Leigh E. Schmidt
In Consuming Visions, Suzanne K. Kaufman deftly explores the crowded cultural intersection that produces modern forms of pilgrimage, healing, and devotion: commerce, spectacle, popular media, tourism, and mass consumption. Making good use of religious and cultural histories of the United States—where the merchandising of faith has long been viewed as a wondrous sign of creative adaptation to religious disestablishment—Kaufman bathes the Lourdes shrine in a new light.
Whitney Walton
This well-researched and engagingly written book argues that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Lourdes shrine modernized religious devotion through mass transportation, advertising, sensationalized medical debates, and the mass press, but not at the expense of true faith. Suzanne K. Kaufman's original insight is that modernization actually created exciting and innovative devotional practices. Consuming Visions thus offers a new perspective on the Catholic and anticlerical conflict of the early French Third Republic. Indeed, this book represents a new way of thinking about faith and modernity.
James R. Lehning
Suzanne K. Kaufman shows how commercialization was a central part of the Lourdes shrine and its transformation into the most popular Catholic pilgrimage site in Europe, the cradle of a modern form of religiosity, and a source of profound concern about the proper relationship between religious piety and the commercial enterprises at the shrine. The activities at Lourdes undercut traditional forms of piety, allowing a more democratized experience in which the agency of pilgrims and miraculous subjects created a more popular form of religiosity. Consuming Visions provides exciting insights into the reformulation of French political and popular culture in the late nineteenth century and the ways in which religion, commerce, gender, and democratization interacted to produce a specific version of the transition to modernity in late nineteenth-century France.
Mary L. Roberts
This is a truly outstanding book, strongly argued yet highly readable, about the 'commercial culture' that developed at the shrine in Lourdes in the nineteenth century. It is also impressively researched: Suzanne K. Kaufman has mastered a massive body of archival, periodical, and historiographical literatures and has an excellent grasp on cultural theory, particularly that pertaining to commodity culture.
