Mrs. Mattingly's Miracle, and the Miraculous Serendipity of Archives

Paul Harvey

Here's a new and intriguing work that's is already making quite a splash: Nancy Schultz, Mrs. Mattingly's Miracle: and the Cure that Shocked Washington City, recently published by Yale University Press. A brief description, from the book's website:

In the spring of 1824 in the young capital city of Washington, D.C., Ann Carbery Mattingly, widowed sister of the city's mayor, was miraculously cured of a ravaging cancer. Just days, or perhaps even hours, from her predicted demise, she arose from her sickbed freed from agonizing pain and able to enjoy an additional thirty-one years of life. The Mattingly miracle purportedly came through the intervention of a charismatic German cleric, Prince Alexander Hohenlohe, who was credited already with hundreds of cures across Europe and Great Britain. Though nearly forgotten today, Mattingly's astonishing healing became a polarizing event. It heralded a rising tide of anti-Catholicism in the United States that would culminate in violence over the next two decades.

Working from sources in Europe and America, Nancy Lusignan Schultz deftly weaves analysis of this significant episode in American social and religious history together with the astonishing personal stories of both Ann Mattingly and the healer Prince Hohenlohe, around whom a cult was arising in Europe. Mrs. Mattingly's Miracle has the dramatic intensity of a novel and brings to light an early episode in the battle between faith and reason in the United States-a battle that continues to inspire debate in American culture to this day.

The author previously published a really fine study Fire and Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834, and has made her name as someone who brings to life the social history of antebellum Catholicism, and anti-Catholicism. The new book is akin to Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz's classic The Kingdom of Matthias, in that it takes an unusual, idiosyncratic story and uses it as a lens to explore broad themes of American religious and cultural life in a particular time period. The book has received a really wonderful review by the Washington Post; here's a little snippet:

Nancy Lusignan Schultz, a professor of English at Salem State University, brings an impressive depth of scholarship to this odd, forgotten chapter of America’s early social history. She presents a gripping account of the controversy that erupted over Mattingly’s sudden and inexplicable return to health and explores the lasting debate it provoked “between reason and emotion, between science and religion, and between sectarianism and ecumenism.”

All of these tensions, she explains, were distilled in the person of Prince Hohenlohe, the mysterious “thaumaturgus,” or miracle worker, whose apparent ability to cure blindness and other infirmities had already made him a sensation in Europe. The 18th son of an Austrian crown prince, Hohenlohe drew crowds wherever he went, combining the “benign accessibility of a parish priest with the awe-striking cachet of a thousand-year-old name.” He also attracted powerful enemies. One official denounced him as a “deeply dissipated man, who seduces girls,” and even his staunchest defenders were forced to admit that he made “an unlikely candidate for Catholic sainthood.” As Hohenlohe’s fame spread, Pope Pius VII himself urged moderation, “so that the holiness will not become a subject of curiosity and mockery.”

The Vatican’s fears were amply borne out in America, where the news of Mattingly’s “distance healing” created an immediate stir. The young nation was moved, wrote one cleric, “as Jerusalem formerly was at the arrival of the three wise men.” Perhaps wisely, Schultz does not attempt to answer the divisive question of whether Mattingly’s return to health was a genuine miracle or not. “I believe that something extraordinary did happen in Washington City nearly two centuries ago,” she explains. “How this happened, though, and whether the explanation is natural or supernatural, pushes deep into the realm of faith. This book does not try to guide you there.

Instead, Schultz focuses on the cultural impact of the drama. As the initial enthusiasm gave way to skepticism and concern, she demonstrates, the Mattingly episode exposed tensions within the American church and raised fears that foreign religious figures wished to tamper with the new republic’s hard-won freedoms. The result was a climate of “spectral paranoia” that fueled a wave of anti-Catholic violence, including the burning of an Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Mass., in 1834 — which, perhaps not surprisingly, forms the subject of one of Schultz’s previous books.

The result is a gripping slice of history with fresh, often unsettling resonances for the modern reader. “This miracle has caused a great deal of trouble,” as one beleaguered priest remarked at the time, “happy thing they do not occur often.”

You can also access lot of other reviews and reflections on the book here.

One of the links in the page just mentioned is to a piece by the author in the Chronicle of Higher Education, something that should warm the heart of every historian although written by an English professor! The author reflects on the "serendipity" of the archive, and how that can never be replaced fully by digitized material. In the course of researching Fire and Roses, she stumbled on the inspiration and story for this book. Reflecting on leading her students through the archive at the college where she teaches, she concludes, "My students now understand that most rare archival material . . . will never be scanned and digitized. And even if much of this material is digitized, its virtual presence is no substitute for the tactile and sensory experience of being in an archive." The serendipitous discoveries she made in researching this book on antebellum miracles, she concludes, were themselves small miracles.

freq.uenci.es

a collaborative genealogy of spirituality

Paul Harvey

Here's an amazing and moving introduction for you to Freq.uenci.es: A Collaborative Genealogy of Spirituality: Julie Byrne's "Saint February." It's impossible to excerpt, so just read it. Now.

freq.uenci.es is a project bringing together some of the most creative minds on religious expression today, including some of our friends from Immanent Frame and Killing the Buddha. The experiment kicks off with 100 days of 100 different contributions from scholars, writers, and artists writing about "what they think of when they think of the word spirituality." The index of entries to date is here.

Here's a bit of the lineup and some links for more information.

Frequencies is an experiment. The experiment is simple:
Ask scholars, writers, and artists what they think of when they think of the word spirituality.

Here is the project statement.

Here is the list of terms we supplied.

Explore the results here.

Curators / Executive Editors – Kathryn Lofton and John Lardas Modern

Executive Producers / Senior Editors – Nathan Schneider and Jonathan VanAntwerpen

Here is the invitation we sent.

From Ghost Hunters to Protestant Spirits

Today's guest post is from Sean McCloud, an associate professor of religious studies who teaches, researches, and writes about American religions as well as religion and culture. He is the author of Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955-93(2004) and Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion and Religious Studies (2007) as well as the co-editor of Religion and Class in America: Culture, History, and Politics (2009).

Protestant Spirits

by Sean McCloud

Classes started at my university last week. The hallways and corridors of my religious studies department—which were virtually left to the ghosts this summer—now brim with life as students and faculty fill the spaces. But even though the revnants have been temporarily pushed out of my hallways by the new semester, spirits have materialized elsewhere in various media forms. The new season of Ghosthunters, one of the original of the now dozens of ghost hunting reality television shows, began on the Syfy network Wednesday. Their often repeated commercial tells viewers that one out of three Americans believe in ghosts, though polls by Pew and CBS suggest that the number of those who accept the existence of departed spirits (and angels and demons) may be much higher—even when it’s not Halloween.

Aside from Ghosthunters, two other items conjured up spirits in my presence. The first was Terry Gross’s Wednesday Fresh Air interview with Rachel Tabachnick about The New Apostolic Reformation, a movement of Third Wave Evangelicals who are bringing their practice of spiritual warfare into the American political arena. In Tabchnick’s case, the Protestants are socially conservative and theologically tend toward charismatic and Pentecostal practice. The primary spirits they are focused on are demons, whom spiritual warfare practitioners seek to exorcise from individual bodies, objects, places, regions, and nation states. While the movement is numerically small, its influence can be seen in as variant examples as televangelist Pat Robertson’s 2010 comment that the Haitian earthquake was caused by a pact that the country’s founders made with Satan, former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin’s videotaped deliverance prayer from the spirits of witchcraft by the African minister Thomas Muthee and Evangelical missionary strategies in Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, and Latin America (see, for example, Kevin O’Neill’s discussion of spiritual warfare in Guatemala in his book, City of God: Christian Citizenship in postwar Guatemala (University of California Press, 2010). I find Third Wave Evangelicalism and its practice of spiritual warfare fascinating, so much that I am writing a book that uses the movement as a case study to examine contemporary U.S. religious culture. And who doesn’t find ghosts, demons, and curses interesting? But at the same time, I am guessing that few American religion scholars (knowing the group’s charismatic and Pentecostal roots) would express surprise at the movement’s supernaturalism, which includes the aforementioned demons, but also angels, divine healings, and other miraculous events. But that is definitely not the case with the second spirit-filled item that has possessed my time: Pamela Klassen’s provocative new book, Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity (University of California Press, 2011).

In Klassen’s case, the Protestants under discussion are theologically and socially liberal, Canadian, and concerned with healings simultaneously medical and supernatural. Klassen rightfully notes that miraculous healing—as well as other forms of Christian supernaturalism—“have been more often associated with Roman Catholic or Pentecostal versions of spiritual healing”(xiv), rather than with liberal Protestants in denominations such as the Anglican Church of Canada and the United Church of Canada. She tells readers that her interest in liberal Protestants stems from the “lack of imagination” scholars have had in analyzing the Protestant versions of the “liberal subject” (xvii). Utilizing both historical and ethnographic approaches, Klassen focuses on activities centered around healing. She hopes to reveal the diversity and “messiness” of liberal Protestant practice. I am just a few chapters into it, but Spirits of Protestantism is already effectively battling stereotypes (by examining what Klassen aptly dubs “supernatural liberalism”) and breaking down borders (by focusing on Canadians who are often involved in medical missions). Klassen’s study is also contributing to the cultural history of the study of religion by registering the connections between the anthropology of religion and supernatural liberalism. Spirits of Protestantism looks to be a rich, complex, and promising work that I plan on adding to my spring semester graduate seminar on American religions. In the meantime, I am hoping that the local university spirits will keep their poltergeist activities to a minimum so that I can finish the book before fall semester classes start possessing me.