A few selected cases of visions and apparitions are detected and analyzed, including personal interviews with some of the witnesses. Of special interest is the final third of the book: the transposition of medieval and early modern representations of the relations between humans and the divine into the modern art of photography. Christian presents a pictorial examination of the phenomenon, commenting a large number of images, including commercial postcards and family photographs from the first half of past century Europe.

The author examines the logical structure of religious inquiry and discourse and the various meanings of religious utterances, and then develops principles of judgment and types of argument by which claims can be supported or challenged. Originally published in 1964. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

'William Christian has given us an extremely sensitive study of man, religion and society in a valley in Northern Spain...The reader somehow experiences the passing of the generations and the centuries, the succession of priests with different views, each representative of the Catholicism of his time, the propagation and then institutionalization of ever-changing forms of worship, and the tension set up between innovating priest and conservative community...All in all I find this a truly admirable book. Not only will it be of value to students of the subject, it should also give them much pleasure.' -Emanuel de Kadt, Religion

The author examines the logical structure of religious inquiry and discourse and the various meanings of religious utterances, and then develops principles of judgment and types of argument by which claims can be supported or challenged. Originally published in 1964. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Why are religious visions believed only in certain times and places? In this book William Christian investi gates the settings and responses to a series of group visions reported by Spaniards in rural Galicia, Valencia, Cantabria, and Navarre in the early part of this century the most notable one involving the crucifix at Limpias, where Jesus was first seen agonizing on the cross during a mission service in March of 1919. In light of the social strife and strong anticlerical movements of the period, the author examines how gender and religious politics influenced the experiences of seers and the interpretation of their visions by church officials, journalists, and the public. Christian approaches the story inductively, from the visionaries and the parish to the religious orders, diocesan officials, and Vatican envoys. He places the events in the context of mission dramaturgy and pilgrimages to Lourdes, and shows their ramifications in Italy, Mexico, the United States, France, and Central Europe. Using oral testimony, church archives, local newspaper accounts, and apologetic literature, Christian finds that some observers related the moving crucifixes to a logical, millenarian sequence that included earlier apparitions in France; for others they were divine reactions to national political events; while for many local people they were signs for the establishment of new shrines. His study reveals the preoccupations of ordinary people and how they found expression in religious images. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Why are religious visions believed only in certain times and places? In this book William Christian investi gates the settings and responses to a series of group visions reported by Spaniards in rural Galicia, Valencia, Cantabria, and Navarre in the early part of this century the most notable one involving the crucifix at Limpias, where Jesus was first seen agonizing on the cross during a mission service in March of 1919. In light of the social strife and strong anticlerical movements of the period, the author examines how gender and religious politics influenced the experiences of seers and the interpretation of their visions by church officials, journalists, and the public. Christian approaches the story inductively, from the visionaries and the parish to the religious orders, diocesan officials, and Vatican envoys. He places the events in the context of mission dramaturgy and pilgrimages to Lourdes, and shows their ramifications in Italy, Mexico, the United States, France, and Central Europe. Using oral testimony, church archives, local newspaper accounts, and apologetic literature, Christian finds that some observers related the moving crucifixes to a logical, millenarian sequence that included earlier apparitions in France; for others they were divine reactions to national political events; while for many local people they were signs for the establishment of new shrines. His study reveals the preoccupations of ordinary people and how they found expression in religious images.

Originally published in 1992.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The description for this book, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, will be forthcoming.

Like most other peoples, Spaniards have long wondered about God and the saints--what they want from mortals, how they affect human affairs, even what they look like. The most direct evidence has come from face to face meetings with the holy ones. These meetings are the subject of this book.

This book is an expanded, larger-format, and more highly illustrated version of a smaller book released by CEU Press in 2011. It presents and comments on an extensive set of religious and personal photographs and illustrations that depict people along with divine beings or absent loved ones. First, Christian examines the periodic appearances of Christ-like strangers in the Spanish countryside through the vision of a woman in La Mancha in 1931. Then he considers the long history of images with liquids on them not only for early modern Spain, but also in the United States, Italy and France in the 1940s and 1950s. The third and most extensive chapter addresses the iconography of illustrated depictions of divine and spirit beings in conjunction with humans and how its conventions were incorporated into commercial postcards and personal photographs, culminating in photo montages of families and their absent soldiers in World War I. The fourth theme is new to this edition. It compares the electric moments in Spanish communities when people ritually come into physical contact with saints and with animals, or transform themselves into saints or animals for ritual purposes. Over 50 of the color photographs by Spain's preeminent documentary photographer are included.