Roundtable on Carlos Eire, <i>They Flew: A History of the Impossible</i> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023)

Twenty-five years ago, this journal inaugurated the Book Review Forum as a way "to add dialogue (and disagreement) to the pages of our journal."No book is better suited to promote such discourse than Carlos Eire's fascinating, whimsical, and deliberately nonconforming study of impossible phenomena in early modern Europe, They Flew: A History of the Impossible.At the last gathering of the American Society of Church History, a panel on They Flew attracted an enthusiastic audience equipped with plaudits and protests.The four panelistswhose written reviews are found hereextolled and interrogated They Flew, while noting that Eire's book has received both glowing and grumbling reviews in popular newspapers and magazines.Eire treats an inherently controversial subject in They Flew: supernatural events in history.He does so at two levels.First, he examines sixteenth-century miracles like levitation and bilocation, which were attested to by thousands of witnesses.Then, he considers the critical reception of these miracles, both in their own day by devil-fearing detractors and today by contemptuous historians who dismiss miracles as childish fantasies that should be excluded from history.Eire rebukes such contempt and centers his history of early modern Europe on miracles and belief in miracles.In so doing, he challenges us to question the bounds of historical knowledge and the relationship between belief and reality.Our four reviewers endorse Eire's effort to reengage with the miraculous in history.They also detect in They Flew a fresh approach to history that can bear fruit in many subfields.Esther Chung-Kim suggests that historians of medicine follow Eire's lead, consider the role of belief in the development of medical science, and thereby demolish the anachronistic notion that religion and medicine stood in opposition to each other.Jonathan Reimer notes how studying miracles can illuminate the shortcomings of methodological naturalism.Mark A. Noll and Ronald K. Rittgerswhile they largely praise Eire's bookcriticize his depiction of Protestants.Noll rejects the idea that Protestants set out to divorce the sacred from the mundane.