Spiritualism and Science Studies for the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Science and spiritualism studies is an interdisciplinary academic sub-field of no recent vintage. Since the early nineteen-seventies, studies of major scientific naturalists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, Edward Burnett Tylor, William Crookes, and others have showed a growing willingness to acknowledge and account for the psychical interests and sometimes ardent spiritualist convictions of their subjects. From these initially individualistic case studies has emerged a broader picture of the role of spiritualist beliefs and psychical investigation on the settlement of modern scientific disciplines, methods, and networks. This trajectory is exemplified with particular clarity in the sub-titular ambition of Richard Noakes’s excellent 2019 Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences inModernBritain, a studywhich establishes psychical research not as the faddish interest of a cadre of admittedly high-placed scientific eccentrics, but rather as a key catalyst in the late-Victorian development of the physical sciences. At the start of the twentieth century, he argues, psychical research and spiritualist phenomena may have been frequently derided by physical scientists, but they were also far more difficult to ignore than they have since become. Even if only to be rejected and debunked, such subjects demanded address by leading scientific naturalists of their day. The current special issue of Aries takes inspiration from and responds to this increasing complex historiography of spiritualism and science, noting its gains and addressing its challenges. Perhaps chief among the latter is the need to overcome a persistent lack of confidence about, or understatement of, the