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Stigmatics is an international research network that brings together different historical research projects on stigmata to enable systematic exploration of the Wounds of Christ on mortal bodies, primarily in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

NEWS

1 October 2020

Today is book publication day! Find the results of the Between Saints and Celebrities project in our monograph The Devotion and Promotion of Stigmatics in Europe (available as e-book in Open Access): https://brill.com/view/title/55448

In the nineteenth century a new type of mystic emerged in Catholic Europe. While cases of stigmatisation had been reported since the thirteenth century, this era witnessed the development of the ‘stigmatic’: young women who attracted widespread interest thanks to the appearance of physical stigmata. To understand the popularity of these stigmatics we need to regard them as the ‘saints’ and religious ‘celebrities’ of their time. With their miraculous bodies, they fit contemporary popular ideas (if not necessarily those of the Church) of what sanctity was. As knowledge about them spread via modern media and their fame became marketable, they developed into religious celebrities.

Want to know more about the story of an individual stigmatic? Find them in our database.