Stigmatics

Blood ties examines the plethora of meanings and significances attributed to the religious supernatural in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and Ireland through the lens of one specific phenomenon: stigmata. By exploring the attitudes to the wounds of Christ, their bearers, and their believers across British and Irish society, this thesis argues that the religious supernatural played an important role both in religious practices and in the imagination. Whereas the social and cultural ambiguities of the British and Irish supernatural have received plenty of scholarly attention outside the religious sphere (e.g. on Spiritualism, ghosts, and mesmerism), studies on nineteenth- and twentieth-century religion have thus far largely shied away from stigmata, ecstasy and other religious phenomena. This thesis offers to open up this field of research by weaving religious supernatural phenomena into a broader history and exploring the devotion to stigmata as well as their cultural production and contestation – and in doing so, obfuscate the ontological dichotomy of experience and representation, of materiality and textuality, of ‘superstition’ and ‘modernity’.

Particular attention goes to the various ways in which the stigmata were constructed by a cultural mainstream as part of an ‘Other’; studying these strategies over a period of 150 years allows us to historicise the religious supernatural as well as the attitudes toward it and the practices that were formed around it. Its central argument, then, is that phenomena like the stigmata constituted a ‘sub-structure of rich spiritual enterprise’ (Edward Norman, The English Catholic church in the nineteenth century (Oxford, 1984), p. 1) in Britain and Ireland that simultaneously illuminates previously neglected forms of religiosity and contemporary attempts at severing the ‘blood ties’ between society and the religious supernatural.

• Project: 2017-2021
• Kristof Smeyers
• Supervisor: Tine Van Osselaer
• Co-supervisor: Mary Heimann (Cardiff University)
• Funded by: DOCPRO BOF University of Antwerp and Catholic Record Society’s Michael Williams Research Grant 

This project studies the promotion and devotion of the hundreds of stigmatics reported in five European countries during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The majority of the work on these women (and a few men) who carried Christ’s wounds, has focused primarily on the medical debates and religious treatises and examined the stigmatics in isolation. This project wants to move beyond the traditional historiographical emphasis in at least three ways. First of all, it will focus on the popular perception of stigmatics and examine how they became symbolic figures of political and religious causes. Secondly, we will study the interaction of the 'victim souls' with their communities and examine how they were turned into 'living saints' through religious practices and discourse, and how some of them were eventually even beatified and canonized. Thirdly, we will address them as carefully constructed religious commodities (celebrities) and rebalance the research on the selling of religion that has adopted a top-down perspective and focused primarily on the popularization of authorized cults rather than on the impact of their commercialization from the bottom-up. Combining these three aspects in studying the 'golden age' of the stigmatics, the project will enhance our understanding of the role of (new) media and consumption practices in religious change and the construction of religious identities. As each of these emphases calls for a study that takes into account chronological and geographical differences, we will adopt a comparative approach and examine five of the countries where most of the (hundreds of) stigmatics have been attested (Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Belgium). This will allow us to trace larger trends as changes in the type of stigmatic (e.g. bedridden silent 'sign' or a socially engaged charismatic leader) and moments and locations of increased attention (e.g. political crises). However, since this was the era of an internationalized Catholicism the countries will not be studied in isolation and special attention will be given to transnational attraction (e.g. pilgrims) and the related differences in promotion and perception.

• Project: 2015-2019
• Principle Investigator: Tine Van Osselaer
• Collaborators: Andrea Graus, Leonardo Rossi
• Funded by: ERC (Starting Grant)