This book is a collection of chapters on supernatural belief and practice in Scotland between 1500 and 1800. It deals with elite culture – from political prophecy to astrology, theology and poetic visions. And it deals with popular culture – from trances and visionary encounters with ghosts and fairies, to folkloric angels and Second Sight.

This book is about other worlds and the supernatural beings, from angels to fairies, that inhabited them. It is about divination, prophecy, visions and trances. And it is about the cultural, religious, political and social uses to which people in Scotland put these supernatural themes between 1500 and 1800. The supernatural consistently provided Scots with a way of understanding topics such as the natural environment, physical and emotional wellbeing, political events and visions of past and future. In exploring the early modern supernatural, the book has much to reveal about how men and women in this period thought about, debated and experienced the world around them. Comprising twelve chapters by an international range of scholarsThe supernatural in early modern Scotland discusses both popular and elite understandings of the supernatural.

1 Exploring the supernatural in early modern Scotland – Julian Goodare and Martha McGill2 The elrich poems: the supernatural and the textual – Janet Hadley Williams3 Emotional relationships with spirit-guides in early modern Scotland – Julian Goodare4 Experiencing the invisible polity: trance in early modern Scotland – Georgie Blears5 The ninety-nine dancers of Moaness: Orkney women between the visible and invisible – Liv Helene Willumsen6 Angels in early modern Scotland – Martha McGill7 Scottish political prophecies and the crowns of Britain, 1500–1840 – Michael B. Riordan8 Astrology and supernatural power in early modern Scotland – Jane Ridder-Patrick9 Fallen spirits and divine grace: sermons and the supernatural in post-Reformation Scotland – Michelle D. Brock10 The uses of providence in early modern Scotland – Martha McGill and Alasdair Raffe11 The invention of Highland Second Sight – Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart12 The pagan supernatural in the Scottish Enlightenment – Felicity Loughlin13 Eighteenth-century Scotland and the visionary supernatural – Hamish MathisonIndex