Mansfield Prize Award- 2018

The Religious History Association has decided to award the Mansfield Prize for 2018 (awarded to the best article published in the Journal of Religious History) to SUZANNE K. KAUFMAN “Les Miraculées de Lourdes: Sacred Celebrities in the Age of Mass Spectacle” published in the December 2018 (vol 42).

The adjudication committee (Katharine Massam, Shurlee Swain and Constant Mews) makes the following statement about the article of Suzanne Kaufman, Associate Professor at Loyola University, Chicago:

It examines the promotion of women as subject to miraculous healing as a remarkably successful strategy that created a new kind of religious celebrity: women healed through the grace of the Virgin. She looks at the medical figures who assisted in promoting scientific recognition of these female miraculées not just as a new phenomenon in the piety of the later nineteenth century, but as a marketing strategy, within the emerging mass media of the day. These women were able to create a new identity for themselves through belief that they had received miraculous healing.

The article fully conforms to the standards of religious history as established by the late Bruce Mansfield, founder of this journal.