Reviews of Books

There is one very good reason why most of us trained in European history seldom write American history. We know so little about it and we are rarely au courant with recent, state-of-the-art historiography. No such inhibition burdens the Americanist Leigh Eric Schmidt, a professor in the department of religion at Princeton. In the course of addressing the ostracism accorded those in the past who claimed to hear divine voices, he has much to say about the religious culture of English Protestants and especially about the European Enlightenment. Hearing Things would be a good book if it had stayed focused on nineteenth-century American Methodists and the penchant of these men and women for hearing voices and shouting out the Word--what Schmidt calls their "superhuman ventriloquy" (p. 74). On that topic the book can be fascinating and informative, even provocative.	1
In places Hearing Things is deftly written and when centered on what the author knows, a pleasure to read. For instance, we are asked to think about the rise of ventriloquism and to frame the discussion, as did early modern Protestants, about how it worked in relation to the power of demons. Schmidt claims that unnamed European "literati" refashioned ventriloquism in order to create "naturalistic, universal categories for explaining (away) religious phenomena" (p. 137). Certainly English clergymen of the seventeenth century, such as Joseph Glanvill and Henry More, grappled with the challenge posed by the ventriloquist's art and the threat it posed to their pious belief in the possibility of demons speaking through persons. Little wonder that within a century, minor but aspiring French philosophes like J. B. de la Chapelle, writing in the context presented by the Catholic clergy and its power to exorcize, used ventriloquy as prime evidence that what posed as honest could also be fraud. The agonizing of Protestant clergymen about the reality of Satan and the possibilities for supernatural intervention set the stage for the Devil's eventual demise. From 1600 to 1800, controversies born out of the Reformation traveled a circuitous path only to emerge as a wellspring for doubting the very existence of demons that talked.	2
As Schmidt frames the stakes of the struggle over who could say or hear what, the scientific investigators of sound are seen to originate "in the penumbra of an Enlightened cloud that stubbornly refuses to disperse" (p. 247). Setting aside the diatribe about the European Enlightenment, we find that Schmidt has learned and interesting things to say about the intricacies of the new scientific approach to hearing and acoustics and even about the mystical language employed by Emanuel Swedenborg when he talked to angels. But this level of appreciation, combined with a willing suspension of disbelief, demands that we ignore what in the book is wrong-headed, pretentious, and finally historiographically ill informed. The description of English and European religion and thought provokes a reviewer coming from the study of their religious and scientific history to proclaim--possibly with as much volume and passion as early Methodists could muster--"Enough!" And then in the same acoustical register to ask: How did we get to a place in the American academy where "the Enlightenment" can be blamed for just about everything that a professor of religion does not like about the modern world?	. . .