Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age

Ruth Harris is a historian, and this Allen Lane and Penguin Press book is her scholarly study of the Lourdes apparitions and the pilgrimage cult that followed, situated within the wider context of nineteenth century French religion, medicine and the tensions of secularization. Its strength is that Harris treats Lourdes as a genuine historical and social phenomenon, examining medical, religious and popular responses together rather than adjudicating the apparitions' authenticity from either a devotional or a purely skeptical stance. Its limit is that it centers on the nineteenth century French context specifically, so a claim about Lourdes's later twentieth or twenty-first century pilgrimage practice needs a more recent or differently focused source.