This Item Is the Archived Peer-Reviewed Author-Version Of

This item is the archived peer-reviewed author-version of: 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.

Load more