How Abundant is "Abundant History"?

16 Historically Speaking · September/October 2008 ity on the part of historians. Ankersmit thinks so. "Historical experience," he writes in a discussion of Huizinga, "is the historian's response to 'the call' of the past," and "there is in the case of historical experience a 'communication' between the historian and the past excluding all that is not part of this most private and intimate communication." It is striking in this regard that on the very first page of the preface to her history of Lourdes, Ruth Harris alludes briefly to her own physical distress, noting that "my work on Lourdes became part of a personal voyage, an act of sympathy with nineteenthcentury pilgrims." Visiting Lourdes, Harris describes how her sense of being an alien at the shrine is slowly eclipsed as she gets caught up in the work of helping other pilgrims who cannot help themselves. She tells of "being directed to help a mother care for her adult son who was incontinent, paralyzed, blind and deaf." In the end, Harris says, she was not "converted"—although why is this even an issue?— but "the experience" of being there "completely changed my approach to the topic."" In a very preliminary way we may conclude from this that abundant events that are not exhausted at the source and are characterized by the face-to-face experience of presence may very well draw the historian , too, into an unexpectedly immediate and intimate encounter with the past. I read Harris's relief at not being converted as an expression of the anxiety this possibility provokes among us, understandably so, given our training. But it may be that this is what abundant historiography is: the effort to write abundandy about events that are not safely cordoned off in the past but whose routes extend into the present, into the writing of history itself. RobertA. Orsiisprofessorof religion andthefirst holderof the Grace Craddock Nagle Chairin CatholicStudies atNorthwestern University. His most recent book, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton University Press, 2004), receivedanAwardforExcellence in the Study of Religionfrom theAmericanAcademy of Religion. ' Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body andSpiritin theSecularAge (Viking, 1999), 87. 1Among the excellent historical accounts of Marian apparitions and pilgrimages that have appeared in recent years, I want to mention: David Blackbourn, Marpingen:Apparitions of the Virgin MaryinNineteenth-Century Germany (Knopf, 1994); William A. Christian,Jr., Apparitions in LateMedievalandRenaissanceSpain (Princeton University Press, 1981) and (with a somewhat different focus, but related) Visionaries: TheSpanish Republicandthe Retgn of Christ (University of California Press, 1996); Sandra L. Zimdars-Swartz, EncounteringMary: From La Salette to Mea/ugor/e (Princeton University Press, 1991); Michael P. Carroll, The Cultof the Virgin Mary: PsychologicalOrigins (Princeton University Press, 1986) and Madonnas ThatMaim: PopularCatholicism in ItalySince the Fifteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University 1992). 1 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: PostcolonialThought andHistoricalDifference (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 16. ' Chakrabarty, ProvincialisingEurope, 20. ! F R. Ankersmit, Sublime HistoricalExperience (Stanford University Press, 2005), 14. * Robert Calasso, Literatureandthe Gods, trans. Tim Parks (Vintage International, 2001), 6. The detail about Christ in the streets of Paris comes from Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, I$62-1629 (Cambridge University Press, 1995). 'Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today (Harvard University Press, 2002), 66-67. On Newton see Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 40, etpassim. 'Christopher Bollas, Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience (Roudedge, 2002), 47. *Paolo Apolito, TheApparitions at Olívelo Cifra: Local Visionsand Cosmic Drama, trans. William A. Christian,Jr. (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 107-108. "Gananath Obeyesekere, Medusa's Hair:An Essay on Personal Symbols andReligious Experience (University of Chicago Press, 1981), 167; StanleyJeyaraja Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and theScope of Rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 107. IIAnkersmit, Sublime HistoricalExperience, 125; Harris, Lourdes, xiiii, xv. How Abundant is "Abundant History"? Thomas Kselman Not very long ago a historian of modern Europe who chose to study Marian apparitions would have been committing professional suicide. As Robert Orsi suggests in his essay, this is no longer the case, forover the pastgeneration a number of scholars, including several at distinguished institutions, havewrittenwell -received books on apparitions at Lourdes, Marpingen, Ezkioga, and other places as well.1 Orsi admires...