A magisterial history of the world's greatest Catholic healing shrine: an examination of its incredible flowering, and how it shaped the Church and the faith of millionsIn 1858, near the tiny French town of Lourdes in the foothills of the Pyrenees, a young peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous witnessed the Virgin Mary in a grotto. Since then, millions of pilgrims from all over the world have gone there every year to walk in a procession to a shrine whose waters have made it a synonym for healing.Oxford historian Ruth Harris traces the history of this mass phenomenon, placing Lourdes at the center of nineteenthcentury debates on religion, science, and medicine--debates being revisited today. She examines the pivotal role of women and children as its visionaries, devotees and advocates address issues of mysticism and non-orthodox faith that speak to our own era of spirituality. Above all she explores how, at a moment in French history when the Church was under attack, this place of pilgrimage improbably prospered. She offers a serious challenge to the view that the spirit of modern Europe has been exclusively secular and progressive. Lourdes is a major work and sure to become an important history of the greatest of healing shrines.