Abstract
In the early 1990s, a Mayo woman, Christina Gallagher, claimed to have had visions of the Virgin Mary, to have conversed with God and Jesus, and that she had experienced stigmata on her feet and head. The “House of Prayer” she founded on Achill, and her reputation for cures and prophecies, attracted busloads of visitors. Despite the opposition of the then archbishop of Tuam and complaints of fraud on the part of former supporters, the “House” is still in existence, and there are several offshoot houses in the US and Mexico. While her stigmata were prominently advertised in early publicity about Gallagher, few actually got to view them, and her current website doesn’t seem to mention them, instead emphasising the Marian apparitions.
Gallagher’s claims of stigmata, their public and private character, and the curiosity, fervour and ambivalence with which they seem variously to have been greeted, sit within a much longer tradition of people, principally women, who have at various points been believed to have been marked with wounds echoing those of Jesus. In Supernatural Bodies, Kristof Smeyers considers in greater and lesser detail a number of cases of alleged stigmata arising in the Irish and British Isles between the 1840s and the mid 1900s. As Smeyers points out, when it comes the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “The history of supernatural bodies and stigmata in Britain and Ireland sits on the crossroads of two historiographies” (p. 7)—those of religion and of the supernatural. Here he brings the two together by means of a series of carefully constructed and researched case studies. Predictably, cases of stigmatism might provoke debates about superstition and credulity. However, both Catholics and Protestants (including Methodists and Presbyterians) debated, promoted and debunked their significance. Smeyers stresses that interest in cases of alleged stigmatism might be sporadic and short-lived, but common features recur, and individual stigmatics might be cherished or remembered over relatively long periods.
The scene is set by a chapter on the reception in these islands of accounts of visitors to two Tyrolean women who were believed to have received stigmata in the 1830s (the influence of the subsequent case of the Belgian stigmatist, Louise Lateau, is also mentioned later). Popularised in Britain and Ireland by an account by the influential Catholic peer, the sixteenth earl of Shrewsbury, allegations of trickery and Catholic credulity soon followed, though Smeyers points out that not all Catholics were receptive and not all Protestants sneered. The case was still vivid when two young women in a newly founded “Magdalen asylum” in Youghal, Co. Cork, were observed to fall into trance-like states and to display wounds on their hands and feet. The local parish priest proclaimed this as miraculous, and the local and international press drew parallels with the news from Tyrol. However, Youghal had an unusually high Protestant and nonconformist population (its demographics and very particular character could have been further explored), making for strong pushback against what the Anglican minister, Richard Aldworth, concluded was “a most profane and impious effort at deception” (p. 77). Meanwhile, Smeyers demonstrates how rivalries between the Franciscans and Dominicans, and the silence of the local Catholic bishops, weakened support for the Youghal “estatica,” and the affair ended when Catholic physicians and clerics examined the women, who were banished from the diocese.
The cases in chapter four of John Nichols Thom and Anne Girling provide an opportunity to consider how stigmata might offer “bodily credentials” for the words and actions of those who claimed powers of prophecy and more. Thom proclaimed himself the son of God and preached against the New Poor Law and other injustices suffered by the lower sorts, before being killed alongside some of his followers in a skirmish with police and soldiers. Girling, a Methodist preacher with an extravagant bodily style, also attracted devoted followers who danced and fell on the floor in convulsions and came to live with her in a sort of commune. In later years she reportedly showed her stigmata and presented herself as a messiah and “God-mother”. Chapter five circles back to Thom’s post-mortem body, venerated by supporters, but discredited by doctors to introduce a discussion of stigmatism. It also considers the English schoolteacher Teresa Helena Higginson’s bleeding wounds and the marks, displayed on bodies during the 1859 Ulster Presbyterian Revival and on other similar occasions, to explore how observers might link stigmata with women, and the feminised complaint of “hysteria”. Increasingly, nineteenth- century stigmata and other forms of “embodied piety” might be searched for meaning or origins by doctors, psychiatrists and psychical researchers as well as by spiritualists, clerics and the faithful. They might become part of debates on the nature of the miraculous, or they might be dismissed as superstation and neurosis, and linked with unhealthy minds and unsavoury forms of religion.
Unsurprisingly, as Smeyers shows, World War I saw something of a revival of the language of stigmatism, as soldiers’ wounds were perceived to reflect those of Christ. Teresa Higginson, who had died in 1905, and another stigmatic, Dorothy Kerin, were believed to have travelled in spirit to the Front. Kerin is one of the subjects of chapter 8: she believed she had been miraculously healed and protected by angels from several accidents before she received the stigmata on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in 1915. Access to her wounds was guarded from “prying eyes,” but her stigmata were prominent in the literature about her and, though hidden, they conferred authority on her activities as a healer.
There are some minor errors in the book—e.g. mention of “counties Cork and Cloyne” (p. 32), and “acquiesced doubts” (p. 109)—and there can be a little unevenness in pacing. Sometimes key points are reached in a slightly circular fashion. Different aspects of the cults of certain individuals, especially Higginson, are addressed across several chapters, and the aspects of Kerin’s, Girling’s and other stories engaged with here can only scratch the surface (no pun intended!) of rich devotional lives and extended ministries. However, this thought-provoking account succeeds in revealing the potential public consequence of private bodies perceived to display stigmata. Throughout, Smeyers carefully weaves the “big” themes of interdenominational conflict, questions of orthodoxy and proof, and debates on the meaning of bodily phenomena, with the “small” histories of individuals and communities into which apparently miraculous events had (generally unexpectedly) intruded.