Photographing a miraculous apparition in fin-de-siècle France

2020 ◽  
pp. 28-35
Author(s):  
Ferdinando Gizzi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Double Exposure ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Spirit Photography ◽  
Marian Apparitions ◽  
Visual Materials

This paper is dedicated to the photographic coverage of the alleged miraculous apparitions, which occurred in the small French village of Tilly-sur-Seulles between 1896 and 1897. These photos, circulated as postcards and appearing in popular magazines of the time such as L’Illustration and Le Monde illustré, were presented – by virtue of the authority of the photographic as an indexical trace – as “authentic” testimonials of the supernatural events, though in fact neither recognized nor approved by the Catholic Church. These photographs used the already-known double exposure process of spirit photography, bringing these exotic visual materials into the tradition of religious “authentic fakes”. But more importantly, such images manifested the “visionary fervour” of late nineteenth-century France, that is, the growing desire of the modern crowd to see the invisible in more and more spectacular and convincing ways. Such a new spectatorial desire – that can also be found in the very successful genre of the photographs of the real bodies of mystics, saints, and seers – would be perfected by a whole series of contemporary forms and attractions, and finally, by cinematographic special effects. Keywords: nineteenth century, Marian apparitions, visionaries, photography, superimposition

Reading Rooms for Travelling Cultures: English-Language Reading Rooms in Late Nineteenth-Century France

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-206
Author(s):  
Colette Colligan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Transit Routes

This essay focuses on British and American reading rooms at the end of the nineteenth century in French travel centres such as Boulogne-sur-Mer, Cannes, and Paris. These reading rooms were sites of transit that reveal the travelling cultures of Britons and Americans. They set in motion certain travel sociabilities and practices, suggested various transit routes and itineraries, promoted different cultural and national affiliations and identities, and collected, represented, and displayed anglophone cultures. They operated as microcosms of British and American cultures, offering essentialized experiences and connections with people, behaviour, and things affiliated with home, but this essay shows how they were also social environments that not only reinforced, but also reshaped and interrogated anglophone cultures on the move in British, American, and French cultural territories.

The First Albanian Autobiography

2020 ◽  
pp. 255-273
Author(s):  
Noel Malcolm
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Personal Narrative ◽  
Early Education ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Italian Culture ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

This essay presents a hitherto unknown work: the first autobiography ever written by an Albanian. It was composed in 1881–2 by a young man (born in 1861) called Lazër Tusha; he wrote it in Italian, and the manuscript has been preserved in an ecclesiastical archive in Italy. Tusha was the son of a prosperous tailor in the city of Shkodër, which was the administrative centre of the Catholic Church in Albania. He describes his childhood and early education, which gave him both a love of Italian culture and a strong desire to serve the Church; at his insistence, his father sent him to the Catholic seminary there, run by the Jesuits. He describes his disappointment on being obliged, after six years, to leave the seminary and resume lay life, and his failed attempts to become either a Jesuit or a Franciscan. Some aspects of these matters remain mysterious in his account. But much of this unfinished draft book is devoted to things other than purely personal narrative: Tusha writes in loving detail about customs, superstitions, clothes, the city of Shkodër, its market and the tailoring business. This is a very rich account of the life and world of an ordinary late-nineteenth-century Albanian—albeit an unusually thoughtful one, with some literary ambition.

The emergence of modern Greek studies in late-nineteenth-century France and England: The yearbooks of the Association pour l’encouragement des études grecques en France (1867) and of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies (1877)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandros Katsigiannis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
French And English ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Modern Greece

Was the field of modern Greek studies perceived as an ‘exotic’ discipline in the making, or was it considered to be a branch of the already canonised Hellenic studies? This chapter examines two major associations that were established in the late nineteenth century in France and in England and dealt with the promotion of Greek studies: the Association pour l’encouragement des études grecques en France (1867) and the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies (1877). Their yearbooks constitute an unexamined treasure of information illuminating the reception of modern Greece and, at the same time, the construction of the modern Greek cultural identity by French and English Hellenists, from the mid-1860s onward.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 292-304
Author(s):  
Jennifer Walker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Theatre ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Catholic Church

Taking the 1903 death of Pope Leo XIII as its starting point, the conclusion extends beyond the legal separation of Church and State (1905) in order to trace the ways in which the processes of transformation that were set in motion during the late nineteenth century continued well into the twentieth century. Pierre Nora’s concept of the lieu de memoire illuminates the numerous ways that the sites of Catholic and French memory that the book explores—whether as opera, popular theatre, or concert—found an extraordinary ally in the Republic as it collectively harnessed the power of memory. From its “origin” in the French medieval era, to its transformations throughout the fin-de-siècle, to the response to the devastating fire at Notre-Dame in 2019, the Catholic Church provided (and continues to provide) a new mode of expression for the French Republic. In effect, the success of the twentieth-century renouveau catholique was set in motion by its nineteenth-century forbear: the path was paved by the Republic’s musical Ralliement and the memorialization of its Catholic past as a fundamental cornerstone of its modern existence.

Autobiographical Voices: Performing Absence in Singers’ Memoirs

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 165-185
Author(s):  
Kimberly White
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Life Writings

AbstractThis article explores the emergent genre of singers’ autobiographies in late nineteenth-century France. The moment singers took up the pen is telling, as it coincides with their dislodgement in the operatic marketplace from creator and collaborator to interpreter. In their life writings, Gilbert Duprez and Gustave Roger demonstrate a strong preoccupation with revising their public images and the histories that had been written about them. I argue that what critics felt was a flaw – the tenors’ predominant focus on relationships in their autobiographies, rather than on art – reveals how Duprez and Roger sought to reconstruct their artistic identities beyond the voice, locating their most profound contributions in their exchanges and actions within the musical community.

Women and the Language of Statistics in Late-Nineteenth-Century France

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Hélène Périvier ◽  
Rebecca Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Economy ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
French Economy ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Chicago World's Fair

This article considers how women adopted a “scientific” statistical language at the end of the nineteenth century to draw attention to their role in the moral and social economy. It explores in particular the messages contained in La Statistique générale de la femme française, a series of eighteen murals that the moderate feminist Marie Pégard sent for exhibition at the Woman’s Building at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. The article begins by considering the place statistics held in France in the final decades of the century within the context of universal exhibitions. It then examines Pégard’s choice of quantified categories of social analysis to convey a sustained argument about the comparative weight of women in a modernizing French economy. The article seeks to understand how contemporaries read and interpreted the graphs, and how this mode of rendering visible the issue of women’s work played into the politics of an emerging feminist movement.

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