The preternatural is the subject of a new journal from Penn State University Press.
Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies in the Preternatural is set to debut in May says editor Kirsten C. Uszkalo, a literary scholar at the Universities of Alberta and Athabasca. The biannual’s book-review editor is Richard Raiswell, a historian at the University of Prince Edward Island.
They welcome original scholarship on any subject related to the “role, appearance of, or function of the preternatural” from any academic discipline and theoretical approach. The realm includes such closely related topics as magic, esotericism, demonology, and the occult.
In articles in the first issue, Nancy Caciola and Moshe Sluhovsky write on parallels between the medieval and early modern practice of “discerning spirits” and an emerging experiential science. Michael Ryan’s essay describes a quest for unicorn horn and saints’ relics by sibling count-kings of late-medieval Aragon. In “Motive Hunting in the Case of Richard Hathaway,” Laura Apps considers the competing narratives behind a 1701 case alleging fraud for a false accusation of witchcraft.
Finally, Joseph Laycock finds similarities between accounts of demonic sexual congress in the confessions taken from accused witches in early modern Europe and accounts of sexual trauma in tales of Satanic ritual abuse told to modern therapists, as well as in stories of alien abduction recalled under hypnosis. Or as he puts it, sexual transgressions “at the hand of a mysterious other: the thorny penis of the Devil, the bizarre anal insertions of Satanists, and the mysterious probing of aliens.”
Looking forward, Preternature has a call for papers for an upcoming special issue on Monstrophy. We were happy to learn that there’s a term for ill-placed punctuation.