Marpingen

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.

• 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.

`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