This work attempts to explain how the small French town of Lourdes became the greatest of all Christian healing shrines despite unpromising beginnings, prospering in an age supposedly given over to secularism, growing as attendance at church fell, and continually expanding in the midst of official onslaughts on the position of the Church. The book offers an inter-disciplinary examination of this episode in French history, from mass travel and the burgeoning pilgrimage movement, to the cultural and spiritual traditions of mid-19th-century France, and the central position of women in the spiritual movement.