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Introduction : the book, the spirits, and the historian## 1. Power and gender : the spiritualist context## 2. Victorian spiritualism and the spiritualist woman## 3. Star mediumship : light and shadows## 4. At home with the Theobald family## 5. Women healers in the spiritualist world## 6. Medicine, mediumship and mania## 7. Louisa Lowe's story## 8. Spiritualism and the subversion of femininity##

Women and spiritualism --- Women mediums --- History

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Finalist for the 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Religion categoryInvisible Hosts explores how the central tenets of Spiritualism influenced ways in which women conceived of their bodies and their civic responsibilities, arguing that Spiritualist ideologies helped to lay the foundation for the social and political advances made by women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As public figures, female spirit mediums of the Victorian era were often accused of unfeminine (and therefore transgressive) behavior. A rhetorical analysis of nineteenth-century spirit mediums' autobiographies reveals how these women convinced readers of their authenticity both as respectable women and as psychics. The author argues that these women's autobiographies reflect an attempt to emulate feminine virtues even as their interpretation and performance of these virtues helped to transform prevailing gender stereotypes. She demonstrates that the social performance central to the production of women's autobiography is uniquely complicated by Spiritualist ideology. Such complications reveal new information about how women represented themselves, gained agency, and renegotiated nineteenth-century gender roles.

Women and spiritualism --- Women mediums --- Sex role --- Autobiography. --- Autobiographies --- Autobiography --- Egodocuments --- Memoirs --- Biography as a literary form --- Mediums --- Spiritualism and women --- Spiritualism --- History --- History and criticism --- Technique

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In late medieval Catholicism, mourners employed an array of practices to maintain connection with the deceased—most crucially, the belief in purgatory, a middle place between heaven and hell where souls could be helped by the actions of the living. In the early sixteenth century, the Reformation abolished purgatory, as its leaders did not want attention to the dead diminishing people's devotion to God. But while the Reformation was supposed to end communication between the living and dead, it turns out the result was in fact more complicated than historians have realized. In the three centuries after the Reformation, Protestants imagined continuing relationships with the dead, and the desire for these relations came to form an important—and since neglected—aspect of Protestant belief and practice.In Speaking with the Dead in Early America, historian Erik R. Seeman undertakes a 300-year history of Protestant communication with the dead. Seeman chronicles the story of Protestants' relationships with the deceased from Elizabethan England to puritan New England and then on through the American Enlightenment into the middle of the nineteenth century with the explosion of interest in Spiritualism. He brings together a wide range of sources to uncover the beliefs and practices of both ordinary people, especially women, and religious leaders. This prodigious research reveals how sermons, elegies, and epitaphs portrayed the dead as speaking or being spoken to, how ghost stories and Gothic fiction depicted a permeable boundary between this world and the next, and how parlor songs and funeral hymns encouraged singers to imagine communication with the dead. Speaking with the Dead in Early America thus boldly reinterprets Protestantism as a religion in which the dead played a central role.

Death --- Spiritualism --- Women and religion --- Women and spiritualism --- Protestantism --- Religious aspects --- History. --- History --- Social aspects --- American History. --- American Studies. --- Gender Studies. --- Religion. --- Religious Studies. --- Women's Studies.

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"This book is a 300-year social history of Protestant communication with the dead in early America (to the mid-nineteenth century); the people in the book are a wide variety of people. This book is also a history of women in religion"

Protestantism --- Women and religion --- Spiritualism --- Women and spiritualism --- Death --- 248*34 --- 248*34 Protestantse spiritualiteit --- Protestantse spiritualiteit --- Dying --- End of life --- Life --- Terminal care --- Terminally ill --- Thanatology --- Spiritualism and women --- Communication with the dead --- Dead, Communication with the --- Metapsychology --- Spiritism --- Occultism --- Religion and women --- Women in religion --- Religion --- Sexism in religion --- Christianity --- Church history --- Protestant churches --- Reformation --- Social aspects --- History --- Philosophy --- Philosophy and psychology of culture --- Christian spirituality --- Physiology: reproduction & development. Ages of life --- United States --- United States of America