Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Enlightenment

Michael R. Lynn is Professor of History at Purdue University Northwest. He has published Popular Science and Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France (2006), The Sublime Invention: Ballooning in Europe, 1783–1820 (2010), and "The Curious Science: Chiromancy in Early Modern France" (2018). He is currently working on a monograph analyzing the culture and practice of divination in Enlightenment France.

• Introduction: magic, witchcraft, and ghosts in the age of reason 1. The ghost of the Enlightenment: communication with the dead in Southwestern Germany, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 2. Invisible worlds: magic, spirits, and experience in the early Enlightenment 3. Priests in the storm: an approach on changes in ritual attitudes in eighteenth-century Hungary 4. East Anglian folk magic, folklore, and witchery in the age of reason 5. Jean-Baptiste Alliette and the Ecole de Magie in late-eighteenth century Paris 6. Fortune telling, culture, law, and gender in Ireland, c.1691–1840 7. A scientist at astrology’s funeral: Richard Saunder and the Apollo Anglicanus 8. Natural magic, hermeticism, and skepticism: orientalizing chemical curiosity in eighteenth-century France 9. Afterword

‘The shadow side of the Enlightenment is illuminated in this fascinating collection of studies on the survival of magical beliefs and practices into the 18th C., from German ghosts, Hungarian exorcisms, and Irish fortune tellers to natural magic, astrology and a proposed Ecole de magie for Paris in the age of Voltaire.’Mary O'Neil, University of Washington, US