Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Abstract Marian apparitions were among the great collective dramas of nineteenth-century Europe. They drew scores of thousands of men and women to obscure valleys and remote mountains where the Virgin Mary had allegedly appeared, a figure that rose to hundreds of thousands at a place such as Lourdes. The apparitions were perhaps the most spectacular sign of a religious revival that is one of the outstanding characteristics of the nineteenth century, although one of the least well studied. They also represented an ambiguous counterpoint to the more familiar social and political upheavals of the period.