This introduction broaches the question of how naturalism rose to dominance in the modern West. Naturalism in this context is understood as a rejection of belief in the supernatural. This distinctive feature of Western modernity is at odds, not only with its own religious past, but also with what has been true for virtually all other cultures. Whereas it was once impossible not to assume the existence of the supernatural, this has now become one option among others, and one that is typically thought to be lacking in rational support. The book seeks to account for this unique historical development in two related ways. First, it explores the histories of the two key terms in this understanding—‘belief’ and ‘supernatural’—showing how they came to take on their present meanings in the modern period. Second, it shows how advocates of naturalism necessarily subscribe to a progressive view of history that can vindicate the adoption of these two categories in their modern sense.

This chapter gives an account of the origins of our present understanding of the natural/supernatural divide, showing how the terminology of the ‘supernatural’ first emerged in the Middle Ages and gradually assumed its modern form between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The attendant ‘isms’—naturalism and supernaturalism—arrive at the end of this period, during the 1800s. The original context for the naturalism/supernaturalism distinction was neither science nor philosophy, but the sphere of biblical criticism. From there it was imported into a scientific context. The nineteenth century also witnessed attempts to reconstruct the history of science with a view to arguing for a long-standing alliance between naturalism and science. A more accurate portrayal of the relevant history shows, to the contrary, that ‘science’ had been consistently aligned with theistic assumptions about the regularities of nature. These regularities were formalised as laws of nature in the seventeenth century, at which time they were understood as divinely authored imperatives to which nature necessarily conformed. In the nineteenth century, what had originally been understood as expressions of the divine will were simply redescribed in purely naturalistic terms by advocates of naturalism. Ironically, they were now claimed to represent evidence against theistic readings of nature.

David Hume’s famous argument against believing miracle reports exemplifies several key issues relating to the emergence of modern naturalism. Hume uncritically assumes the universal and unproblematic nature of core conceptions such as ‘supernatural’ and ‘laws of nature’. Hume’s argument also presents him with a dilemma. He relies upon the weight of testimony to establish his case against believing miracle reports, but must also contend with the weight of testimony, across different times and cultures, to the existence of the supernatural. Hume resolves this by an appeal to historical progress accompanied by a dubious racial theory. These enable him to discount testimonies emanating from the past and from other cultures. ‘Hume’s dilemma’ has not gone away and, if anything, is even more acute since the traditions and beliefs of non-Western cultures are now more difficult to dismiss on the basis of dubious historical accounts of Western exceptionalism. This dilemma amounts to a tension between the ethics of belief and the demands of epistemic justice.

I ask how sensory models are established and operate across different cultures, including their variant ethnographical nuances. This problematises the interplay of the senses whereby sensory conjunctions or amalgams form part of everyday life and ritual practices in many societies, as opposed to the broader compartmentalisation of the senses in Western aesthetics. The chapter compares a range of categories that delineate different senses, as well as the varying modalities per sense. This is accomplished through an investigation of linguistic descriptors of senses as a starting point. How a particular culture names the senses that wield cultural importance is however not merely an exercise in description or enumeration. I analyse sensory nomenclatures in a three-fold manner to unveil the phenomenological epistemology of the senses. First, I engage with the numbers of modalities per sense in order to acknowledge alternate sensory models beyond the hegemonic Romano–Grecian five-sense categorisation. Second, I query the social significance of the nuances of each sense. Third, I raise examples of how two or more senses may be employed synaesthetically. By focusing on cultural interpretations of sensory practices, pairings, and intersections, this approach sheds analytical attention upon everyday orderings of sensory categories and their cultural significance.

Best known for her links to Italy, where she moved at eighteen, Vernon Lee was a Pan-European who viewed western Europe as a single entity unified by shared culture and history despite local languages and customs. Born into an expatriate family, she learned multiple languages as her family shifted residences during her youth, including stays in Germany and Switzerland. More important, Vernon Lee’s wonder and imagination were awakened by her German-speaking Bernese governess who taught her German fairy tales and legends as well as history and literature; the governess also imparted a profound experience of female love. This chapter posits Lee’s foundational German-related childhood experiences as key to her psychological, sexual, and imaginative formation; her supernatural and historical writing; and her sexuality. After demonstrating the Anglo–German conversation of Lee’s supernatural tales, especially ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Woman’, with German lore and the romantic tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, the chapter focuses on the novella Ottilie (1883) as a site of Lee’s conceptualisation of haunted historical narrative. It concludes with a feminist reading of Ottilie and proposes the novella’s suitability as an imagined history of Ottilie von Goethe.

The chapter takes a historical perspective and asks us to consider the long and overlapping concerns of both scientists and religious believers with truth, beauty and creative ordering. Science is no enemy of religion but a casual reductive materialism, often presented in the media under the auspices of ‘science’, and fails to see the sophistication and glory of religious belief that God created all that is (creation ex nihilo), and that this conviction is fully compatible with robust modern science.

In the twenty-first century, Gothic pervades national literatures and cinemas even in some possibly unexpected parts of the world, such as the Islamic Middle East. Gothic texts and films from the region mainly aim to disentangle the genre from Western influence by including motifs from Islamic folklore and demonology such as the supernatural creatures known as ‘djinns’. While many Gothic texts from Islamic countries, such as Iran, are celebrated by Western audiences today for being politically progressive in outlook, a large number of Gothic texts and films from Turkey often tend to cultivate far more conservative values in correlation with governing political and religious orthodoxies. This chapter investigates the cultural origins of what might be called ‘Islamic Gothic’, highlighting its most common conventions concerning the representation of women haunted by malevolent djinns of Islamic cultures. Following a historical survey that sheds light on the development and popularity of Gothic in the Islamic Middle East, particularly in Egypt, Iran and Turkey, the chapter explores the role of the djinn, the mainstream monster of Islamic Gothic in Turkish literature and film, in establishing an ideological position that correlates with the rising popularity of conservative politics in the post millennium.

This chapter explores Scott’s writing about familiar landscapes comprising cultivated land, rivers and coastlines. Topics include the history of farming and effects of new agricultural policies associated with enlightenment and the culture of ‘improvement’. The expansion of sheep farming is discussed with attention to changes in soil structure, flora and rural population levels. Sections address foods that are associated with Scotland, including salmon, beef and mutton. Whisky is explored for its ecological and national significance. River and offshore environments are considered in terms of the use of marine products and technologies that threatened fish stocks. The chapter has a temporal framework that looks from the nineteenth century back to the end of the last great ice age, exploring Scott’s interest in environmental history through his accounts of fossils, prehistoric tools and animal bones found in peat bogs. Environmental memory, folklore, supernatural creatures and eco-gothic tropes of haunting are key themes.

Hearing without seeing, or without seeing well, was one of the defining experiences of the preindustrial night. This chapter seeks to capture something of this experience. It follows darkness as it fell, from sunset to bedtime, beginning with an attempt to “listen around,” or to reconstruct the aural texture of the everynight. While hearing was much more important than during the day for information and orientation, it could not compensate for the loss of vision. The deep darkness of the early modern city undermined people’s sense of control, aggravating fears of very real nocturnal dangers. Discussion accompanies people as they were readying themselves to sleep and shows that even at home, fears and real dangers could shake people’s security and disturb their peace. But while nocturnal threats, fears, and nuisances seem universal, their effect was highly differential, since it depended on the means one could use to cope with them. My second argument is therefore that sleep did not necessarily emancipate people from diurnal social hierarchies and material conditions. They remained unequal even in their beds.

This chapter explores representations of fantasy and romance in Anglo-American screen productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. It is particularly concerned with how filmmakers of these plays make the fantastical and the romantic believable yet sufficiently otherworldly. Films of A Midsummer Night’s Dream discussed include those by directors Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle (1935), Peter Hall (1968), Adrian Noble (1996), and Michael Hoffman (1999). Each uses numerous elements from the cinematic toolbox to create plausible versions of Shakespeare’s faerie world. Films of The Tempest considered include those by Derek Jarman (1979) and Julie Taymor (2010). Airy spirit that he is, Ariel in The Tempest is kin to the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Thus directors of The Tempest are faced with similar challenges of crafting verisimilitude as their counterparts face working on A Midsummer Night’s Dream; each meets those challenges with their idiosyncratic aplomb that does justice to Shakespeare.

This chapter examines the numerous meanings of ‘Gothic’ in the period before 1800 to explain how it was understood in a variety of contexts, from politics and Protestantism to architectural heritage and literary style. The ancient Goths were simultaneously seen as the barbarian destroyers of Classical civilisation, and as the northern champions of liberty against Roman tyranny and corruption. The reputed organisation of ancient Gothic society was understood to have provided the foundations for post-Roman English and later British systems of government, so influencing both the constitution and contemporary politics, especially among Whigs. The perceived links between the Goths of antiquity and the history and society of the Middle Ages and the Reformation in turn provided the basis of a national cultural identity that was increasingly celebrated and revived in the eighteenth century, and the term was adopted in broader debates on governance, cultural values, national character and the environment. The literary dimensions of Gothicism, inspired by medieval romances, added further characteristics of the supernatural and the mysterious to the term's changing meanings.

The development of the Victorian ghost story can be contextualised in relation to an array of interleaving discourses of the unseen: the science of optics; the advent of new, invisible technologies that constituted a form of modern supernatural; and the rise of Spiritualism and the pseudo-scientific investigation of the paranormal. Many ghost story writers explored, even embraced, the spectral effects of modernity and the ghost story flourished in an historical moment when scientific and technological progress was shadowed by the occult. For women writers, the ghost story is a tale of increasing visibility and opportunity: in a climate of social and political reform, women occupied a prominent role in the genre, exploiting the growing appetite for popular and marketable writing, particularly in shorter forms. The chapter explores how the Victorian ghost story provided an often oblique vision of gender and class inequalities, and raised fundamental questions about faith and knowledge.

When he wrote Gallathea, Lyly combined certain elements which might be said to be at the heart of Shakespearean comedy: cross-dressed lovers, woods as spaces for personal discovery, supernatural imps with power over human interaction, a narrative moving towards marriage against seemingly irreconcilable odds. Though Shakespeare’s earlier plays, such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love’s Labour’s Lost, are most often described as Lylian, every one of his comedies engages with some combination of these elements, and towards the end of his career, in the second scene of The Tempest Shakespeare can be seen rewriting the first scene of Gallathea. This chapter will give this side of Shakespeare’s authorship a new emphasis by juxtaposing it with different elements of Lyly’s influence over his early career, charting the use of Lyly’s prose fiction in Two Gentlemen of Verona and his play The Woman in the Moon in Titus Andronicus. By looking at various kinds of influence – generic, structural, performative, tonal – this chapter will present a new understanding of Shakespeare’s early use of Lyly’s work.

This chapter continues the exploration of the development of the doctrine of justification during the Middle Ages, focussing on the important concept of grace. Although medieval theologians based their thinking on this significant element of the Christian doctrine of justification on the writings of Augustine of Hippo, it became clear that the idea required further development to engage with the questions being explored at this time. The chapter opens by exploring the increasingly important correlation between grace and the concept of the supernatural, which is expressed in Aquinas’s famous definition of grace as ‘something supernatural within the soul’. The analysis then shifts to the distinction between actual and sanctifying grace. Although this distinction is implicit within Augustine’s theology of grace, it lacked the conceptual precision necessary to engage certain questions. This is also true concerning the distinction between operative and co-operative grace, which became increasingly important in Aquinas’s theological analysis. The chapter concludes by exploring one of the most distinctive themes in thirteenth-century theology: the role of supernatural habits of grace in justification. What factors led to its introduction, and why did Ockham and the via moderna criticise this? This analysis establishes a significant continuity of argument between the via moderna and Luther on the relational aspects of grace.

Accounts of miracles and visions feature prominently in each of Flodoard’s histories. Notably, he recorded a huge number of wonders that occurred during his own lifetime. This constitutes a striking contrast with contemporary authors of history and hagiography, many of whom doubted whether miracles still happened or whether they were necessary. This chapter examines Flodoard’s attitude to the supernatural, asking in particular how it evolved over the course of his lifetime. I argue that Flodoard came to perceive miracles as validation of the work carried out by monks, clerics and bishops, and that he heeded seriously reports of visions and other phenomena as divinely inspired responses to moral failings. Flodoard contrasted the earthly vices of the leaders of the West Frankish kingdom with the greatness of spiritual power, thus providing a rationale for episcopal authority in a time of political upheaval.

This chapter argues that we might better understand postmodernism’s ambivalent appropriation of genre models by theorizing it in terms of a logic of quasi- or “as if” belief that cuts across structures of financial and literary market exchange. Taking recent work in economic sociology and the “New Economic Criticism,” as jumping-off points it shows how a deep-rooted kinship between fiction and finance as forms of writing that mediate value in the modern credit economy (in Mary Poovey’s terms) are becoming newly visible today. The shared condition of fictional texts’ and financial and monetary instruments’ successful market circulation is their solicitation of tacit faith or trust in imaginary things. A desire both to exploit and to subvert this condition of “fiduciary exchangeability” shapes the experiments in supernatural narrative form offered by Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and Lunar Park (2005), Anne Billson’s Suckers (1993), Stephen Marche’s The Hunger of the Wolf (2015), and Jonathan Coe’s The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (2010). In the work of these writers we see many of the crucial elements of market metafiction in action.