Marpingen

Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany
Erscheinungsjahr 1993
ISBN: 978-0-19-821783-1
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 480 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 163 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 866 g

In July 1876 three eight-year-old girls from Marpingen, a village in the west German border region of Saarland, claimed to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Their visions attracted tens of thousands of pilgrims and prompted numerous claims of miraculous cures. They also led to military intervention, the dispatching of an undercover detective, parliamentary debate, and a dramatic trial. This book examines an episode that contemporaries dubbed the `German Lourdes', its background and its repercussions.

David Blackbourn sets out to recreate the Catholic world of Bismarckian Germany through a detailed analysis of the changing social, economic, and community structures in which it was embedded, and a sensitive account of popular religious beliefs. He powerfully evokes the crisis-laden atmosphere of the 1870s, and offers a subtle interpretation of the interplay between politics and religion in newly unified Germany.

The book ranges boldly across the fields of social, cultural and political history, in an engrossing story with many contemporary resonances.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Blackbourn, David

Über Autor(innen)

David Blackbourn is author of: Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Yale, London & New Haven, 1980), The Peculiarities of German History (co-author, O.U.P. 1984), Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern Germany (Unwin Hyman, 1987), and The German Bourgeoisie (co-editor, Routledge, 1991. He is currently writing a History of Nineteenth-Century Germany (for end 1994) Harper-Collins/Fontana UK, and for O.U.P. New York in the USA. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, member of the Editorial Board of Past and Present, and former secretary of the German History Society. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.