Tyrolean stigmata in England: the cross-cultural voyage of the Catholic supernatural, 1841–1848

This article considers the transcultural dynamic between English Catholicism and mainland Europe in the early 1840s through the lens of the reception of two famous Tyrolean women bearing the stigmata. After the publication of the account of their supernatural qualities by John Talbot, sixteenth Earl of Shrewsbury, Waterford, and Wexford they became the controversial subject of the heated debates on the nature of English and universal Catholicism, and by extension on the nature of religiosity at large. This article argues that adopting a transnational approach to the study of supernatural phenomena within Catholicism in the 1830s and 1840s allows us to look beyond the history of institutions and key figures in the polemic, and to shed light on more nuanced religious and devotional interactions between the British Isles and the Continent. As such this article also argues for the inclusion of supernatural phenomena in the transnational history of English Catholicism.