain to reveal a world inhabited by researchers, spirits, and spiritual mediums. Representing themselves as masters of the senses, untainted by the effeminized subjectivity of the body, psychical researchers in Canada, the UK, and the US believed that they could use machines and empirical methods to transform the seance into a laboratory of the spirits and a transnational empirical project. However, mediums and ghostly subjects could and did challenge their claims to scientific expertise and authority.

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9780774833509

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Reviews

In this provocative book, Robertson contends that the study of mediumship impacted both empirical methods and gender studies ... A major contribution of this work is its description of how women, both as participants and researchers, debunked the stereotype that had linked femininity with intellectual ineptitude. Robertson's work can serve as a model for further inquiries on the contributions psychical research can make to scholarship, methodology, and philosophy. -- S. Krippner, Saybrook University CHOICE

In this provocative book, Robertson contends that the study of mediumship impacted both empirical methods and gender studies ... A major contribution of this work is its description of how women, both as participants and researchers, debunked the stereotype that had linked femininity with intellectual ineptitude. Robertson's work can serve as a model for further inquiries on the contributions psychical research can make to scholarship, methodology, and philosophy. -- S. Krippner, Saybrook University * CHOICE *

Author Information

Beth A. Robertson is a historian of gender, science, medicine, and technology who teaches in the History Department at Carleton University. She has published in Gender and History and Nova Religio and is a co-editor of ActiveHistory.ca and the book review editor for Scientia Canadensis.

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