Lourdes: Body And Spirit in the Secular Age - Softcover

Harris, Ruth

3.85

113 ratings by Goodreads

9780141038483: Lourdes: Body And Spirit in the Secular Age

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141038489 ISBN 13: 9780141038483

Publisher: Penguin, 2008

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Lourdes was at the very centre of nineteenth century debates on religion, science and medicine. Both the Church and secularists championed the 'miracle' town as crucial in shaping how society should think about the mind, body and spirit. Since the ‘visions’ of Bernadette Soubirous in 1858 transformed the quiet Pyrenean town into an international tourist and pilgrimage destination, it has been a site for controversy. In her well-crafted and carefully researched book, Harris deftly places Lourdes and its attendant spiritual movement firmly at the centre of French history and shows its significance in the country’s development.

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Review:

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 b�tes 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 Pretsell

Review:

"A remarkable book. . . beautifully written . . . Harris never forgets the human dimension to this complex story". -- Chicago Tribune

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