Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment

*1. Introduction
*2. Responding to a Revolutionary Tradition
*3. Enterprise
*4. Careers
*5. Distinctions
*6. Intimate Relations
*7. Reform
*8. A New National Identity
* Notes
* Index

Leigh Eric Schmidt is Professor of Religion at Princeton University.

In this intriguing, heavily researched study, Schmidt considers the interaction between American Christianity and the Enlightenment with regard to hearing in an era when ventriloquism became a popular entertainment and Thomas Edison invented his phonograph. The very tools that had been developed to debunk spiritism were now being used to advance it. The author studies hearing as a cultural phenomenon, both scientific and religious, in this fine interdisciplinary study that sheds much light on a particular period of American history. -- Augustine J. Curley Library Journal Who silenced the angels? For an answer, Schmidt turns back to the 18th and 19th centuries to look at Enlightenment philosophers and traveling ventriloquists, at acoustic engineers, anatomists and alienists, each of whom demonstrated in his own way the structures that undergirded claims of the miraculous...This densely argued, fascinating story features a panorama of colorful characters, from the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg to the traveling showman William Frederick Pinchbeck and his Pig of Knowledge. Schmidt's study offers an important chapter in the genealogy of the modern religious imagination. Publishers Weekly