Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age Book

On February 11th 1858 Bernadette Soubirous, a 14-year-old from an impoverished family, had the first of eighteen encounters with a white lady claiming to be the "Immaculate Conception". Within 50 years the little grotto of Massabielle and the sleepy town of Lourdes had been transformed into the greatest of all the modern Catholic pilgrimage sites. Lourdes became, over this time, a focus for many and diverse strands within the church and French society in general: a standard for the right-wing, legitimist and anti- Semitic; a ray of hope for the sick and the invalid; a cause for the women of the church; the bêtes noire of the scientific, rational and secular elites; and a source of income for this impoverished region in the south-west of France. Ruth Harris is Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at New College, Oxford, and she has written widely on Modern French History and the History of Medicine. In Lourdes she maintains an admirable objectivity on a subject that has attracted just as many hagiographies as fervent denunciations. This is a work of social history and it is not the authenticity of the original vision or the miracles associated with Lourdes that concern the author. Rather, it is the people involved and the way the pilgrimage became a focus for a mass movement within modern French society. Illustrated throughout with contemporary drawings and photographs, Lourdes is a book appropriate for historians and accessible to interested amateurs. --Douglas PretsellRead More