Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (review)

Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James. By Ann Taves. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1999. Pp. xiii, 449. $23.95 paperback.)

Ann Taves's study of the interaction between the experience of religion and the interpretation of that experience throughout much of the history of American Protestantism is one of the most important contributions not only to the study of American religious history, but more broadly to the study of religion, which has appeared in recent years. Taves, who teaches at Claremont and who has previously written about Roman Catholic devotionalism, sets herself the task of tracing the history of some of the more dramatic forms that religious experience has taken—"fits, trances, & visions" and the like—from the time of the awakenings of the 1740's through the early twentieth century. Her study, however, is "intertextual"—to use a currently fashionable term—in that she continually cross-cuts between accounts of such religious manifestations and the attempts of contemporary observers to make sense of such phenomena. The cast of characters in each category, which sometimes overlap, changes over the decades from the time of John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards to that of William James and his contemporaries, to name three of the most important interpreters of religion. The experiencers similarly range from those converted during the Awakenings of the 1740's to Spiritualists and Pentecostals, with those in the Wesleyan/Methodist tradition receiving particular attention.

Another sort of cross-cutting in which Taves consciously engages is between "high and low," reminiscent of the exhibit of that name at the Museum of Modern Art a few years ago as well as Lawrence Levine's Highbrow, Lowbrow, which concerned themselves with interaction between the intelligentsia and popular culture which was much more the case in nineteenth-century America than is so today. In addition to luminaries such as Edwards and James, Taves resurrects the work of many writers remembered dimly if at all as a way of adding textureto her tracing out of "chains of interpretation" throughout this period. This generally works well, although one does wonder why she omits the strain of Emersonian Transcendentalism that in many ways parallels the object of her discussion. The latter separates for her into three "chains," which interpret religious behavior in terms respectively of supernatural and natural causation and, in the third case, a mediating category associated with James which accepts religious experience as genuine though explicable in naturalistic terms. This latter mode serves the author as a point of departure for a critique of contemporary interpretive strains, which for her are unnecessarily divided along disciplinary lines as well as between believers and skeptics, both of which chasms might be bridged through the development of a more inclusive vocabulary of discourse.

Taves's work presumes a knowledge of the basic narrative of American Protestantism, and is not for beginners. However, the author consistently writes in a lucid and well-organized fashion, and it is easy to follow her argument through the astonishing array of detail she has mined from a host of primary sources, many of them published but seldom examined for many years. Although she mentions Catholicism only briefly and in passing, her finds should be of great interest to students of religious phenomena no matter what their particular field of study.