Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James

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Princeton University Press, Nov 14, 1999 - History - 449 pages

Fits, trances, visions, speaking in tongues, clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences, possession. Believers have long viewed these and similar involuntary experiences as religious--as manifestations of God, the spirits, or the Christ within. Skeptics, on the other hand, have understood them as symptoms of physical disease, mental disorder, group dynamics, or other natural causes. In this sweeping work of religious and psychological history, Ann Taves explores the myriad ways in which believers and detractors interpreted these complex experiences in Anglo-American culture between the mid-eighteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Taves divides the book into three sections. In the first, ranging from 1740 to 1820, she examines the debate over trances, visions, and other involuntary experiences against the politically charged backdrop of Anglo-American evangelicalism, established churches, Enlightenment thought, and a legacy of religious warfare. In the second part, covering 1820 to 1890, she highlights the interplay between popular psychology--particularly the ideas of "animal magnetism" and mesmerism--and movements in popular religion: the disestablishment of churches, the decline of Calvinist orthodoxy, the expansion of Methodism, and the birth of new religious movements. In the third section, Taves traces the emergence of professional psychology between 1890 and 1910 and explores the implications of new ideas about the subconscious mind, hypnosis, hysteria, and dissociation for the understanding of religious experience.

Throughout, Taves follows evolving debates about whether fits, trances, and visions are natural (and therefore not religious) or supernatural (and therefore religious). She pays particular attention to a third interpretation, proposed by such "mediators" as William James, according to which these experiences are natural and religious. Taves shows that ordinary people as well as educated elites debated the meaning of these experiences and reveals the importance of interactions between popular and elite culture in accounting for how people experienced religion and explained experience.

Combining rich detail with clear and rigorous argument, this is a major contribution to our understanding of Protestant revivalism and the historical interplay between religion and psychology.

 

Contents

INTRODUCTION
3
FORMALISM ENTHUSIASM AND TRUE RELIGION 17401820
13
Explaining Enthusiasm
20
Making Experience
47
Shouting Methodists
76
POPULAR PSYCHOLOGY AND POPULAR RELIGION 18201890
119
Clairvoyants and Visionaries
128
Embodying Spirits
166
RELIGION AND THE SUBCONSCIOUS 18861910
251
The Psychology of Religion
261
Varieties of Protestant Religious Experience
308
CONCLUSION
348
NOTES
363
NAME INDEX
435
SUBJECT INDEX
441
Copyright

Explaining Trance
207

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About the author (1999)

Ann Taves is Professor of the History of Christianity and American Religion at the Claremont School of Theology and Professor of Religion at the Claremont Graduate University. She is the author of The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth Century America and Religious and Domestic Violence in Early New England: The Memoirs of Abigail Abbott Bailey.

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