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Building the archive of stigmatic women religious

Reference: Smeyers Kristof.- Building the archive of stigmatic w omen religious Studies : an Irish quarterly review of letters, philosophy and science - ISSN 0039-3495 - 107:427(2018), p. 336-345 To cite this reference: https://hdl.handle.net/10067/1566050151162165141

Institutional repository IRUA Misc. Building the stigmatic’s archive

The doors of the convent open

In May 1801 the newly-elected abbess Maria Rosa Serra (1766-?) opened the doors of the Capuchin convent of Ozieri, in Sardinia.1 In the first week of May she was said to have suffered the stigmata, the wounds of Christ on the cross, in the presence of several other nuns and a delegate of the Pope. Upon examination Serra bled profusely from her hands and feet, from several pinprick-sized wounds in her forehead, and from a wound in her side that, ‘on placing the hand near it, the very breath from the lungs could be felt’.2 The election results for the new abbess were unanimous; in fact, Serra’s swift rise to the top of the convent hierarchy was in large part due to the Holy Wounds.3 Upon opening the convent doors to pilgrims, curious Sardinians—on 15 May a royal delegation of S;avoy made it to Ozieri—and journalists, the abbess became a public religious sensation, the convent a site for popular lay devotion, and the town a traveller’s destination.

But this sudden porosity of the convent walls also subjected the stigmatic abbess to contestation, not only in ecclesiastical milieus. Serra’s rise to a position of charismatic religious authority had a ripple effect within the Capuchin community and across local and regional communities. The Capuchin nuns experienced a substantial improvement of their living standards in the convent; the village frequently found itself overrun with visitors, in particular on Fridays when Serra experienced the Passion. Popular fame and public visibility fuelled Serra’s religious authority, but also provoked an intervention from the

Church. The new bishop, Giovanni Antioco Azzei, ordered an investigation into Serra’s supernatural claims in 1805 and, despite local resistance, was successful in removing her from the convent in 1806.

Though she lived in isolation afterwards, her public legacy was further cultivated. In 1828, twenty-two years after Serra’s ‘confession’ and eviction from the convent, William Henry Smyth, then Captain in

1 I am hugely indebted to Tine Van Osselaer, Andrea Graus and Leonardo Rossi for their comments and generous contributions of source material. I am grateful to the audience at the H-WRBI annual conference of 2017 and their helpful comments and questions. 2 William Henry Smyth, Sketch of the present state of the island of Sardinia (London, 1828), p. 202. 3 At the time of election Serra was 35 years old: five years too young to be considered a valid candidate in accordance to Tridentine law.

1 the Royal Navy, dedicated two pages of his concise travel account of Sardinia to the sensational story of Maria Rosa Serra.4

What happened in Ozieri in 1801 constituted a tonal shift for stigmatic women religious—and consequently for the historian studying stigmata. After the French Revolution numbers of religious sisters and convents increased dramatically across Europe, with a notable geographical concentration along the dorsale catholique that ran from present-day Belgium across the French-German border into

Northern Italy.5 Newly founded congregations adopted an active religious life in which sisters worked as teachers, nurses or administrators in a range of institutions. Whereas in the middle ages and early modern period women religious carrying the stigmata were predominantly kept behind the walls and the closed doors of the cloister, the beginning of the nineteenth century saw a similar move of (some) stigmatics into the public sphere, somewhat dramatically personified in Maria Rosa Serra’s act of opening the convent doors.6 Some stigmatic nuns ventured outside the sanctified, enclosed realm of their spiritual life and became visible to a world in which the religious supernatural evoked strong reactions of devotion, sensation, and condemnation.7

This article traces the consequences of this shift for historians, in particular by honing in on the diverse sources required to build the archive of (visible, public) stigmatic women religious. It makes a methodological exercise, and contends that to adequately study phenomena of supernatural religiosity like the stigmata in their religious and cultural context,8 it is necessary for the historian to leave the

4 Smyth, Sketch of the present state, pp 201-202. 5 See, for example, Susan O’Brien, ‘French nuns in nineteenth-century England’ in Past and Present, no. 154 (1997), pp 142-180. The dorsale catholique refers to the confessional frontline in Reformation Europe, see, for example, Gilles Deregnaucourt et al (eds), Dorsale catholique, Jansénisme, devotions: XVIe-XVIIIe siècles: mythes, réalité, actualité historiographique (Paris, 2014). 6 On the specificities of a stigmatic ‘renaissance’ beginning in the nineteenth century, see Otto Weiss, ‘Stigmata’ in Hubert Wolf (ed), ‘Wahre’ und ‘falsche’ Heiligkeit. Mystik, Macht und Geschlechterrollen im Katholizismus des 19. Jahrhunderts (Oldenburg, 2013), pp 111-125; Tine Van Osselaer, ‘Stigmatic women in modern Europe. An exploratory note on gender, corporeality and Catholic culture’ in M. Mazoyer and P. Mirault (eds), Évolutions et transformations du marriage dans le christianisme (Paris, 2017), pp 269-289. 7 It is important to note that in many instances the convent doors remained firmly closed and that this article deals only with those stigmatics that became part of the public sphere. The public visibility of a supernatural religious phenomenon also depended on larger cultural ‘currents’, see William A. Christian Jr, ‘Afterword: islands in the sea: the public and private distribution of religious visions’, Visual Resources, 25:1-2 (2009), p. 153-165. 8 On the cultural immanence of the religious supernatural, see, for example, Nancy Caciola, ‘Through a glass, darkly: recent work on sanctity and society. A review article’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 38:2 (1996), p. 301-309.

2 beaten archival tracks and to follow stigmatic nuns like Maria Rosa Serra out of the cloister, into the world.

Saints and sinners: historiographical sketch

When Serra opened the convent doors in Sardinia, a ‘golden age’ of stigmata had begun to unfold across

Europe.9 From the late eighteenth century onward, cases of stigmatisation increased in number and visibility. The overwhelming majority of these cases were women: 92 percent of stigmatics currently in our project database are female.10 Though in previous centuries the proportion of religious sisters carrying the wounds of Christ was significantly larger, and the nineteenth century saw the rapid rise of female lay mysticism, more than half of the women in the database are women religious.11 They cover most orders, from the Franciscans and Carmelites to the Daughters of the Divine Saviour.

Studies on stigmatisation have long focused on the corporeal character of the phenomenon.

Central to that approach was the (in)authenticity of the holy wounds. Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre, whose two-volume magnum opus Les stigmatisées was published in 1873, listed as many as 321 stigmatics since Francis of Assisi received the stigmata while meditating upon his crucifix in 1224.12 His selection criteria appeared to have been relatively flexible; some of the cases included were notorious for being known as fraudulent. Other compendia that aimed at bringing together stigmatics deployed different criteria. It is important to understand the motives of the makers to be able to understand the production of the lists of stigmatic cases.13 The same goes for ‘lists’ of other mystical phenomena. Regardless of the severity of the criteria, however, the main argument for inclusion or exclusion was usually the

9 Weiss, ‘Stigmata’, p. 117. 10 The reasons for the female character of the phenomenon are discussed in Van Osselaer, 2017. The database of the research project ‘Between saints and celebrities: the promotion and devotion of stigmatics in Europe, c. 1800- 1950’ at the University of Antwerp (ERC starting grant 637908) is at the date of writing comprised of 244 stigmatics across seven countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Great Britain and Ireland). The database will go live in April 2019. 11 Paula Kane, ‘Stigmatic cults and pilgrimage. The convergence of private and public faith’ in T. Van Osselaer and P. Pasture (eds) Christian homes. Religion, family and domesticity in the 19th and 20th centuries (Leuven, 2014), pp 105 -125, p. 107. 12 Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre, Les stigmatisées. I. Louise Lateau de Bois-d’Haine, Soeur Bernard de la Croix, Rosa Adriani and II. Palma d’Oria. Examen de la these rationaliste, liste historique des stigmatisés (Paris, 1873). 13 On Imbert-Gourbeyre’s motivations, see,Gábor Klaniczay, ‘The stigmatized Italian visionary and the devout French physician: Palma Matarelli d’Oria and Doctor Imbert-Gourbeyre’ in Women’s History Review (forthcoming).

3 veracity of the wounds, and therefore the distinction made between godly and deceptive, between saint and sinner.

The significance of critical, empirical arguments attesting to the (in)authenticity of the stigmata was also long reflected in the footnotes of historical studies on stigmatics, with the majority of references referring to medical, ecclesiastical and legal examinations of the phenomenon. The records pertaining to these indeed provide an effective though limited way into the phenomenon.14 However, the reliance on sources in which the stigmatic was treated solely as medical object or potential criminal implied a further dismissal of those cases that had stayed under the radar of doctors, bishops and policemen. Even when stigmatics existed in official reports, like the anonymous woman who was diagnosed in the Cardiff

City Mental Hospital in 1936, and when those reports were known to ‘stigmatic hunters’, it did not guarantee their inclusion in the lists of ‘qualified’ stigmatics. In the Cardiff case, the director of the hospital wrote to the expert scholar of the supernatural in Britain, Herbert Thurston SJ (1856-1939).15

Thurston did not follow up on the hospital director’s letter, and the woman was not included in his The physical phenomena of mysticism.16

Another criterion that decided the lists of stigmatic hunters like Imbert-Gourbeyre’s and

Thurston’s is denomination. Stigmata are considered a Catholic phenomenon. This is, for the most part, a correct consideration, or so we assume: notions of pain and redemptory suffering were in the nineteenth century associated with Catholic piety.17 But it is worth asking the tentative question whether, in the case of stigmata, relying on the lists of stigmatic hunters paints a skewered picture in this regard. Do we, as historians, consider it a Catholic phenomenon because many of the non-Catholic cases of stigmatisation have been excluded from these lists, because they do not correspond to a stigmatic

‘archetype’?18 A significant minority of the cases brought together in our project database nonetheless

14 See, for example, Andrea Graus, ‘Mysticism in the courtroom’ in History of the Human Sciences (forthcoming; full-text https://stigmatics.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/mysticism-in-the-courtroom.pdf (20 May 2018) in which court records concerning the Spanish stigmatic Sor Patrocinio are compared to those of two (lay) stigmatics. 15 ‘Mystics’ (Archive of the Jesuits in Britain, Herbert Thurston papers, 39.3.3). 16 Herbert Thurston, The physical phenomena of mysticism (London, 1952). 17 Paula Kane, ‘“She offered herself up”: the victim soul and victim spirituality in Catholicism’ in Church History, lxxi, no. 1 (2002), pp 80-119. 18 A notable exception is the English Primitive Methodist Mary Ann Girling (1827-1886), found in Thurston (1952). On Girling see Mary Heimann, ‘Mary Ann Girling’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), pp 347-348; and Kristof Smeyers, ‘A Christ in curls: the contested charisma of Mary Ann Girling’ in Women’s History Review (forthcoming).

4 adheres to other denominational traditions and rites. When we abandon the Catholic label of the stigmata we find, in the British Isles alone, a Primitive Methodist cult leader, a child, a nondescript millenarian man who was seen attending the Sabbath in the synagogue of Canterbury, female Presbyterian revivalists in Ulster, and an Anglican Benedictine nun.19

In the past years, a marked shift in the study of stigmatics has occurred. Paula Kane’s study of the American stigmatic Sister Thorn (1884-1937) showed how the phenomenon could elucidate elite and popular attitudes toward popular religion and devotional culture.20 Stigmatic women—including, when the convent doors opened, stigmatic sisters—occupied a range of different functions in society.

They could be considered living, if unofficial saints in the eyes of the faithful; unofficial but influential mediators between lay people and God. They could be religious celebrities, with their bedroom or convent cell as popular pilgrimage destination; their stigmatised bodies the centres around which flocks of devout followers gathered together with a hungry press. They could be the crux of heated debates among lay people, Church and state authorities alike. The move away from perspectives of fraud, illness and lunacy, and toward faith practices and the cultural resonance of stigmata has also meant that

‘traditional’ sources no longer suffice. In the remaining paragraphs, I want to highlight the variety of archival building blocks necessary for the study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century stigmatics and how they were perceived, venerated, represented, remembered, and forgotten. Examples will be drawn in particular from sources on stigmatic women religious.

Building blocks

Following the stigmatic woman religious out of the convent in the search for sources is essential. For religious sources, the obstacle most commonly encountered is one of accessibility. Our archival research risks falling between two chairs. In some cases, the convent sisters have successfully shielded the stigmatic from becoming a public phenomenon, as in the case of the anonymous child who suffered the

19 On the Canterbury stigmatic see Kristof Smeyers, ‘When immortals die. Excavating the emotional impact of the death of prophets in nineteenth-century England’ in Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies, ii, no. 2 (2017), pp 1- 30. On the stigmatics in the Ulster revival, see Janice Holmes, ‘The “world turned upside down”: women in the Ulster revival of 1859’, in J. Holmes and D. Urquhart (eds), Coming into the light; the work, politics and religion of women in Ulster, 1840-1940 (Belfast, 1994), pp 157-178. 20 Paula Kane, Sister Thorn and Catholic mysticism in modern America (Oakland, 2013).

5 stigmata in the convent of the Sisters of St Louis in Kiltimagh, co. Mayo in Ireland, in 1910.21 When a nun entered a contested public sphere, as in the case of Maria Rosa Serra, her fate was tied to the reputation of the convent: a stigmatic’s public prominence could propel the community into fame—or bring it into disrepute. On the other hand, when a stigmatic has become the subject of a beatification or sanctification campaign, the issue of accessibility revolves around documents pertaining to her stigmatisation which remain behind the closed doors of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of

Saints.

Ego-documents and hagiographies provide mediated, but often illuminating insights into the social and spiritual lives of stigmatised sisters. In many cases, their father confessors encouraged them to keep a diary of their mystical phenomena. These notes, often minute, were both factual—the size of the wounds, the amount of blood—and emotionally evocative—the pain, the fear and the love that accompanied the stigmata. Such ‘stigmata diaries’ chronicled the experience of carrying the wounds, and thus served to underline its divine character. The spiritual director could take a very active role in the production of these diaries, as shown in the diary of the Belgian Franciscan sister Rumolda, who dutifully noted down the details of her stigmata as well as the visits from devotees and curious neighbours in the 1920s. The last page of her notebook makes that influence explicit. Sister Rumolda’s final entry states: ‘My confessor forbids me to continue my notes’.22

If we must go beyond the convent archive to study stigmatics as subjects of devotion and contestation, we must, in many cases, also look over state borders. Because stigmatic religious sisters were active in the public sphere, and in some cases gained international repute or notoriety, their sources are scattered far and wide, and are sometimes found outside the ‘religious sphere’ entirely. To untangle devotional networks, for example, travel diaries provide valuable perspectives. In the early nineteenth century poets, romanticists and aristocrats undertook voyages to the holy wounds. Journals, letters and published pamphlets of the 1840s detailing such travels to famous stigmatic women in the Tyrol reveal a network of people across Europe corresponding about the experience.23 These sources served as

21 The only known references to the stigmatic child are mentions in a handful of local newspapers. 22 Zuster Rumolda (Archives of the Diocese of Antwerp, 615A’). 23 See, for example, John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury and Waterford, Letter to Ambrose Lisle Phillipps Esq. descriptive of the Estatica of Caldaro and the Addolorata of Capriana (1st ed., London, 1841).

6 contemporary travel guides—they included picturesque routes, recommended inns, and the best times to visit a stigmatic’s bedroom (invariably Friday afternoons)—but also as first-hand testimonies of supernatural Catholicism.

Such journals are one way into elite networks formed around stigmatic women; the wider social

‘impact’ of a stigmatic can often be measured somewhat through media coverage—specifically in the nineteenth and twentieth century newspapers reported on spectacular events like the emergence of a local miracles—and council records.24 When she became the subject of popular devotion, that impact could be dramatic. A hamlet in the vicinity of the cloister could be transformed into a devotional and tourist hotspot, particularly during Holy Week. Looking at the revenue of local inns and shops allows us in some instances to assess the socio-economic consequences of a stigmatic woman’s presence in town. When the Claretian stigmatic Madre Speranza di Gesù (1893-1983) became a public sensation in the Spanish village of Santomera, she triggered local investments to improve village infrastructure in order to cope with the dramatic increase in traffic. Speranza’s influence stretched beyond local and national borders, an increased mystical celebrity which she deployed to promote the devotion of the

Handmaids of Merciful Love in congregations throughout Italy.25

A particularly large room of the archive we are building must be reserved for visual and material sources. They make it possible to trace popular, grassroots devotions and cases that have remained largely under the radar of stigmatic hunters. Depictions of famous stigmatic women circulated widely in the form of devotional cards and as illustrations accompanying sensational newspaper articles. The corporeal nature of the phenomenon, in combination with the focus on the experience of seeing the stigmata ‘up close’, means that the stigmatic’s archive is an intrinsically material one. The Italian stigmatic Elena Aiello (1895-1961), mockingly nicknamed ‘the holy nun who sweats blood’ because she was considered unfit for religious life, claimed to draw with her stigmatic blood in an unconscious state. A piece of paper or cloth adorned with Aiello’s haemography was a much-coveted relic, though it wasn’t recognised by the Church as such. Unofficial relics like these, in particular, show the vibrancy

24 On the relationship between religion and media, see the contributions in ‘The mediatization of religion’ (themed issue), Culture and Religion, xii, no. 2 (2011). 25 Beppe Amico, Madre Speranza. Una storia di grazia e Misericordia (Trente, 2014).

7 and creativity of a stigmatic devotion. Many of them are directly associated with the stigmatic’s blood, as in Aiello’s case, and come in all shapes and forms: phials, devotional cards stained with stigmatic blood, bandages, pieces of cloth or bedlinen, even whole body parts. These material building blocks constitute a particularly strong foundation for the stigmatic’s archive.

Other sources that echo the public resonance of a stigmatic can be found in forms of popular culture, whether it is devotional lay songs written for or about her, as in the case of the Belgian sister

Rumolda, or fiction. Stigmatic women have inspired poems, novels, plays, musicals, and films. These all illustrate the cultural role stigmata could take on in the public imagination, and how they could be

‘consumed’.26 The internet offers another way into understanding live stigmatic devotions. Online, veneration and appropriation of stigmatic women religious continues, and it is a crucial environment to trace shifts in their significance.27 Authors of blogs dedicated to specific stigmatic sisters have sometimes rigorously tracked down collections of paraphernalia, relics, and locations. A stigmatic’s online presence, then, can also be an unexpected gateway not only of devotional legacies but also of sources that usually remain outside the historian’s gaze. Together, these building blocks create an

‘archival space’ in which to study the phenomenon from a wide range of angles.

Building on the stigmatic’s archive: research perspectives

In these concluding paragraphs, I want to suggest some of the questions that become possible once the stigmatic’s archive is built. These questions resonate in the study of women religious, convent life, and religious culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A first, tentative question concerns the blurring distinction between the perception of religious and lay in the study of stigmatic women. One of the most famous stigmatics, Anna Katharina Emmerick

(1774-1824) from the German town of Dülmen, was no longer an Augustinian nun when she received the wounds and became a religious ‘celebrity’, but she nonetheless continued to be depicted as a woman

26 Two recent complementary, interdisciplinary studies on the consumption of religion, both through the senses and through consumer culture, are Sally Promey (ed), Sensational religion. Sensory cultures in material practice (Yale, 2014); Kathryn Lofton, Consuming religion (Chicago, 2017). 27 An exploration of the affective shifts taking place in online expressions of devotion, in this case in Middle Eastern Islam, is Charles Hirschkind, ‘Experiments in devotion online: the YouTube Khutba’ in International Journal of Middle East Studies, xliv, no. 1 (2012), pp 5-21.

8 religious throughout her life and after her death; the stigmata and the habit were essential components of the visual culture that presented Emmerick as a holy, suffering sister.

A second possible research angle focuses on attitudes toward supernatural manifestations within the convent. When a stigmatic sister became a mystical sensation, sometimes despite the best efforts of her fellow sisters, the convent, too, was impacted. In the case of the English Sister Scholastica, who received the stigmata in 1926 in the Benedictine Community of the Holy Cross in Haywards Heath, the public knowledge of the sister’s alleged supernatural abilities tainted the reputation of the community at large. Visitors spoke of an ‘unhealthy atmosphere’ in the convent, caused by Sister Scholastica’s visions and stigmata.28 How did religious communities react to the ‘supernatural turn’ of one of their members? How did a stigmatic sister change lay attitudes toward her community, especially when that nun became a public religious commodity?

From there it becomes possible to study the impact on lay communities of a ‘wonder nun’, as

Andrea Graus has typified women religious for whom the stigmata were only one of many mystical abilities.29 In Graus’ study of the Spanish stigmatic Sor Patrocinio (1811-1891), court records are combined with caricatures and political sources to reconstruct the ways in which the reputation(s) of Sor

Patrocinio was deployed in the Spanish civil and culture wars. Sor Patrocinio’s influence outside the convent grew to such a degree that she became a propaganda tool for the Spanish Church as well as for anticlerical and liberal factions. Though in some cases stigmatic nuns were conscious of their public image and were successful in curating their personae, more often they were transformed into symbols by others. Depictions of her were formed on all sides of the Spanish civil and culture wars in the public sphere while Sor Patrocinio herself mostly remained cloistered, only leaving the communal walls to go to the court of Queen Isabella II. Patrocinio’s case also shows how a stigmatic’s public reputation could serve as an argument against women religious venturing outside the convent. The convent gates had to open only slightly for a stigmatic woman religious to become a contested public persona.

28 ‘Community of the Holy Cross’, 11 June 1929-30 June 1930 (Lambeth Palace Library, MS 3066). 29 Andrea Graus, ‘“Wonder nuns”: Sor Patrocinio, the politics of the supernatural and republican caricature’ in Journal of Religious History (forthcoming). Many stigmatics also claimed gifts of prophecy, levitation, and inedia.

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These are only three of many possible routes that lead from the stigmatic’s archive. A first step in historical research on stigmatic women religious, so this article aimed to suggest, is to acknowledge just how diverse their ‘archives’ must be, and how vital it is to link up Church sources to political and press collections, visual and material cultures, and devotions both personal and public. Using all miscellaneous building blocks here described allows us to bring together narratives of stigmatic women religious—whether they serve as symbols of saintliness, deviance, or political subversion—and the practices that formed around them, within the convent and beyond, religious and lay. This archival sensitivity implies an approach toward stigmatic women religious that no longer studies them as isolated manifestations but as a religious, even cultural phenomenon.

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