Spectacles of Light: The Magic Lantern as Popular Entertainment, 1810-1930

From fairgrounds to lecture halls, cabarets to classrooms, the magic lantern cast its glow across the modern world. Long before cinema, this versatile projection device captivated audiences with dazzling images, dramatic storytelling, and immersive spectacle. At once a scientific tool, a medium of persuasion, and a form of mass entertainment, the lantern became central to the making of modern visual culture. This book explores the magic lantern's extraordinary role in shaping popular performance and entertainment in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Bringing together leading scholars from across disciplines, its chapters follow itinerant showmen, professional lecturers, and theatrical illusionists as they built audiences across Europe, North America, and Australia, forging connections that made the lantern a truly international medium. Spectacles of Light completes the trilogy on the magic lantern in the Media Performance Histories series, shifting focus from religion and education to the vibrant worlds of entertainment.

KURT VANHOUTTE is professor of theatre and performance at the University of Antwerp. He served as the central coordinator and spokesperson of B-magic, an Excellence of Science Project (2018-2025) on the cultural impact of the magic lantern. His research explores the intersections of performative culture, illusionism and media technology since the nineteenth century.

ELEONORA PAKLONS is a historian specializing in the history of knowledge, performance, and representation. She earned her PhD from University of Antwerp in 2026, with a dissertation on the representation of place in magic lantern travelogues. She previously conducted archival research for the B-magic project at the same institution.

EVELIEN JONCKHEERE obtained a PhD in Art History with a dissertation on popular culture in the Belgian fin de siècle. She was a member of the B-magic project at the University of Antwerp. Since January 2025, she serves as curator of the Museum Huis van Alijn in Ghent.

LEEN ENGELEN is a film and media historian based in Belgium. She teaches at LUCA School of Arts (KU Leuven) in the international MA programs FilmMemory and DocNomads. After collaborating on the B-magic project, her current research focuses on nineteenth-century visual and immersive media, cinema cultures, archives and decolonial approaches.