II

Anyone familiar with the conventions of medieval hagiography will recognise in Teresa Higginson's testimony a fairly standard account of the final stage of a mystical union with God. This explanation, although advanced by the prime witness in the case, is one which we are unlikely even to consider. Dismissing any supernatural explanation as impossible from the outset, most of us, considering the evidence, will have leapt to one of three conclusions. Some will suspect that Teresa Higginson was a deliberate fraud who simulated or even inflicted her own wounds and whose visions were feigned for whatever obscure motive. Others, being of a less cynical disposition, will presume her to have been honest but mistaken, and will have strained to find natural explanations to account for her testimony. They will perhaps surmise that fasting made Teresa Higginson so light-headed and confused that she thought that she heard voices, did not notice that the fire in the grate was still smouldering when she made the sign of the cross over it, forgot that the cupboard had been filled with kindling earlier that afternoon or failed to realise that the white hand which placed a key on the table in front of her eyes was in fact her own. As for her missionary work in Africa and visions of devils, these will be understood as dreams or hallucinations. The most reductionist will have decided that her stigmata were nothing more than a dermatological complaint. The majority, however, will probably have concluded neither that Teresa Higginson was a fraud nor that she was unduly forgetful, but rather that she was mentally ill. Her stigmata will be understood as the product of some unspecified form of insanity (what would today be termed a ‘disorder’ and would then have been called ‘hysteria’), her visions put down to the sorts of delusions observed in modern-day schizophrenics and her self-harm and fasting attributed to something like depression or anorexia. They may have gone on to speculate as to how far the desire to attract attention to herself, to be revered as a saint or to control those around her, may have entered into her calculations or influenced the course of her delusions, and to wonder why she should have been driven to such extremes in her evident need for psychological help and social validation.

The first problem which arises in trying to find a satisfactory explanation for Teresa Higginson's behaviour is that each of the explanations just outlined – that she was a conscious fraud; that she was mistaken; or that she was mentally ill – could indeed be supported by the historical evidence. None, however, could be proved conclusively, and each would require us to rely heavily on evidence which, in a court of law, would be dismissed as ‘circumstantial’. Let us take first the case for conscious fraud. Although Teresa claimed to have developed the full range of wounds traditionally associated with Christ's crucifixion – in other words, the marks of nails in the hands and feet and a sword-wound on the left side (she was also later seen to bear pinpricks on her brow as from a crown of thorns) – only one mark on her body was actually seen by Fr Thomas Wells, the others having disappeared, in answer to her prayers as she said, over the course of a morning and before anyone else could witness them. We might be inclined to conclude from this anomaly that there never was more than one mark on her body, and that there is therefore no reason to suppose any mystery.

If we take the sceptic's position that Teresa Higginson did not really develop the five wounds of Jesus, this still leaves unanswered the question of why she should have said that she did. Here the fact that her claims closely followed her reading of a newspaper report that a Belgian woman named Louise Lateau fell into an ecstasy every Friday and developed the marks of the crucified Lord on her body will seem highly suggestive.Footnote ¹⁸ It was only a month or two before claiming to be a stigmatic herself, according to the testimony of her housemates, that Teresa Higginson happened to mention that Louise Lateau was in communication with her and had instructed her to read something in the life of St Teresa (St Teresa of Avila being herself, of course, a well-known stigmatic). As Susan Ryland later recalled, ‘during the early part of 1874, there was something in the paper about Louise Lateaux [sic] in France [sic] being in ecstasy every Friday and we passed the remark (I mean Miss Woodward and I) “That is nothing in this house. It is a daily occurrence here”, which it was at that time’.Footnote ¹⁹ Teresa Higginson's knowledge of, and evident absorption with, parallel cases of stigmata suggests that she may well have been working to a model and indulging in copy-cat mysticism. This interpretation would seem all the more likely given that every stage of her mystical advances, which she said began at an early age, turns out either to have followed a well-reported case of a related phenomenon, or else to have followed a saintly model to which she was particularly likely to have had access.

The pattern can be traced back to her childhood. It was in 1857, when controversy over the alleged apparitions at La Salette was first brought to the British public's attention in the Weekly Register, that Teresa Higginson, aged thirteen but only very recently confirmed, began to rise in the night for special devotions and decided that, like the French visionaries, God wanted her to ‘keep secrets’, divine messages which were to be revealed to the world at some later date. In the next year, 1858, when news of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes was trickling out from France and being picked up in the English Catholic press, Teresa Higginson claimed her first outright visions.Footnote ²⁰ Her Marian phase lasted at least until 1859, when she is reported to have fallen into a trance upon being brought the blue ribbon and medal to kiss while lying ill in the infirmary of her convent school. The nuns responded by allowing her to join the Children of Mary, the sodality (Catholic female society) which was later to become as ubiquitous as the Girl Scouts. The self-styled mystic of Bootle so exaggerated the significance of this – ostentatiously signing herself ‘Teresa Higginson, Enfant de Marie’ and loading herself down with medals and scapulars – that Fr Thomas Wells, as her ‘spiritual director’, eventually ‘instructed’ her to stop wearing them altogether.Footnote ²¹

Two years after an article in Macmillan's Magazine first ‘broke the silence’ about the apparently spontaneous appearance of the marks of the cross on the bodies of pious young girls across Europe, and a year after Gerald Molloy brought out his A visit to Louise Lateau, Teresa Higginson made explicit, not only in word but also in her behaviour during Holy Week, her sense of kinship with the stigmatic Louise Lateau.Footnote ²² Before being allowed to join the Third Order of St Francis (a confraternity or Catholic society in honour of St Francis of Assisi which Teresa Higginson eventually joined in 1885), Teresa Higginson claimed to experience, like him, not only the stigmata, but also the ultimate mystical union with God known as espousals. Her revelation to the Sacred Head of Jesus had an obvious parallel to devotions to the Sacred Heart, devotions which, although revealed to St Margaret Mary Alacoque in the seventeenth century and practised by some Catholics in England from as early as the eighteenth century, only began to feature prominently in English Catholic manuals of prayer in the early 1870s, just in time for Teresa Higginson's revelations about the Sacred Head.Footnote ²³ Even the ‘diabolical bangs’ which were heard coming from her room on three successive nights in 1883 were found by a contemporary critic to have coincided with her reading of a life of the curé d'Ars.Footnote ²⁴ In short, if Teresa Higginson had wanted to pretend to be a mystic, she would have had easy access to plenty of material to show her how to play the part. Furthermore, in the contemporary climate of enthusiastic reappropriations of the Faith to combat the perceived dangers of religious ‘indifference’, ‘leakage’ and secularism, she might reasonably have expected her revelations to be taken up with some enthusiasm by English Catholic clergy and to have spread, perhaps via Belgium or France, to Rome and so to the Church universal.

A psychoanalytical interpretation of Teresa Higginson's behaviour is likely to appear even more immediately persuasive to modern readers than the case for conscious fraud. And again, the evidence can neither contradict nor demonstrate such a conclusion. Teresa Higginson's life is riddled with references to mysterious illnesses which might easily be conjectured to have been of psychological origin.Footnote ²⁵ The sexual implications of her visions of ‘mystical espousals’ could be understood as a spinster's wish-fulfilment fantasies. The fact that trances invariably accompanied the development of what she claimed to be manifestations of her mysticism might suggest that both her stigmata and visions were the result of something like self-hypnosis. That the human body can respond dramatically to suggestions of the mind is a notion which we, more than a century after Pierre Janet's work on hysteria and experiments in the possibilities of hypnotic suggestion, as well as through our easy familiarity with phrases such as ‘psychosomatic’ and ‘placebo effect’, find intrinsically plausible. The testimony of the nineteenth-century Alfred Lescher to having induced bleeding by hypnotic suggestion and of the twentieth-century psychiatrist Robert Moody to having witnessed the recreation, by a mentally disturbed patient, of rope marks on his body corresponding to a traumatic experience of years before, suggests an even more obvious parallel with the spontaneous development of wounds on the body of a person morbidly absorbed with images of the crucifixion.Footnote ²⁶ As the Jesuit scholar Herbert Thurston crisply concluded in the case of a direct contemporary who similarly claimed the stigmata, ecstasies, miraculous communions and mystical espousals, Teresa Higginson may have been ‘simply a religiously obsessed neurotic girl, so phenomenally suggestible that the ideas latent in her subconscious mind had the power to work out their own fulfilment even in her physical frame’.Footnote ²⁷

If we happen to believe in a close relationship between mind and body of the kind suggested by Lescher, Freud, Moody, Thurston and others, then we are likely to continue down the road of psychoanalytic explanation and to posit the notion of a childhood trauma to account for Teresa Higginson's acute self-loathing. A psychological imbalance, with origins deep in Teresa Higginson's psyche, may have led to her physical and mental disturbances in later life. Teresa tells us that the death of her little brother, which occurred when she was just five years old, took place at roughly the same time that she ‘discovered’ her own sinful nature. Perhaps she blamed herself for the baby's death: it seems too much of a coincidence that she should recall her first sin, that ‘wilful act of disobedience’ in which she pretended not to hear her mother calling her, as having taken place close to the time of her brother's death, in the same year that she began to torture herself systematically, to ‘mortify herself’ as she afterwards expressed it in religious language.Footnote ²⁸

More recent psycho-medical theories, developed from work on eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia and focusing in particular on the psychology of young women, would suggest ‘low self-esteem’ to be the common denominator which could make sense of Teresa Higginson's self-hatred, evident need to control and physical symptoms. Teresa's long history of morbid fancies and masochistic urges, if that is how we wish to interpret what she would have called her early sense of sin and discipline of self-mortification, certainly seems to have formed the pattern of her subsequent life. Her schooldays at the convent of the Sisters of Mercy in Nottingham, which began on 3 March 1854 and lasted, on and off, for about eleven years, were recalled in a ghoulish account of her cunning in concealing the bruises and cuts which were the result of her own work, although she admitted to having been caught once, when a horrified nun saw her put a red-hot cinder down her dress and told her never to do such a thing again.Footnote ²⁹ It was her enthusiastic concentration on the devotion known as the Stations of the Cross, in which the penitent empathetically meditates on the fourteen stages of Christ's passion, which undoubtedly provided the raw material for her vivid and public re-enaction of the crucifixion in Wigan in 1874. Given her extreme reaction to the pious practice of meditating on the sufferings of the redeemer, we may conclude that it was inevitable that she should have chosen to attach herself to, of all confraternities, the Third Order of St Francis: St Francis was the first known stigmatic and had a particular devotion to that very same formalised meditation on the passion which so captured Teresa's imagination. Nor should it surprise to find that in 1881 she solemnly ‘renewed’ vows ‘made in childhood and renewed continually since, though without permission from anyone to do so’ not only to ‘detach herself from all earthly things, places and persons’ but also ‘to mortify every sense of my body’Footnote ³⁰ Teresa Higginson's morbidity, low sense of self-esteem, pattern of self-harm, peculiar attitudes to food, slow development, frequent illnesses and extremes of behaviour will all suggest a psychologically disturbed person.

The notion that Teresa Higginson was not simply a passive victim of her delusions but used cunning to manipulate those around her into treating her as a saint can be seen as providing a motive for otherwise inexplicable behaviour. If manipulation is characteristically the refuge of the weak, then Teresa Higginson, a sickly lower-middle-class woman without proper qualifications or job security, without prospects, husband or family support, would certainly have had reasons to seek to influence those around her by whatever means lay within her power. Although her early claims to mystical experiences were evidently ignored by the nuns at her school and seem to have been held in suspicion by the parish priest in Wigan, she soon managed to draw attention to herself and to influence the actions of those around her. Fr Wells, for example, for all that he told her that she had ‘no business to go on that way’ and once even drove her out of church for disturbing the congregation, soon found himself drawn within her orbit.Footnote ³¹ As a priest, he could hardly deny her communion; and this entailed calling at her home since she claimed to be too ill to get to church. It would have taken a more callous person than he to ignore the alarms for her safety which were raised by her housemates after her bouts of erratic behaviour, and so Fr Wells was often forced to visit the house in the middle of the night as well as during the day. Nor was it possible for him to escape hearing her mystical claims in the confessional where his role as listener and counsellor also forced him into the position of tacit accomplice, having to instruct her to drink and eat out of ‘obedience’ to him (since she refused all nourishment except under what she called ‘spiritual instruction’) and even allowing her to take away holy water since that alone, she claimed, kept the devil at bay.Footnote ³² Teresa Higginson eventually found more credulous priests in the shape of Fr Edward Powell and Fr Alfred Snow, for whom she styled herself in her confessional letters as ‘your devoted child’ in ‘the Sacred Heart and Sacred Head’. Others saw her as fitting more naturally into a different, but equally gendered, stereotype: that of female hysteric.Footnote ³³ Herbert Thurston, for example, tartly suggested in his sceptical survey of modern mystics that ‘spiritual directors’ whose heads were ‘filled with mystical theology and with the marvels recorded in the Lives of the Saints’ yet less well-versed ‘in the literature of what we may for brevity's sake call hysteria’ were more likely to find themselves being directed by, rather than directing, their female penitents, ‘so far, at least, as concerns his guidance of her soul’.Footnote ³⁴ Fr Powell, on the other hand, was not only prepared to accept that ‘two angels’ had brought Teresa Higginson holy communion on at least one occasion, but complained bitterly to Fr Snow that his saintly parishioner was being ‘most outrageously abused by a priest here’Footnote ³⁵ and that Fr Wells was refusing to bring the blessed sacrament to her home.Footnote ³⁶

However little credence Fr Wells may have given to Teresa Higginson's revelations, and however his instructions and responses to her may have been intended, Teresa was able to interpret them in such a way as to lend validity to her mystical claims. When he told her to stop rising during the night, since ‘night is the time to sleep and rest so that you may be able to do your work as duty requires’, she explained: ‘I did not rise intentionally, but several times I found myself rising, and when I at once returned the devils would shriek and yell and laugh in the most dreadful manner.’ Fr Wells, unmoved by her recourse to the passive mood, tried to rebuke her, pointing out, as Teresa Higginson later recalled, that ‘if the will was really desirous of being entirely obedient he did not see how I could be so continually rising’.Footnote ³⁷ It was perhaps as a result of her sheer persistence that Wells eventually changed tack, telling her that she should ‘tell the devil not to do it’, a response which implicitly granted the reality of her visions. Small wonder, we may think, that she ‘always noticed [that any temptation] stopped at the command of my director’,Footnote ³⁸ since by appearing to show deference to him she gained clerical validation of her claims and so increased her own influence. It is easy to imagine a weary Fr Wells who, forced to humour what he believed to be no more than an imaginative fancy on the part of his penitent, eventually pleaded with Teresa Higginson to ‘ask our b[lessed] Lord to change the temptation’.Footnote ³⁹

III

Each of the three different ways in which an attempt might be made to understand the extraordinary claims which were made by an obscure Lancashire schoolteacher in the 1870s and 1880s – that she was a manipulative fraud, that she was confused, or that she was mentally ill – implicitly relies on a conception of humanity which is wholly natural. In trying to account for the motives for Teresa Higginson's behaviour, the one possible explanation which is not taken seriously is her own: that she was a mystic. Rather than trust the supernatural interpretation being offered by our historical witness and chief source of information, we are irresistibly drawn to a social explanation, one in which social acceptance is the desired end and social deviance the means of the outcast to attempt to gain status or recognition within a community. If we think that Teresa Higginson was a fraud, then the question which immediately arises is that there must have been some social pressure to drive her to such desperate measures. If we think she was mentally ill then, accepting the fashionable modern view that insanity is a relative and socially constructed concept, we will seek to understand the norms from which she was deviating and attempt to discover where the line between madness and sanity was drawn in Wigan and Bootle during the 1870s and 1880s.

Teresa Higginson can be viewed as a marginal figure, an outsider, from whichever standpoint we happen to find most attractive. As an English Catholic, her identity can be seen as out of step not only with the prevailing Protestant culture of Victorian England but also with the tightly-knit Irish communities of the industrial north, many of whose members were Catholic in name only and whose ethnic identity was in any case different from her own. As an unmarried woman who lived either alone or in female boarding-houses of one kind or another, she can be said to have survived outside the prevailing Victorian paradigms of domestic normality. As a lay teacher who worked in a series of impoverished and undistinguished Catholic primary schools in Wigan, Seacombe, Liscard, Sabden, Neston, Bootle and Newchurch, she again fell between two stools as someone who was neither qualified to teach in the English state school system nor admitted to the community (and attendant job security) of a Catholic teaching order. Even Lady Cecil Kerr, her credulous would-be hagiographer, notes her mother's acknowledgement that, until Teresa Higginson met Susan Ryland, the chief witness to her alleged miracles and mystical favours, she had no friends.Footnote ⁴⁰

Teresa Higginson clearly deviated from what we might regard as the social, religious, class and sexual norms of her day. There is also considerable evidence to suggest that she was treated for most of her life as a person who aroused suspicion, an outsider who ought properly to have been left outside. As a child Teresa Higginson was not allowed to make her First Communion until the relatively late age of thirteen, and she did not leave her convent school in Nottingham until the age of twenty or twenty-one, for reasons which are not fully explained.Footnote ⁴¹ At the age of fourteen, she is said to have spent nearly nine months in bed with a mysterious, unspecified complaint.Footnote ⁴² Her own brother and sister are said frequently to have ‘teased her’ about her purported miracles. Her confessor in Wigan, Fr Wells, was not only sceptical about her mystical claims but drove her out of church altogether on at least one occasion. When, claims that she lived on communion wafers notwithstanding, she was discovered to be eating in secret, she was called a ‘lying hypocrite’; only later was it explained that she was sometimes ‘impersonated’ by the devil. Two ‘local curates’ described her rather as ‘mentally deficient’ and ‘not fit to be in church’.Footnote ⁴³

Teresa Higginson's career did not fare any better than her schooldays or relationships with family and neighbours. She was sacked from one teaching job at St Alban's, Liscard, in 1876 and was forced to leave a Jesuit mission school in Sabden, near Clitheroe, ‘on account of illness’ in 1879.Footnote ⁴⁴ In 1877 or 1878 a fellow-lodger accused her of stealing £100; although the money mysteriously reappeared after the police were called, she was asked by the other residents to move out.Footnote ⁴⁵ Further accusations in 1879, this time of drunkenness and unseemly behaviour, led to an enquiry being launched by Bishop O'Reilly of Liverpool, who revealed his judgement on the matter by ordering Fr Edward Powell, the first priest to be sympathetic to her mystical claims, to stop acting as her spiritual director.Footnote ⁴⁶ Fr Hall, a Benedictine who was brought in to advise the bishop, pronounced Fr Powell to have been ‘duped’ by a combination of ‘hysteria’ and ‘delusion’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Although Powell's replacement, Fr Alfred Snow, turned out to be an even more sympathetic confidant, believing Higginson to be a saint and suggesting that she pursue a life of holiness at his sister's convent of St Catherine's in Edinburgh, the sister, although later used to support the Scottish bishops’ case for her beatification, was initially more cautious.Footnote ⁴⁸ Although Teresa Higginson spent a dozen years in and around the convent, where she ostentatiously heard mass three or four times a day, in addition to attending Benediction and the Quarant'Ore, and set up a makeshift shrine to the Sacred Head, she was unsuccessful in entering the order.Footnote ⁴⁹ After twelve years in Scotland, Teresa Higginson, who was by then presumably unemployable, was taken under the successive protection of two wealthy Catholic connections of Alfred Snow's – first the Garnetts of Liverpool and then the Cliffords, on whose estate in Chudleigh, Devon, she died of a stroke in 1905.Footnote ⁵⁰

Even Teresa Higginson's death failed to gain her the retrospective acceptance which she must have craved when she predicted that ‘thousands’ would one day visit St Alexander's church in Bootle.Footnote ⁵¹ The cause for Teresa Higginson's beatification was taken up with zeal by local Catholics after Fr Snow's correspondence with her came to light in 1922 and selected letters were published by a Benedictine priest in 1924, followed by a much fuller selection which was brought out in 1927 by Lady Cecil Kerr. After her case was presented to the Sacred Congregation of Rites in Rome on 7 December 1933, a flurry of pamphlets, hagiographies and devotional tracts appeared in the English Catholic press, together with favourable articles in Liverpool's local Harvest and Cathedral Record. The publicity surrounding the case, which included extravagant claims of miraculous intercessions, matched a parallel French campaign for devotions to the ‘Holy Face’, but was criticised sharply in Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique in 1936 and The Clergy Review in 1937 and became the subject of a bitter, drawn-out controversy in the pages of The Tablet over the course of 1937 and 1938. After the case for her beatification was finally refused by the Congregation of Rites in 1938, Teresa Higginson became one of many hundreds of lesser-known failed candidates for sanctity whose files are no longer kept in the Vatican archives but who retain some local reputation and whose spiritual biographies, collections of letters and devotional ephemera remain scattered across national libraries and archives.Footnote ⁵²

From everything that has been said about Teresa Higginson, it would be easy to conclude that she was about as marginal a figure as it is possible to be. She was obscure in her own lifetime and all but forgotten after her death; she had no permanent residence; no stable occupation; no strong family ties; nor, from what one can tell, any real friends. She was not quite middle-class nor quite working-class, was not typically English, was not typically Catholic and did not follow the normal domestic or social patterns for a woman of her day, despite her own efforts, helped by a few priests, to place her within an explicitly hagiographical tradition of Catholic mystics. She teetered between health and sickness, sanity and insanity, had at least one brush with the law and a number with those who lived with her. Even her claims to mysticism, which might alone have made supernatural sense of her miserable life, were denied by the very authorities whose models of sanctity she sought to emulate. The case that she was both marginalised in her own day and should be seen as historically marginal in ours would appear to be air-tight.

But although notions of marginality may seem to explain Teresa Higginson away, the closer one looks at her case the more one is left with the uneasy sense of having imposed one's own, modern categories where they do not quite seem to fit. If our experience of the world is such that we believe that an intelligent, but unmarried, impoverished and poorly educated woman living in the late nineteenth century to be likely to have felt frustrated by the limits imposed on her by her society, then we will of course find it innately plausible that she should have sought to manipulate those around her in order to seek the authority entailed in a special revelation and a reputation for sanctity. If we believe that human psychology is the ultimate explanatory framework through which to account for all eccentricities of behaviour, then we will pore over the incidents of her childhood, draw parallels with what we see as analogous cases, and seek patterns of behaviour which conform to our models of deviance, abnormality or insanity. But the more easily we are satisfied by these explanations, the more we must admit that they arise from prejudice rather than from evidence; that they mirror, not Teresa Higginson's view of the world, nor even that of her circle, but rather reflect back our own, equally improvable, notions of what is and is not plausible.

IV

That historical writing may be more akin to autobiography than to biography, that it tells more about the age in which it was produced than about its ostensible subject-matter, is hardly a new thought. But this ever–present historiographical problem seems to be more easily disguised with some historical subjects than with others. We are far more likely to feel complacent about our interpretations of the past when they are concerned with matters which make such an immediate, intuitive appeal to us as ‘power relations’, ‘constructions of gender’ and ‘social networks’ than when they concern insistent claims of the reality of the supernatural.

Over the past twenty years there has been a sharp increase in interest among nineteenth-century historians in a whole range of reports of supernatural occurrences and popular superstitions which were once imagined to be confined to ‘rural’ or ‘backward’ societies, but which more recent evidence has shown to have continued to be voiced in supposedly modern, industrialised and urbanised western societies. The nineteenth century, far from conforming to previously dominant textbook stereotypes of the age of secularisation, rationalism and scientific progress, has been exposed as a murkier and less certain time of spirits, ghosts, poltergeists, apparitions, lucky charms, evil omens and visitations from another world.

If we are to understand this foreign country, then we need to engage with its less palatable aspects as well as those parts of it which seem readily comprehensible. But in seeking to account for phenomena such as apparitions of the Virgin Mary, crazes for spiritualist séances and allegations of visits from another world, historians have tended to take as their starting-point, their unspoken a priori assumption, one of those very same three positions which we must admit to have been purely speculative in the case of Teresa Higginson. Thus historians have looked for evidence of childhood traumas, eating disorders and psychological illnesses in nineteenth-century mystics, and tended to lay stress on their troubled backgrounds, poor social standing, unexplained illnesses, sublimated sexuality, habits of fasting, traumatic adolescences and other signs of their disturbances or marginal status within their communities.Footnote ⁵³ Spiritualists and mediums have been presented as power-hungry women with an appetite for manipulation, political radicalism and the inversion of gender stereotypes,Footnote ⁵⁴ while mystics, visionaries and prophetesses (Protestant and Catholic alike) have too often been painted as shrewd rebels struggling for personal or communal autonomy or else as proto-feminists tragically caught in the wrong century. It may well be that such accounts, which certainly flatter our own prejudices, also happen, by sheer good luck, to be true. But by building our interpretations of the claims of mysticism on purely secular and naturalistic foundations, and smuggling in beliefs about the reality of gender, psychological illness, power politics and the impossibility of supernatural intervention, we are far more likely to be committing a solipsism. If we are to be historians rather than autobiographers then we will need to resist the temptation to think that our own belief system is a specially privileged one which permits us to reduce the claims of self-styled mystics to our own lowest common denominator. We will need to focus attention on the attempts of contemporaries to make sense of mysteries rather than to presume that we always know best and that the nineteenth-century past was essentially the same as the twenty-first-century present.

This task is, of course, easier to recommend than to put into practice. An attempt to engage empathetically with the beliefs of people living in the Middle Ages is difficult enough; but a case as recent as that of Teresa Higginson has the additional complication of appearing deceptively close in mental outlook. It was, of course, precisely in the nineteenth century that stigmatics were prodded and poked by doctors, that Freud and Breuer were beginning to develop their theories of hysteria, that gender (then called sex) was beginning to be developed as an explanatory framework to account for broad differences between men and women and that fraudulent spiritualists, prophetesses and visionaries were unmasked, often in a blaze of publicity.Footnote ⁵⁵ All three explanatory schemes which make such a strong a priori appeal to us – the materialist, the psychological and the sociological – began to be put forward in earnest and to be widely discussed at just the same time that increasing numbers of claimants to special illuminations, revelations or experiences of the paranormal were coming forward. But the case for the reality of the operation of the supernatural in the natural world, the very explanation which was quietly omitted from our list of possibilities at the outset, is precisely the one which would have arisen first in the minds of most late Victorians, whether to be applauded as proof positive of the non-material world or to be discredited by self-conscious debunkers as the supposed relic of a superstitious past.Footnote ⁵⁶

To examine the case of Teresa Higginson from the perspective of her own contemporaries can give us insight into how far the explanatory models which we have inherited had begun to infiltrate earlier, unambiguously supernatural, perspectives from the late 1870s and 1880s. Rather than rush in to establish the ludicrousness of Teresa Higginson's claims, as a nineteenth-century rationalist or anticleric might have done, for mainly polemical purposes, it will be more helpful to withhold judgement about her claims and to focus instead upon their reception, looking not at what use they might have served, but rather at how plausible they might have seemed at the time.

It will already have become apparent that several Catholic clergymen or religious, Fr Wells, Fr Hall osb, Bishop O'Reilly and Fr Thurston sj among them, did not take at her word Teresa Higginson's claims to have received special divine favours. Bishop William Ullathorne, when asked to examine her letters, refused point-blank to do so, urging ‘extremest caution with respect to females who are liable to mistake imagination for revelations!’Footnote ⁵⁷ But although Fr Wells's instinct, when presented with a self-styled stigmatic, was to call for a doctor, implying that he thought her condition to be a medical disorder rather than a supernatural favour, and at least two Benedictines and a Jesuit had the same instinct, other priests and religious were far from dismissive. Teresa Higginson's second confessor, Fr Edward Powell of Bootle, certainly thought it worth his while to present her case to a higher ecclesiastical authority, which he did in 1882.

When Fr Bertrand Wilberforce, a Dominican father steeped in the literature of traditional Catholic mysticism and the theology of St Thomas Aquinas, wrote back, it was to endorse her claims as exactly matching the experiences of many canonised saints of the Church. Acknowledging that her devotion to the Sacred Head of Jesus might ‘in a certain sense … be called a new devotion’ he nevertheless judged it to be theologically sound since, as he pointed out, it bore ‘a striking analogy to the devotion in honour of the Sacred Heart’ and could be defended on the same grounds.Footnote ⁵⁸ It also seemed to meet the more stringent qualification of being a particularly fitting devotion, both in itself and in the timing of its revelation. As Wilberforce argued:

What better antidote could there be for good Catholics than to turn from sinful pride in their own, merely human, rationality to the eternal wisdom of Almighty God as mediated through the teachings of His Church on earth?

Excited by the prospect of being able to help spread word of such a pertinent new devotion, Wilberforce, while admitting that it might be both ‘delicate’ and ‘presumptuous’ to pronounce on the character of a soul he had never met, nevertheless found it difficult to moderate his enthusiasm since ‘everything that has come to my knowledge, through her letters and accounts given me by her confessor of her acts and dispositions’ all ‘lead me to conclude, not only that she is in a high degree of holiness, but also that her mind is wonderfully illuminated by the Light of God’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Systematically combing through Teresa Higginson's letters for evidence of the four traditional virtues associated with sanctity – humility, patience, obedience and mortification – Wilberforce found that she passed all tests with flying colours. In judging Teresa Higginson's humility, he was particularly impressed that ‘she thoroughly despises herself, is truly anxious to be despised by others, is free from that selfwill which would make her desirous to guide herself instead of submitting to others’, has a ‘fear of delusion, yet with confidence in God: is anxious that divine favours should remain hidden, yet mentions them with simplicity under obedience’.Footnote ⁶¹ Her patience under what he saw as ‘the pressure of extreme mental and bodily suffering’ Wilberforce found ‘heroic’, particularly as she not only ‘endure[d] these things without repining, but … display[ed] an ardent thirst for more numerous and more painful afflictions, in order to unite her soul to Christ crucified’.Footnote ⁶² The testimony of Teresa Higginson's confessor that his penitent was immediately willing to cease performing ‘any penance or exercise without agitation of mind when commanded’ to do so, satisfied Fr Wilberforce that she met the requirements of obedience; and he singled out for special commendation ‘the humble way in which she accuses herself of a very slight act of childish disobedience [which] shows the light of the Holy Spirit and reminds us of St Philip Neri’.Footnote ⁶³ As for the virtue of mortification, her behaviour could hardly fail to be seen as anything less than exemplary.

That Teresa Higginson's revelations were doctrinally compatible with the teachings of the Catholic Church, that she appeared always to submit to authority, and that her desire to suffer indicated genuine self-loathing, all made the case for her beatification impossible to reject out of hand. She clearly met all the traditional criteria for sanctity. But what really seemed to persuade Wilberforce of her genuine status as a saint was her detailed knowledge of the mystical life, knowledge which he did not believe could have come her way except through direct experience. ‘The person has read no books of mystical theology, even the ordinary spiritual books common among the faithful’, he wrote in wonderment, ‘yet she described most accurately and in most striking terms how a vision which is neither imaginary nor even intellectual is infused by the action of the Holy Spirit in the centre of the soul itself. It is impossible to avoid the impression that she is speaking from personal experience.’Footnote ⁶⁴ Elsewhere he stressed that ‘the theological way in which this simple and unlearned person [sic] explains the doctrine of the Trinity and Incarnation and speaks of the devotion to the Sacred Head is a decided indication of superior illumination’. While admitting that ‘visions are certainly to be more cautiously received in the case of a woman’, he nevertheless believed that ‘this soul has had diabolical visions and has detected them’.Footnote ⁶⁵ In conclusion, he found it utterly implausible that a person ‘unlearned, [who] has read no books [sic], and has lived ever secluded’ could have ‘invented herself a devotion so admirably suited to the times in which we live’.Footnote ⁶⁶

To Wilberforce, sifting through exactly the same collection of letters which gave us our evidence of fraud, psychosis or delusion, it seemed clear that Teresa Higginson's mystical experiences were precisely what she claimed them to be. Far from appearing marginal, an outsider, she represented a touchstone, a living piece of evidence to attest to the reality of the continued operation of the Holy Spirit in the natural world. The same evidence which led us to see a pattern of self-harm associated with low self-esteem or else to suspect the psychological perversion of masochism led him to see a soul genuinely humble and full of commendable self-loathing; the evidence which suggested to us the possibility of copy-cat mysticism persuaded him of the timely appropriateness of her revelations; the illnesses which seemed so suggestive to us of mental disturbances were of relevance to him only insofar as they enabled her to display the Christian virtues of patience and mortification. Wilberforce's criteria for explaining Teresa Higginson's case could not, in short, have been more diametrically opposed to our own.

It would be easy if the case could be left there, with the conclusion that it is hardly surprising that a Catholic priest, especially at a time of fierce interdenominational competition for unclaimed souls throughout England, should have shown loyalty to a medieval view of sanctity as buttressed by his Church's hagiographical tradition and theological treatises on mysticism. But what is most striking about the reactions of Teresa Higginson's housemates, for example, it that they seem at once too credulous and too sceptical to be easily categorised. Although they seem hardly to have blinked at the miraculous appearance of new firewood, soap and a key, and could mention with perfect nonchalance that Teresa Higginson could indeed ignite or quench fires by making the sign of the cross over them, it appears never to have occurred to them to think that she might be a saint. Although one might suppose that her re-enactment before their very eyes of scenes from well-thumbed Lives of the saints might have prompted some veneration, or at the very least excitement, they seem to have accepted this behaviour with complacency except when afraid for her physical safety. If Teresa Higginson's Catholic housemates did not think her a saint, why did they trust in her miracles and why did they call the priest when they returned from mass on Good Friday, leaving it to the priest, of all people, to call for a doctor? The sharp divisions among clergy and religious over her case seem similarly illogical: if Teresa Higginson's behaviour conformed as perfectly to saintly models as Wilberforce's analysis suggests, then how could priests have divided over the question and why should the Catholic Church have pronounced against her?

Perhaps one explanation for these seeming inconsistencies may be found in the lack of clear boundaries between different categories of thought at the time, in the ability of Catholic laypeople, like their priests and religious, to have held in their heads, without apparent strain, what may seem to us to be logically incompatible schemes of the natural and supernatural. If Teresa Higginson's housemates believed in her miracles, but not in her sanctity; if the parish priest disbelieved in her stigmata, but was eventually persuaded that the devil visited her at night when she was asleep, then perhaps the binary oppositions which exist in our minds between the natural and the supernatural, the rationalist and the credulous, ought to be abandoned as uncharacteristic of the thinking of ordinary people at the time. The notion of such an intellectual free-for-all would certainly help to explain how psychical researchers in the nineteenth century could imagine that the reality of the soul was susceptible of experimental proof; how early psychoanalysts could posit the unprovable assertion that there actually existed such a thing as ‘the unconscious’ mind; how lapsed Christians could continue to believe in the soul, not to mention ghosts, spirits and poltergeists; how enthusiasts for Darwin could indulge in pantheistic beliefs about the ‘Life-Force’ or the ‘Forces’ of nature. Looked at from this perspective, the phenomenon of the stigmata, which was claimed by no fewer than twenty persons living in nineteenth-century Europe, many of whose lives came to be highly celebrated, no longer seems so marginal.Footnote ⁶⁷ Like spiritualists, psychical researchers, prophetesses, cult leaders and ghost hunters, stigmatics offered what they claimed to be physical proofs of the reality of the operation of non-material forces in the natural world. Thoroughgoing secular rationalists on the one hand and internally consistent theologians like Wilberforce on the other seem, by the 1870s and 1880s, to have come to represent uncharacteristic extremes of opinion. The more common, even the central, position by the late nineteenth century was evidently to find both atheism and traditional Christianity inadequate and to believe in some idiosyncratic blend of the two. If this muddle of the material and immaterial seems intellectually unsatisfactory from a twenty-first-century perspective, that is no reason to deny its validity for many, perhaps even most, late Victorians. If they impose rationalistic categories where they do not apply, historians make themselves marginal to their subjects and describe not late-Victorian attitudes, but their own.