From the Founding Editors: Thinking Preternaturally After Ten Years

preternature, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2021 Copyright © 2021 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pa. In his 1605 Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon advocated for a program that investigated “nature erring, or varying” as part of his general history of nature, its properties and limits. This “history of marvels,” as he went on to explain, would be distinct from that of the “history of creatures,” and the “history of arts,” in that it would center upon nature’s digressions. That is to say, it would be concerned with those instances in which nature diverged in its operation from its usual course to produce strange effects. While he could find “a number of books of fabulous Experiments, & Secrets, and frivolous Impostures for pleasure and strangenesse,” he lamented, he could not find “a substantiall and severe Collection of HETEROCLITES, or IRREGULARS of NATURE, well examined & described” (Bacon 1605: sig. Bb4r). Yet such instances were important, he thought, for they might betray hitherto strange but wholly natural effects that might be harnessed to improve human welfare. Our goal when we founded Preternature was to take up Bacon’s challenge once more, albeit a tad belatedly and to different ends. We fixed on the journal’s title, for it nicely delineated that sliver of space between the natural and the supernatural haunted by the creatures of perception and imagination, whose existence defies mere rationalistic explanation. Preternature, as we originally conceived of the journal, was to be the home for the study of the preternatural— but the preternatural as the preternatural. It was to be a rigorous textual space for the study of this epistemological space. To be sure, the last generation has seen a burgeoning of scholarship on the likes of aliens, demons, revenants, monsters, ghosts and spirits, and on magic and occultism, too. But while these studies have been fascinating in themselves from the founding editors: thinking preternaturally after ten years