Historians of religion have long been sceptical of any overarching narrative built around the idea of a disenchantment of the world. Keith Thomas’s magisterial Religion and the decline of magic (1972) ended with an acknowledgement of the continuing importance of magical beliefs in twentieth-century Britain. Since then, the point has been reinforced by a range of studies on the persistence, in the Europe of the nineteenth century and after, of supernatural remedies and prohibitions.

To this literature Dr Smeyers has now added a survey of cases of stigmata, expanded to cover not just the traditional five wounds of Christ but other instances of supposedly miraculous bodily markings. His study begins with John Thom, alias Sir William Courtenay, who showed his stigmata to a group of followers before leading them into a short but lethal clash with soldiers in Bossenden Wood, Kent in 1838. It ends with two cases: that of Dorothy Kerin (1889–1963), a reticent bearer of the stigmata, more widely celebrated, right up to her death, as a healer; and the much more assertive Sister Scholastica, whose dramatic manifestations disrupted life in an Anglican Benedictine convent in West Sussex in the late 1920s. Cases spanned denominational barriers: of sixteen examined in detail, only eight involved Catholics. The reaction of medical and clerical professionals changed over time, with allegations of fraud giving way to attempts to find naturalistic explanations for the mysterious markings, whether by suggesting exotic skin conditions or by positing the power of mind over body. By the early twentieth century, stigmata were also part of the stock-in-trade of practitioners of the would-be science of paranormal phenomena, possibly helping to account for what seems to have been a marked increase in reported cases in the 1920s and 1930s.

Where Ireland is concerned, Dr Smeyers devotes most space to the Ulster revival of 1859, when words, crosses and other markings appeared on the bodies of different, mainly female, subjects. Little however is added to what is already available in the work of Janice Holmes, David Hempton, Myrtle Hill and Andrew Holmes, and no earlier or later episodes are identified which might provide a longer-term context for the events of that fevered spring and summer. Catholic Ireland provides one well-documented case of stigmata proper, from 1843, when two or three residents of a ‘penitentiary for disgraced females’ (73) in Youghal exhibited the wounds of Christ. The director of the institute, a Franciscan who had reportedly been preaching enthusiastically about a recent cluster of stigmata cases in the Tyrol, publicised the women’s stories, until his bishop intervened to remove them from his care. But this seems to have been an isolated case. Episodes like the Marian apparition at Knock in 1879 and the killing of Bridget Cleary sixteen years later allowed Protestant polemicists to perpetuate the stereotype of Irish Catholic backwardness and superstition. But bleeding replicas of the five wounds of Christ were one feature of continental European spirituality that failed to take root in the fervent but clerically-regimented popular piety of Ireland’s devotional revolution.