The Persistence of the Sacred: German Catholic Pilgrimage, 1832–1937 by Skye Doney (review)

Skye Doney’s book is a study of two major pilgrimages in western Germany during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the septennial pilgrimage to the relics of the Aachen Cathedral and, especially, the pilgrimages to the Holy Coat of Trier, occurring at irregular intervals. Based on extensive unpublished material in ecclesiastical archives, the contemporary periodical press, the many pamphlets, fliers, memorial images, medallions, and other ephemeral forms of commemoration, and a thorough evaluation of the anthropological and historical literature on popular religious practice, the book contrasts official and expressly stated opinions of the church hierarchy and more bourgeois and educated Catholics on the one hand, and the not explicitly articulated aspirations of the hundreds of thousands or even millions of less educated and lower-middle or lower-class pilgrims on the other. The upshot is an eminently readable and very fruitful study, whose main premises might require some additional consideration.