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From the Editor

2017; Penn State University Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/preternature.6.1.v

2161-2196

Debbie Felton,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

For Preternature's first issue of 2017, we present six articles rather than our usual four. The first three comprise the rest of our “Preternatural Environments” theme, carried over from issue 5.2. Considering the “eerie” in the landscape, their authors cover the uncanny as it relates to suburban areas, to lands surrounded by water, and to the “newness” of North America, a land lacking the antique ruins of Europe. The other three articles in this issue also relate to eerie environments, even if such a topic is not their main theme: they examine vampires, witches, and ghostly occurrences in the contexts of, respectively, small towns in early modern Europe, Nazi Germany, and the uniquely domestic setting of slumber parties.In “The Liminal Space: Suburbs as a Demonic Domain in Classical Literature,” Julia Doroszewska argues that the suburbs, more so than urban or rural settings, act as magnets for the preternatural in ancient Greece and Rome. Ghosts, witches, werewolves, and other such creatures seem drawn to this liminal area that was not strictly the city, yet not far enough removed from the city to be the countryside. This may have been because these entities were themselves considered liminal. Adducing evidence from a number of ancient sources, including Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Petronius's Satyricon, Lucian's The Lover of Lies, and many other loci, Doroszewska provides a highly original analysis of the connection between the preternatural and the suburbs in classical antiquity.The title of our second article both poses a question and provides clues to an answer: “Why Sea Monsters Surround the Northern Lands: Olaus Magnus's Conception of Water.” In it, Lindsay J. Starkey analyzes several works by Olaus Magnus (1490–1557), archbishop of Uppsala (Sweden), including maps and texts that prominently featured depictions and discussions of sea monsters in the waters surrounding northern Europe. She argues that Olaus conceptualized both sea monsters and the water that contained them as wonders or marvels, many of which were dangerous, some of which were protective, and others of which were surprisingly useful. The idea that Olaus and his contemporaries viewed the seawater itself as a wonder has broad ramifications in terms of European motives for investigating and dominating the oceans. Starkey's approach also has the advantage of combining monster studies and ecocriticism, two rapidly growing fields of study.In contrast, Paul Manning's “No Ruins. No Ghosts.” is firmly tied to dry land. Exploring cultural anxieties about the apparent “unhauntability” of the landscapes of the New World, Manning argues that architectural ruins, such as those found in the Old World, represent histories that allow the imagination to conjure up hauntings, whereas for colonial settlers in both North America and Australia, the absence of “picturesque ruins” left these new landscapes as blank slates that produced an eerie tension arising from their apparent emptiness. Manning suggests that this “sublime wilderness,” with its vast untouched age approaching a cosmic scale, inspired the aesthetics of the American weird tale as embodied by the works of such writers as H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, among others.Moving away from specific considerations of landscape, though not from considerations of setting, Stephen Gordon's “Emotional Practice and Bodily Performance in Early Modern Vampire Literature” considers “the troublesome dead” in relation to the emotional makeup of local communities in small-town Europe of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gordon considers social stresses that contributed to beliefs about the agency of revenants, including a belief in the ability of such creatures to spread disease among the living. Reviewing a number of medieval and early modern literary sources, including Walter Map (De Nugis Curialium), William of Newburgh (Historia Rerum Anglicarum), Johann Valvasor (Die Ehre des Hertzogthums Krain), and Augustin Calmet (Dissertations upon the Apparitions of Angels, Dæmons, and Ghosts, and Concerning the Vampires of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia)—to name only a few—Gordon demonstrates that the phenomenon of “emotional contagion” can help our understanding of folk beliefs related to vampires and other revenants.In light of the recent (2016) discovery of a large stash of Heinrich Himmler's books on witchcraft, our fifth article, William Badger and Diane Purkiss's “English Witches and SS Academics: Evaluating Sources for English Witch Trials in Himmler's Hexenkartothek,” is especially timely. Before the outbreak of WWII, Himmler had organized a team of SS researchers to gather records of historical witchcraft trials that had occurred in lands being occupied by the expanding Reich. His alleged reason was to present evidence demonstrating a (nonexistent) anti-German crusade by the Church. Badger and Purkiss examine the ideological underpinnings of Nazi reception of such documents, including their ironic reliance on material by Philipp Aronstein, a German Jew expelled from his professional affiliations in accordance with the Nuremburg Laws and later executed at Theresienstadt.The final article in this issue, Anelise Farris's “Experimenting with the Occult: The Role of Liminality in Slumber Party Rituals,” returns us to Doroszewska's theme via folkloric methodology. Farris, explaining the ritual nature of children's games such as “Cat Scratch,” “Concentrate,” and “Sandman,” discusses how the liminal aspects of the slumber party environment not only facilitate such belief-oriented rituals but also heighten the import of those beliefs. Her analysis encompasses specific contextual information, including the participants' ages, religious upbringings, educational levels, and political backgrounds. In this way, Farris demonstrates both the desire and the dread that can accompany the individuation process for adolescents, who are themselves at a liminal stage of life.Preternature welcomes proposals for special issues such as the “Preternatural Environments” theme presented in issues 5.2 and 6.1. Please direct correspondence to me at felton@classics.umass.edu; for book reviews, please contact Richard Raiswell at rraiswell@upei.ca. For our online submission system and author guidelines, please visit http://www.psupress.org/journals/jnls_submis_Preternature.html.Preternature typically publishes articles within twelve months of acceptance.