Publisher's Synopsis
In July 1876 three eight-year-old girls from Marpingen, a village in the Saarland region of south-west Germany, claimed to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Their visions attracted tens of thousands of pilgrims and led to hundreds of claims of miraculous cures.;This book is a study of the phenomenon that was widely discussed at the time as 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 social, economic and community structures in which it was embedded, and a reconstruction of the "mentalite" of the Catholic community in the Saarland. He evokes the crisis-laden atmosphere of the 1870s, and offers an interpretation of the interaction between politics and religion in newly-unified Germany.;Other titles by David Blackbourne include "Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany", "Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern German History" and "The Peculiarities of German History".
