RT Article
T1 Offshoring the invisible world? American ghosts, witches, and demons in the early enlightenment
JF Critical research on religion
VO 9
IS 2
SP 126
OP 141
A1 Koslofsky, Craig 1963-
LA English
PB Sage
YR 2021
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1764192591
AB The fierce debate about the reality of spirits and the “Invisible World” which flared up in the 1690’s helped define the early Enlightenment. All sides in this debate—from Spinoza and Balthasar Bekker to John Beaumont and Cotton Mather—refashioned familiar metaphors of light and darkness and connected them with the world beyond Europe in surprising new ways. This article shows how this key controversy of the early Enlightenment was built upon references to darkness, light, and the benighted pagan peoples of the world. As new street lighting and improved domestic lighting nocturnalized daily life in the Netherlands, London, and Paris, the old denizens of the night - ghosts, spirits, and witches—were increasingly relegated to the extra-European world and used to articulate new categories of human difference based on civility, reason, and skin color. These new categories of human difference—new ways of seeing and ordering the world—were essential to the formation of early modern whiteness and the Enlightenment.
K1 ghosts and spirits
K1 Cotton Mather
K1 Balthasar Bekker
K1 European enlightenment
K1 Light
DO 10.1177/2050303220986971