Supernatural bodies: Stigmata in modern Britain and Ireland [Hardcover]

This book is the first in-depth study of the changing perceptions and receptions of supernatural bodies in modern Britain and Ireland. It focuses on one phenomenon that became hotly contested and discussed in the public sphere between 1840 and 1940: the stigmata. In 1874, an Irish reporter asked why the wounds of the crucified Christ on mortal bodies could not be discussed with calmness...without indulging in angry rhetoric. Supernatural bodies takes that question seriously. It draws on previously unexamined archival materials to place supernatural bodies at the heart of long-lasting discussions about the position of Roman Catholicism in society; the supernatural in modern Christianity and society; the authority of sciences; the relationship between Britain and Ireland, and between Britain and the Continent. Through the lens of stigmata controversies, this book shows how these discussions could converge around supernatural bodies.GBThis book examines the role of supernatural bodies in public debates about religion, science, culture and modernity in modern Britain and Ireland. In turn, the prism of supernatural bodies reveals how those debates were interlinked, and how the forms of knowledge that informed them were produced.Kristof Smeyers is a Research Fellow at the University of Louvain

Experiencing extraordinary religious phenomena on ones body, from ecstasy to bearing the Wounds of Christ, has often been described as an intimate, innermost bond with the divine. But supernatural bodies were not private affairs. They affected families, communities, as well as a burgeoning public opinion. This book offers the first account of such bodies in the public sphere in modern Britain and Ireland.
Supernatural bodies were manipulated into parables and symbols, and became hotly contested in an outpouring of polemical print. The book argues it is precisely their physicality that sets them apart from many other extraordinary phenomena that were also prolific in this perlÓ"