Comparación de las emisiones anuales con otros inventarios

The history of purgatory is the history of tales of the supernatural and the impossible. The material features of purgatory, such as holy souls who leave physical evidence of their visits or visionaries who arrive back from purgatory burned and scarred, qualify as supernatural events, in the strictest sense, as they occur outside of what has been considered, since the medieval era, as ordinary or possible. Watkins notes that even though the “supernatural” as a formal category had not yet been estab-lished in medieval Europe, “the embryo of the idea had already come into being.”⁶⁷ Following the work of Alexander Murray, Watkins reveals that in this time period “distinctions were steadily being drawn between the observed patterns of nature and the anomalies within them.”⁶⁸ Extraordinary, supernatural events were designated by language of “awe and wonder.”

The doctrine of purgatory was codified during this time period, and while its mention in documents from the councils where it was formulated downplay its features inspiring awe and wonder, purgatory literature, which included visionary tales, references, and anecdotes in chronicles and exem-pla, as well as its articulation in the more formal treatises of the scholastic theologians, was dominated by language of awe and wonder. Reports of souls from purgatory occurred within circumstances that were deemed extraordinary.

During the “long twelfth century,” religion in its parochial setting was a “blend of local and universal practice.”⁶⁹ Even as clergy were accommo-dating reports of the supernatural, they were also utilizing these accounts in didactic literature. In doing so, they utilized the material, concrete ele-ments of the supernatural as evidence for an unseen, invisible world.

Beyond its function as a means to secure belief among those who needed to “see to believe,” the materiality of purgatory empowered practitioners to change or ameliorate their afterlife destinations. In this respect there is no better case than the purgatory caves in Ireland, located on Saints Island and Station Island in Lough Derg (Red Lake) to illustrate the problems and benefits of purgatory’s materiality. The caves at Lough Derg, which became known as St. Patrick’s Purgatory by the twelfth century, were sites of penitential activity. Practitioners engaged in ascetic exercises and uti-lized sacred space to expiate their sins so as to avoid hell after they died. In effect, the caves functioned as concrete purgatories. Chapter 1 is an exam-ination of the practices that occurred at the caves and the fame that the site achieved throughout Europe. At first, the location of purgatory in Ireland

did not present a problem since purgatory as a concrete place of penance was easily reconciled with early medieval theological frameworks. However, as chapter 2 reveals, while at first the purgatory caves were a boon to belief regarding the doctrine, they soon became a problem and an embarrass-ment for Church authorities and were suppressed several times. Despite suppression, practitioners utilized the site as a means to control their afterlife fates as late as the eighteenth century. Chapters 1 and 2 further address how the shift in late medieval penitential theology brought about a change in how purgatory was interpreted among theologians. As this shift gained momentum in the late thirteenth century, the materiality of purgatory became a problem, and places like Lough Derg were viewed with suspicion by Church authorities.

Chapter 3 examines how Lough Derg was represented in the popular press, and specifically in the works of Bishop John England, a priest who was born in Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century and became a bishop in the United States. England was deeply influenced by two events:

English colonization of Ireland, and the French and American revolu-tions. Enlightenment thought profoundly influenced his ideas of religion and purgatory, and his writings reflect a greater process at work within Catholicism and specifically with respect to representations of purgatory.

England distanced himself from what he considered to be the supersti-tious views of purgatory as a place, and indeed from having any knowl-edge whatsoever of souls in purgatory. On the one hand, he condemned the pilgrimage site of his homeland, the caves at Lough Derg, for fostering superstition, while on the other hand he lauded the pilgrimage for being a devotional practice that inspired faith among Irish Catholics during the trying years of English colonization. Significantly, John England’s purga-tory, devoid of space and time, reveals a model of purgatory that would become standard for future authoritative representations. England’s work is also representative of the beginning of the end of purgatory, or, as Cuchet termed the development, purgatory’s spiritualization, where rep-resentations of purgatory become abstract and rituals associated with the doctrine focus less on public demonstrations and more on practitioner’s subjectivity. In chapter  4 I further trace the impact of Enlightenment thought on representations of purgatory within the Catholic press.

Periodicals in France and North America reveal that the version of purga-tory that relied on its material elements gradually gave way to more ab-stract versions of purgatory as a condition where souls experience the pain of loss. Anecdotes of souls in purgatory, which were common in periodicals

devoted to the doctrine, are interspersed with references to “reason”

guided by faith and other idioms representative of Enlightenment thought.

The gradual process of the displacement of purgatory from earth to its status as an afterlife condition took hundreds of years, yet it is in the pre-sent that the problem of purgatory’s materiality is most clearly evident.

This is illustrated in chapter 5 by the efforts of contemporary Catholics who are reviving a physical version of purgatory and rejecting an abstract version that they associate with modernism. Amid the little commentary about purgatory by church authorities, lay apostolates and ministers pub-lish websites, tracts, and books that are beholden to old texts about purga-tory that focus on its physical attributes and literal, not allegorical, punishments.

This revival, led by the apostolate leaders mentioned earlier, belongs to a larger critical response to the liturgical reforms and the changes con-sequential to the Second Vatican Council. Even as the development of empiricism dealt a severe blow to the version of purgatory as a place, as people used increasingly more sophisticated instruments to ascertain earthly locations and places, it is ultimately the senses that guide what is known about the sacred, and thus the afterlife, and advocates for a literal purgatory insist on representing purgatory’s physical features as a means to gain knowledge about it and to establish it as a real, not imaginative, place. At issue for these contemporary practitioners is the loss of knowl-edge of the supernatural, and the material aspects of purgatory provide the means to this knowledge.

When Purgatory Was