Lourdes

"Ruth Harris has written a major work of cultural and social history. She re-creates with startling vividness and intelligence the contrasting worlds of peasant pilgrims and aristocratic grandes dames, of local clergy and ecclesiastical grandees, and shows how the apparitions and cures of Lourdes fascinated contemporaries of all walks of life. Harris provides an unsettling account of a parallel world of fervent religious beliefs which offers a serious challenge to the view that the spirit of modern Europe has been exclusively secular and 'progressive'."--Jacket.