url of book review of possible interest to M&D readers

[Doug Millison]

http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=20445999015300

"[...] Hunter has abstracted from the papers and
writings of Boyle and his friends and correspondents,
texts dealing with second-sight and its significance.
For Hunter, the latter lies primarily in the presumed
ability of second sight and its attendant phenomena to
establish empirically a realm of spirit and thus aid
in the defense of the Christian religion against
Hobbists, other atheists, deists and sceptics. Boyle's
interests in this material were much the same as those
which around 1680 led Joseph Glanvill, Cambridge
Platonists Ralph Cudworth and Henry More, and the
Scottish engineer and professor George Sinclair, to
study, such things as poltergeists, witches, second
sight, and other things which today are generally
lumped into the category of the paranormal, a category
not now generally seen as having a relation to things
providential, devilish or angelic. For Boyle and his
correspondents, Scotland seemed to offer a new place
to collect evidence of the spirit world, evidence
whose novelty and unimpeachable sources would impress
even the scoffers of London. [...] They did not yet
have a sure sense of what was natural and what
belonged to the supernatural realm to which most had
given considerable thought. [...]


from a review of:
Michael Hunter, ed. The Occult Laboratory: Magic,
Science and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-Century
Scotland--A New Edition of Robert Kirk's "The Secret
Commonwealth and other texts". Bury St Edmunds: The
Boydell Press, 2001. 256 pp. Index. $90.00 (cloth),
ISBN 0-8511-5801-3. 



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