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Title
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The flesh made word : stigmata in the public sphere in Britain and Ireland, 1830s-1930s
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Author
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Abstract
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| Print culture and public debate in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and Ireland brimmed with mentions of the supernatural. This study proposes an analysis of public responses to specific phenomena to qualify attitudes to contested manifestations of the supernatural. Different phenomena fired different reactions. Among the most controversial forms of the supernatural in this period was a phenomenon in the fringes of Christianity: stigmata, the Wounds of Christ’s crucifixion as they displayed on living bodies. Why were stigmata such a highly charged and polemically significant phenomenon in Britain and Ireland? Why could the phenomenon ‘not be discussed with calmness […] without indulging in angry rhetoric?’ as a reporter asked in 1874, when a lecture on the subject by the Archbishop of Dublin derailed with ‘indignation’. Stigmata provoked people to draw lines: between denominations; within denominations; between religion, magic and ‘superstition’; between science and ‘pseudoscience’; between modernity and what came before; between oneself and the other. Each chapter hinges on one major theme in discussions that made stigmata a source of public contestation. Chapter 1, ‘Stigmata as Catholic supernaturalism’, looks at how internationally renowned cases of stigmata were used to demarcate confessional differences between Catholics and Protestants in the 1840s, not coincidentally a decade of renewal in both denominations and of increasing anti-Catholic sentiment. Despite clear-cut rhetoric that described the Wounds of Christ as intrinsically Catholic, discussions laid bare divisions within denominations. Some Catholics distanced themselves from the phenomenon, while some Protestants became its champions. Chapter 2, ‘Finding meaning in non- Catholic stigmata’, shows how Protestant groups fractured when faced with prolific cases of stigmata throughout the nineteenth century. Discussions laid bare divisions among Nonconformists, dissenters and smaller groups. Far from uniformly ‘rational’, Victorian Protestant piety at times embraced the extraordinary bodily phenomenon as a marker of authentic religion and spiritual vitality. Confessional divides alone do not account for the presence of stigmata in the public sphere. Chapter 3, ‘The (super)nature of stigmata’, therefore turns to the question that underpinned many of the discussions featuring the wounds. It shows how ongoing scientific uncertainty about what caused the phenomenon meant that naturalistic and supernatural explanations continued to coexist, with neither eclipsing the other. This chapter traces how attempts to ‘naturalise’ the wounds gave impetus to renewed emphasis on the phenomenon’s supernature and its symbolic potential for religious revitalisation. The case studies across these chapters demonstrate how these rhetorical binaries – between and within denominations, between the sacred and the profane, between the natural and the supernatural – did not hold up when stigmata were brought into the discussion. Together, these chapters offer the first focussed analysis of stigmata controversies in Britain and Ireland, combining antagonistic sources with records that attest to devotion and magical thinking. They show how, although they rarely manifested in the flesh, stigmata were considered sufficiently relevant throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to be constantly reimagined and contextualised in the public sphere. |
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Language
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English
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Publication
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Antwerp
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University of Antwerp, Faculty of Arts, Ruusbroec Institute
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2021
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Volume/pages
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xi, 250 p.
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Note
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Van Osselaer, Tine [Supervisor]
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Heimann, Mary [Supervisor]
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Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
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