Awards

• Winner of CO-WINNER OF THE 1996 BIENNIAL PRIZE OF THE CONFERENCE GROUP FOR CENTRAL EUROPEAN HISTORY OF THE AHA FOR BEST BOOK ON GERMAN HISTORY.

Overview

Full Product Details

Author:   David Blackbourn (Professor of History, and Senior Associate of the Center for European Studies, Professor of History, and Senior Associate of the Center for European Studies, Harvard University)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Clarendon Press
Dimensions:   Width: 16.30cm , Height: 3.20cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   0.866kg
ISBN:  

9780198217831

ISBN 10:   0198217838
Pages:   480
Publication Date:   16 December 1993
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
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Table of Contents

"Part 1 The background: apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 19th-century Europe - women and children, visions for troubled times, apparitions and politics, the role of the Church; the place - a changing village in the Saarland - peasants and miners, borderlands, a religious revival; the time - economic crisis and political repression in the 1870s - the great depression, the kulturkampf, the hope of deliverance. Part 2 The apparitions: the visionaries and their world - the visionaries, ""one big lie"", villagers and the apparitions; pilgrims, cures and commercialization; the reaction of the clergy - for and against, the dangers of popular religion, the parish priest; the apparitions and state repression - soldiers, magistrates and the ""Irishman"", policing the village, Mettenbuch - a Bavarian comparison, the weaknesses of the Prussian state; the Catholic response - active and passive resistance, the law, the press and politics; progress and piety - liberal hostility - superstition versus civilization, science, ""mob-masses"" and ""hysterical women"", liberals, Marpingen and the state. Part 3 The aftermath: the state climbs down - legal reverses, Marpingen in Parliament, the trial; the Church stays silent - a textbook enquiry - Mettenbuch, problems in Trier, secretum; the German Lourdres? - Margingen in the 20th century - renewed interest, ""a true apparition mania"" - the 1930s, wax and wane - the postwar years."

Reviews

'Though its scholarship is impeccable, this highly original and elegantly written work is full of human interest and pregnant with implications for the history of Germany.' The Times 'magisterial book' London Review of Books 'It deserves to reach as wide a readership as the most celebrated historical study of a single village: Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou' The Times 'You rise from reading the story of Margaretha with a distaste for all the adult species, and a longing to get back to picking bilberries in the wood.' Times Literary Supplement 'masterly historical study, surely one of the most comprehensive ever devoted to a particular Marian apparition' The Tablet 'David Blackbourn has produced an exhaustive study of the apparitions of the Madonna in July 1876 in Marpingen ... His magisterial book suffers from the weight and oppressiveness of the Prussian machine itself, while also giving a striking picture of popular stubbornness and reistance. Its interest lies mainly in the way it articulates issues of legitimacy in terms of religion and the people. No disgust, no condescension - no compassion even - for the opium of the masses, here; rather, a sharp sense of the democratic right to believe what you choose.' London Review of Books Characterised by both a very high order of analytical rigour and authorial sensitivity...this outstanding book is chiefly memorable for the subtlety with which Blackbourn teases out the many ambivalent aspects of his complex subject matter...it is also rich in character and incident. This is considered, original and outstanding contribution to historicl scholarship, that fully deserves to be ranked alongside the attemps of Natalie Zemon Davies or Emmanuel Le Roy Ladutie to discuss the universal via the ostensibly local. Blackbourn tell this complex and sometimes unsavoury story with immense subtlety and sophistication, pouring into it all the knowledge he has gained in more than twenty years of working on Imperial Germany, and basing it on a mass of meticulous research into what must often have been quite difficult manuscript material in the archives. The real achievemnet of Marpingen lies in the details, in its wonderfully rich and nuanced re-creation of the world of Catholic society and secular politics in the thoughts, eords and deeds of people who have linguished in the dustbin of history for too long. Health Education Research As David Blackbourn presents it, Marpingen becomes a magnifying glass for state and society during the Bismarck period. the author paints a graphic and very precise picture...the broad sweep of narration is given structure and focus by precise reflections on political activity, social intercourse, and changes in mentalities...Blackbourn's book...brilliantly illuminates a turbulent period in Germany's history when things moved fast and generated tensions...Blackbourn's penetrating book makes an unusually creative contribution, in terms both of contents and of method, to the history of Germany in the nineteenth century. It certainly cannot be ignored. German Historical Institute London Bulletin XVIII:1

As David Blackbourn presents it, Marpingen becomes a magnifying glass for state and society during the Bismarck period. the author paints a graphic and very precise picture...the broad sweep of narration is given structure and focus by precise reflections on political activity, social intercourse, and changes in mentalities...Blackbourn's book...brilliantly illuminates a turbulent period in Germany's history when things moved fast and generated tensions...Blackbourn's penetrating book makes an unusually creative contribution, in terms both of contents and of method, to the history of Germany in the nineteenth century. It certainly cannot be ignored. * German Historical Institute London Bulletin XVIII:1 * Blackbourn tell this complex and sometimes unsavoury story with immense subtlety and sophistication, pouring into it all the knowledge he has gained in more than twenty years of working on Imperial Germany, and basing it on a mass of meticulous research into what must often have been quite difficult manuscript material in the archives. The real achievemnet of Marpingen lies in the details, in its wonderfully rich and nuanced re-creation of the world of Catholic society and secular politics in the thoughts, eords and deeds of people who have linguished in the dustbin of history for too long. * Health Education Research * Characterised by both a very high order of analytical rigour and authorial sensitivity...this outstanding book is chiefly memorable for the subtlety with which Blackbourn teases out the many ambivalent aspects of his complex subject matter...it is also rich in character and incident. This is considered, original and outstanding contribution to historicl scholarship, that fully deserves to be ranked alongside the attemps of Natalie Zemon Davies or Emmanuel Le Roy Ladutie to discuss the universal via the ostensibly local. 'David Blackbourn has produced an exhaustive study of the apparitions of the Madonna in July 1876 in Marpingen ... His magisterial book suffers from the weight and oppressiveness of the Prussian machine itself, while also giving a striking picture of popular stubbornness and reistance. Its interest lies mainly in the way it articulates issues of legitimacy in terms of religion and the people. No disgust, no condescension - no compassion even - for the opium of the masses, here; rather, a sharp sense of the democratic right to believe what you choose.' London Review of Books 'masterly historical study, surely one of the most comprehensive ever devoted to a particular Marian apparition' The Tablet 'You rise from reading the story of Margaretha with a distaste for all the adult species, and a longing to get back to picking bilberries in the wood.' Times Literary Supplement `It deserves to reach as wide a readership as the most celebrated historical study of a single village: Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou' The Times `magisterial book' London Review of Books `Though its scholarship is impeccable, this highly original and elegantly written work is full of human interest and pregnant with implications for the history of Germany.' The Times

An absorbing, challenging work of bottom-up history that gives a voice to the unlettered and the disempowered. Blackbourn (History/Harvard) transforms an apparently minor historical curiosity, an instance at best of religious pathology, into a fascinating, surprising, and moving picture of cultural turmoil in the new German nation-state. The event in question is the alleged visitation of the Virgin Mary to three schoolchildren in the remote Rhineland village of Marpingen in 1876, and the response thereto. With sure control of his material and an archaeologist's reconstructive gift, Blackbourn deftly reveals the Marpingen events as a tangled but telling intersection of multiple cultural currents: religious strife, both interdenominational and between competing tendencies in the Catholic hierarchy itself; local communal rivalry; class tensions; grassroots populist activism; Bismarck's ongoing Kulturkampf ( cultural war ) against the Catholic Church; and the upheavals in work and family life provoked by the confrontation of a traditional rural culture with the very different rhythms of a 19th-century industrial state. Blackbourn brushes against the grain of readers' expectations: He encourages us to regard the widespread popular support of the visionaries not as superstitious medieval credulity but as a sophisticated mobilization of deep-rooted cultural resources by a community beset by social dislocation. Conversely, the progressive modernizing forces of state authority, whose response to the apparitions varied from patrician condescension to outright contempt or suspicion, stand revealed as at least as self-righteous and hlinkered (by a faith in secular rationality often as unyielding as religious dogma) as the peasants they undertook to control. The Church itself is riven and ambivalent, its sponsorship of the cult of the Madonna at odds with the increasingly authoritarian bent of the 19th-century Vatican. This dense, authoritative book demands and deserves an attentive reading and offers rewards few recent historical narratives can match. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

David Blackbourn is author of: Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Yale, London & New Haven, 1980), The Peculiarities of German History (co-author, O.U.P. 1984), Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern Germany (Unwin Hyman, 1987), and The German Bourgeoisie (co-editor, Routledge, 1991. He is currently writing a History of Nineteenth-Century Germany (for end 1994) Harper-Collins/Fontana UK, and for O.U.P. New York in the USA. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, member of the Editorial Board of Past and Present, and former secretary of the German History Society. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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