Manchester University Press - The supernatural in early modern Scotland

This book is about other worlds and the supernatural beings, from angels to fairies, that inhabited them. It is about divination, prophecy, visions and trances. And it is about the cultural, religious, political and social uses to which people in Scotland put these supernatural themes between 1500 and 1800. The supernatural consistently provided Scots with a way of understanding topics such as the natural environment, physical and emotional wellbeing, political events and visions of past and future. In exploring the early modern supernatural, the book has much to reveal about how men and women in this period thought about, debated and experienced the world around them. Comprising twelve chapters by an international range of scholars, The supernatural in early modern Scotland discusses both popular and elite understandings of the supernatural.

Awards

2021

Joint Runners-up of the Katharine Briggs Award 2021

1 Exploring the supernatural in early modern Scotland - Julian Goodare and Martha McGill
2 The elrich poems: the supernatural and the textual - Janet Hadley Williams
3 Emotional relationships with spirit-guides in early modern Scotland - Julian Goodare
4 Experiencing the invisible polity: trance in early modern Scotland - Georgie Blears
5 The ninety-nine dancers of Moaness: Orkney women between the visible and invisible - Liv Helene Willumsen
6 Angels in early modern Scotland - Martha McGill
7 Scottish political prophecies and the crowns of Britain, 1500-1840 - Michael B. Riordan
8 Astrology and supernatural power in early modern Scotland - Jane Ridder-Patrick
9 Fallen spirits and divine grace: sermons and the supernatural in post-Reformation Scotland - Michelle D. Brock
10 The uses of providence in early modern Scotland - Martha McGill and Alasdair Raffe
11 The invention of Highland Second Sight - Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart
12 The pagan supernatural in the Scottish Enlightenment - Felicity Loughlin
13 Eighteenth-century Scotland and the visionary supernatural - Hamish Mathison
Index

Editors

Julian Goodare is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh

Martha McGill is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick