Performing Magnetism

Setting the stage
Eleonora Paklons, Kristof Smeyers, Kurt Vanhoutte, and Hannah Welslau

PART 1: POWER & PERSUASION

1 Performing therapeutic magnetism in mid-nineteenth-century Brussels
Kaat Wils
2 Performances and trajectories of magnetism in nineteenth-century Budapest
Kornélia Deres
3 Performing magnetism in mid-nineteenth-century Italy: The 1856 challenge between Francesco Guidi and Antonio Zanardelli
Gennaro Ambrosino
4 Under the sway of performance: The somnambulist stage of Prudence Bernard and Auguste Lassaigne
Kurt Vanhoutte

PART 2: BELIEF & COSMOLOGY

5 Magnetic musings: George Baldwin and the divine traveller in Egypt
Robert Rix
6 Mediums and magnetisers: The entanglement of spiritism and magnetism and its performative and religious effects in nineteenth-century Belgium
Hannah Welslau
7 Magnetism and spiritism in the Ottoman Empire (1850s–1870s)
Özgür Türesay
8 Magnetism, mysticism, and the devil
Kristof Smeyers

PART 3: IDENTITY & AFFECT

9 The embodied self: Automatism, power, and gendered autonomy
Stéphanie Peel
10 Entertaining, healing, and fighting death: Madame Plainchant’s magnetic diary, 1851–1854
Thibaut Rioult
11 Performing magnetism in Charles de Villers’ Le magnétiseur amoureux (1787)
Alessandra Aloisi

PART 4: MEDIA & THE SENSES

12 Music and magnetism from Mesmer to the rise of hypnosis
Olivier Verhaegen
13 Under the lantern’s spell: The use of the magic lantern within magnetism
Eleonora Paklons
14 The magnetic performances of Jules de Rovère: Between automata, prestidigitation, and scientific popularisation
Andrea Ceci

PART 5: THEATRICS & THE ARTS

15 “I am going to unwrap the secret of secrets”: Performing the trial of mesmeric and spiritualist authorship in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée
Zoë Ghyselinck
16 Svengali’s resurrection: Mesmerism, myth, and performance
Miranda Zent
17 Choreographing magnetism: The performance of knowledge in the ethereal field of forces
Julia Ostwald

Bibliography