Supernatural Bodies provides an engaging history of stigmata in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and Ireland. Through a series of broadly chronological and thematic chapters, it examines how the corporeal materialisation of religious ecstasies or the Wounds of Christ on the body intersected with a range of denominational, cultural and medical discourses in the public sphere. Unlike the uncertain evidence offered up in the Victorian séance room, the power of stigmata resided in its tangible and sustained physical presence.
As Kristof Smeyers’ richly researched study demonstrates, stigmatics became the focus of pilgrimage and a public war of words, one that variously sought to bolster the Catholic faith or sceptically dismiss it as superstitious credulity. Such debates played into perceptions of national identity, with British Protestants using cases of stigmata to present themselves as a rational, healthy religion compared to a sickly continental or Irish Catholic ‘other’. Yet this study complicates these neat confessional divides, showing how stigmata was not restricted to Europe but manifested in Catholic and Protestant bodies in Britain and Ireland between 1830 and 1940.
The book opens with a short contextual chapter that establishes British religious and social anxieties surrounding the 1829 Catholics Emancipation Act and what was perceived as a revitalised British Catholicism. The second chapter then focusses on the cases of Maria von Morl and Maria Domenica Lazzeri, two young Catholic Tyrolean women whose stigmata had first appeared in 1834. This chapter introduce some of the book’s underlying themes, including the importance of transnational discursive and devotional networks of Catholic pilgrims and promoters, and the role of the public sphere in publicising and discussing such cases. The aristocratic recusant, the Earl of Shrewsbury, was central to this. His publication of a lengthy letter following his visit to the two women triggered British Catholic commentary on modern stigmata. In response, it stirred resistance that played to long-established Protestant British notions of continental Europe as mired in Catholic superstition and credulity. However, highlighting nuances that are a repeated strength of this study, Smeyers demonstrates how some British Catholics were uncomfortable with the supernatural aspects of stigmata and sought to maintain a distance from what was presented as continental fervour. Conversely, some Anglican clergy were intrigued by stigmata’s potential to revive religious faith.
Smeyers’ subsequent chapters explore and enrich our understanding of such attitudes, national prejudices, and contradictions through case studies drawn from Ireland and Britain. The third chapter focuses on a case of stigmata in a Magdalene asylum in Youghal, County Cork, Ireland, in 1843. In the context of Anglo-Irish politics, British critics were inclined to present this display of Catholic mysticism as further justification for British rule. Concurrently, some Irish Catholics saw how such religious fervour could be perceived as cultural opposition to Protestantism in Ireland. These political dimensions played into intra-order conflict between Catholics, with a group of Catholic priests and physicians ultimately declaring the stigmatic, Mary Roche, a fraud.
Chapters four and five focus on Protestant non-conformist supernatural bodies. Here the emphasis shifts to a fascinating study of fringe mystics and self-declared millenarian prophets such as Joanna Southcott, William Courtney (John Nichols Thoms) and, later in the century, Mary Ann Girling. Both Courtney and Girling used their stigmata wounds as ‘proof’ of their prophetic status, with Courtney going so far as to present himself as ‘a radical modern-day Christ’ (p. 97). Such assertions demonstrate how the symbolic meaning of stigmata appeared to move beyond its traditional association with intense religious devotion. Courtney’s emphasis on his virile body and physical strength may have challenged the gendered stereotype of the poor, sickly, devout young Catholic female stigmatic, but claims of his lunacy did not provide a welcome fit with notions of a rational ‘healthy’ Protestantism either. The point is further developed with Smeyers’ intriguing account of religious enthusiasm among Ulster Presbyterians in 1859-60, an occurrence which was likened to a contagion.
This pathologised understanding of religious enthusiasm forms the focus of chapter six’s examination of scientific, medical, and psychical understandings of supernatural bodies. These involved attempts to naturalise and rationalise stigmata, as dermatological disease or inflammation, or else as psychological or psychosomatic disturbance. Yet chapter seven shows how these efforts to disenchant supernatural bodies generated opposition. Stigmata became a rallying point for British Catholics, an issue of faith in modern miracles and the unknowable. Early twentieth-century British Catholicism’s resistance to the ‘disease of rationalism’ (p.171) clearly demonstrates how both believers and sceptics sought to pathologise one another’s stance on stigmata. The final chapter focuses on the public sphere itself, the early twentieth-century development of and debates between ‘experts’ in the material supernatural. It closes with reflections on the way discussion of stigmata had transformed over the course of a century.
Smeyers demonstrates an assured control over his subject matter and skilfully articulates the complexities of stigmata’s symbolism in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain and Ireland. His study convincingly shows how stigmata not only informed modern denominational and national identities, but also how it became a means of wounding the belief systems of rivals, be they confessional opponents, national adversaries, or competing advocates of faith, science and reason. It also makes an important contribution to the growing historiography on modern supernatural phenomena. While other scholars have studied the period’s magical or Spiritualist beliefs, Smeyers reminds us that the mystical and millenarian fringes of Christianity also continued to play a significant role in such thinking. Across a century that has traditionally been presented as witnessing a crisis of faith, Smeyers’ book persuasively shows how stigmata’s powerful symbolism still possessed the power to capture public attention, be it to galvanise, criticise, or simply sensationalise the extremes of religious supernatural experiences.
