Francis of Assisi is the first stigmatic on record, bearing on his body the marks of the crucified Christ. In this he was followed by a succession of those who were likewise marked, mainly women, identifiably Catholic, continuing through the early modern period, persisting during the Enlightenment, still present in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is this last period that delimits this study, spanning from 1838 to 1938 and focused on Britain and Ireland. A marginal phenomenon in Christianity, stigmata figured prominently in pointed discussions and in polemical literature over the period. Why this was the case constitutes one of the major questions the book sets out to answer. Examination of this material provides occasion, not only for the expected Protestant-Catholic exchanges, but allows insight into intra-Protestant and intra-Catholic differences. While for some Catholics living stigmatists provided apologetic argument in favour of Catholicism, for others they proved to be something of an embarrassment, best passed over in silence. Within Protestantism, stigmatics could function as identity-generating apparatuses; their presence both in mainstream and in sectarian Protestant circles complicated responses here as well.
Smeyers cites Herbert Thurston’s The physical phenomena of mysticism (1952) as, in Britain, ‘the main scholarly work on stigmata’ (p. 3). It focused primarily on continental Europe and adopted a strict definition of stigmata, restricting true stigmatisation to the Wounds of the Passion replicated on the body of the recipient. The subtitle of Smeyers’s study indicates a different geographical locus and his referencing of ‘supernatural bodies’ a more expansive view of bodily phenomena claiming to manifest the supernatural. While stigmata are retained as a prominent concern, he includes stigmatic markings – signs and writing that appear on the skin, trances and convulsions associated with revivalistic behaviour. This enables extension of his investigation into Protestant manifestations and further into scientific reaction to such phenomena. In going beyond the archetypal stigmatist as a woman, often with a history of ill health, being a rather passive recipient the book includes figures whose bodies actively engaged the public and contributed to discourses surrounding the phenomena.
Chapter i sets the stage for an initial period of polemics over Catholic continental female stigmatists who were ‘imported’ into the British Isles, awakening popular interest around 1839. In the early nineteenth century foreign reports of stigmatists, reinforced by gothic fiction, were not unknown in England, but had the effect of reinforcing a stereotype of Catholicism as superstitious, credulous and backward. The Emancipation Act of 1829 which allowed English, Scottish and Irish Catholics a seat in Parliament brought Roman Catholicism under increased public scrutiny. Anti-Catholicism drew strength from anti-Irish sentiment fuelled by immigration. Already present in this early part of the century, that sentiment would gain in intensity as time progressed, especially in the 1840s. Anti-popery already had a long history and stigmata embodied the foreignness and irrationality of Catholicism.
In 1834 two young Tyrolean women received the stigmata. They became the most talked about stigmatists of their time, attracting streams of pilgrims to view the ‘holy virgins’ with their own eyes. In England they were popularised by the earl of Shrewsbury, who had journeyed to Italy and seen the women for himself. Shrewsbury’s efforts placed stigmata squarely on the religious map, initiating controversies between and within Catholic and Protestant ranks (chapter ii).
The representation of the Tyrolean stigmatists became a standard by which to measure the occurrence of ‘domestic’ mystics, even when they were not Catholic. Chapter iii is largely given over to a case study of young Irish Catholic claimants to bear the stigmata. When launched into the public sphere inevitable comparisons were made with the continental exemplars, which had the dual effect of strengthening the Irish claims or rendering them further suspect. In the event, the claims turned out to be fraudulent. The controversy over the ‘stigmatists’ died; interest in stigmata did not.
Chapter iv shifts ground to examine Protestant manifestations. In a climate of end time expectations that bred prophetic voices to usher in the new age, stigmata could provide bodily credentials and function as prophetic legitimation. Here several case studies of nineteenth-century prophets in England are examined. A figure such as John Thom (1799–1838), who claimed to be Christ himself, returned to bring judgement, and bearing the stigmata on hands and feet, presented his stigmatised body (the wounds were authentic) as proof of his status. Here the stigmata did not signify a contemplation on the wounds of Christ which incapacitated its bearer. For Thom they were bodily signs of the oppressive social conditions he experienced and legitimation of his prophetic message of millenarian revolt. In the violence he preached and ultimately suffered, Thom was an outlier. Ann Girling (1827–86) shows another side of English millenarian leadership, in which stigmata played a more subordinate, but still active role.
Understandably, Thom’s prophetic career could and did reinforce a patholocisation of stigmata, no longer simply a curious anachronism or symptom of Catholic backwardness, but a marker of unhealthy religion more generally. Moreover, attention was directed from the stigmatists themselves to pathological effects upon their followers (chapter v). Nineteenth-century revivalism evoked concerns over ‘contagious affliction’ in which religious enthusiasm could spread from body to body. Anti-revivalists could cite ecstatic trances, uncontrollable convulsions and stigmatic markings affecting men as well as the stereotypically more susceptible women. Claims of divine agency clashed with counterclaims of naturalistic etiology. Horizons expanded from explaining manifestations in individuals to accounting for what appeared to be a mental and moral epidemic.
The individual and collective phenomena associated with supernatural bodies drew the attention of the medical community as well as the developing social sciences (chapter vi). Hysteria, a condition held to be characteristically female but not restricted to women, became a favoured explanation of bodily phenomena such as signs and writing upon the skin – as demonstrated in public exhibitions in Paris by Jean-Martin Charcot. Such phenomena could be induced by doctors on hysterical subjects while under hypnosis. Mass hysteria could in turn account for the attraction of devotees to stigmatists who attracted a following. Since hysteria was such a ‘catch-all’ diagnosis during the latter nineteenth century, it served to provide a naturalistic explanation for a wide variety of behaviours, especially and famously faith-healing. By the late 1930s, however, medical attention to stigmata had ceased.
In the interval, opponents of scientific naturalism pushed back against what they regarded as reductionistic explanations of supernatural bodies (chapter vii). As the Medical Bureau at Lourdes attested, empirical diagnoses of disease could be marshalled in favour of the power of miracle and the supernatural. Stigmata as a rallying point of faith could only benefit from this approach. Defenders of the supernatural could also find support from the effects of the Great War, whose trauma and loss created a climate ‘in which stigmata could gain in devotional and emotional support’ (p. 174). The war produced stigmata stories, subject to degrees of fictionalisation, but gaining traction by their connection to the larger suffering brought on by the war.
The final chapter looks to the early twentieth century and the continuing negotiation of stigmatised individuals with the public sphere.
Smeyers’s study redresses a relative neglect of the Britain and Ireland in international accounts of stigmatists. By expanding his attention to other bodily phenomena claiming supernatural origin he is able to incorporate aspects of controversy that engaged occurrences on Protestant terrain. A strength of the book resides in its investigation of how various groups interrelated, how their arguments intersected and developed, and how seemingly homogenous groups could fracture. In his concluding chapter he gives attention to how, over time, public interest in these sorts of phenomena could change. Attitudes toward supernatural bodies were not the same in 1938 as they were a century earlier.
For those whose interest resides in the physical phenomena of mysticism, Smeyers unearths several protagonists, expanding the pool to include a number of Protestants. His research also uncovers others who wished to avoid the public spotlight, and suggests that there is more to be discovered with further research. Beyond that circle of interest, the book may engage historians of Protestant-Catholic relations in Britain over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To those more oriented toward the engagement of the developing social sciences over the period in their interactions with religiosity it provides another window into those relations. It also raises questions of social class and gender, as those bear upon perceptions of supernatural bodies.
