Dreams, though often viewed with suspicion by theologians and church authorities since the early Church fathers, remained a powerful and widespread form of religious expression among ordinary people. In Ming-Qing China, where European priests were scarce, lay converts relied heavily on holy dreams to build and strengthen a distinct religious subculture. This text is a version of a keynote address delivered at the Fourth Biennial Meeting of the Religious History Society in July 2004 in Newcastle, Australia.
A review of four publications from 2008–2010 examines how studies of possession, divination, and trance interact with historical method, focusing on historiography rather than anthropology or ethnography. It analyzes framing devices in an edition edited by Amar Annus and a monograph by Sarah Iles Johnston, then considers how seemingly ahistorical phenomena like divination, trance, and possession can be accounted for historically. The article agrees with commentators that anxiety over integrating history with such phenomena stems from a narrow scholarly mentality. It concludes that alternative historical approaches are needed for religious history to study these phenomena without bias or unease.