| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.4

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.4 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine. By Suzanne K. Kaufman (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. viii plus 255 pp. $34.95).

Travel to a cathedral, a pilgrimage site, or the tomb of some ancient worthy and there they will greet you: those ubiquitous hawkers of holy souvenir trading in I-was-there picture postcards, Marian key chains, Saint Paul spoons and Saint Francis thimbles and every other conceivable incarnation of throwaway religious paraphernalia. Surely this crass commodification of piety for profit signals the utter debasement of what is left of religion in the modern world. Suzanne Kaufman of Loyola University in Chicago does not agree. In a well written and theoretically compelling study of the Lourdes cult in Third Republic France, she argues that the lively purchase of religious goods along the roads leading to the famous grotto was not debased spirituality. In fact, it expressed a quintessentially modern popular devotion enabled as well as shaped fundamentally by the capitalist market practices of France's industrializing economy.

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