Speaking with the Dead in Early America

Early American Studies

By: Erik R. Seeman

Narrated by: John Burlinson

In Speaking with the Dead in Early America, historian Erik R. Seeman undertakes a 300-year history of Protestant communication with the dead. Seeman chronicles the story of Protestants' relationships with the deceased from Elizabethan England to puritan New England and then on through the American Enlightenment into the middle of the nineteenth century with the explosion of interest in Spiritualism. He brings together a wide range of sources to uncover the beliefs and practices of both ordinary people, especially women, and religious leaders.

This prodigious research reveals how sermons, elegies, and epitaphs portrayed the dead as speaking or being spoken to, how ghost stories and Gothic fiction depicted a permeable boundary between this world and the next, and how parlor songs and funeral hymns encouraged singers to imagine communication with the dead. Speaking with the Dead in Early America thus boldly reinterprets Protestantism as a religion in which the dead played a central role.

The book is published by University of Pennsylvania Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

"Meticulously researched and highly readable…" (Ann Braude, author of Radical Spirits)

"Deeply researched, compellingly written, and entirely persuasive." (Douglas L. Winiarski, University of Richmond)

"A bold and provocative new reading of the Protestant relationship with the dead." (Susan Juster, author of Sacred Violence in Early America)

©2019 University of Pennsylvania Press (P)2021 Redwood Audiobooks