Warner, Marina. Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp.  ix + 469. Hbk. £18.99.

This huge volume starts with a marvellous juxtaposition: the body of Santa Catarina de’ Vigri, preserved in her holy incorruptibility for over five centuries to await the

final reanimation, and the tomb of the eighteenth century scientist Luigi Galvani, whose experiments with electricity ‘galvanized’ a dead frog to twitch and kick into a simulacrum of life. With uncanny appropriateness, both are to be found in the church of Corpus Domini in Bologna. These three images of the borderland between life and death, material and immaterial, immediately announce the purpose of Marina Warner's inquiry: to recount how the scientific mind has, from its beginnings, sought to pin down the relationship between soul and matter, and to delineate signs of the first in the second. More broadly still, she wants ‘to explore some of the work of the imagination in envisioning the invisible and giving forms to the impalpable’ (p. 20).

Anyone familiar with the author's earlier work will know the breadth of book-learning she brings to her continuing preoccupation with the relationship between the imagination and its material expressions, between image and form, and the way that the second feeds back to modify the first (Warner 1976, 1985, 1994). Here, the overall headings—wax, air, clouds, light, shadow, mirror, ghost, ether, ectoplasm and film— give some idea of the scope. The mass of facts and juxtapositions that jostle under each take in Marie Tussaud's waxworks and the seventeenth century Wondermuseum of the Jesuit scientist Athenasias Kircher, magic lantern shows and Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, Leonardo's blobs and Rorschach's tests, photographs of native Indians and Philip Pullman's novels—and much, much more besides.

Sometimes, following the connecting threads in this exhaustive catalogue can be a bit exhausting too. Nevertheless, here is a wealth of material with which the psychological mind can play, and store as a valuable reference. Curiously though, in an enquiry so directly abo