Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling

Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and geographies, the Brill Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling presents modern spirit possession in a variety of contexts. Weaving together the interrelated movements of Spiritualism along with its specific Franco and Latin American currents, articles explore the nineteenth-century beginnings of séances and trance mediumship.

Channelling, an heir to Spiritualism begun in the 1970s and still flourishing today, is brought into direct conversation with its predecessors with a view to showing both continuity and disjuncture as the products of new cultural and religious needs. The Brill Handbook marks the first extensive collection on these two interrelated movements and examines themes such as gender, race, performance, and technology in each instance.

Cathy Gutierrez, Ph.D. (2000) is a Professor of Religion at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, USA. She has published in Spiritualism and related esoteric worldviews in the nineteenth century as well as in millennialism and emergent religions. Her most recent work is a monograph, Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance (Oxford UP, 2011).

Contributors to the volume: Adam Crabtree, Mary Keller, Cathy Gutierrez, Marlene Tromp, Lynn Sharp, John Patrick Deveney, Elizabeth Lowry, Darryl V. Caterine, Waleska de Araújo Aureliano, Vânia Zikán Cardoso, Arthur Versluis, Christa Shusko, Jeremy Rapport, John Warne Monroe, Hugh Urban, Ruth Bradby, Adam Klin-Oron, Christopher Partridge, Jeffrey Kripal, Douglas E. Cowan, Michael Barkun and Catherine L. Albanese

"Paging through the contents of Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling is akin to looking over a “Who’s Who?” of the study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century interactions with discarnate beings."
Michael Heyes, University of South Florida, Nova Religio, Vol. 20, No. 2