2026 Theses Doctoral

‘Marvelous Economy’: The Veil of Veronica and the Reproduction of Faith in Nineteenth Century France

Woolley, Heather L.

This dissertation examines the nineteenth-century French revival of the cult of the Veil of Veronica, a medieval relic believed to bear a miraculous imprint of Christ’s face. On the eve of the 1848 revolution, a French Catholic nun reinvented the sacred image as an anti-modern symbol and as an instrument through which to defend and propagate her faith, giving rise to a widespread cult. Drawing on devotional texts, hagiographies, and popular images, this project traces the hitherto unexamined transformation of one of Christianity’s foremost devotional and iconographic traditions.

My analysis centers on how this “image not made by human hand” acquired new meanings as reproduction increasingly became an object of fascination and control across artistic, technological, scientific, and political spheres. As the reproduction of images and bodies came to be understood as a means of shaping history, believers sought to harness what had long been regarded as the primordial reproduction of Christ’s likeness. They reimagined Saint Veronica—believed to have facilitated the creation of the “miraculous” image—as a model for women tasked with reproducing Catholic tradition, while mass-producing printed copies of the Veil in an effort to re-Christianize France.

Challenging dominant art-historical narratives that assume religious visual practices waned in the nineteenth century, this dissertation demonstrates how the sacred image continued to evolve and to shape religious, political, and social imaginaries. My investigation uncovers unexplored ways in which images mediated processes of secularization, while also offering new perspectives on the role of gender in the formation of modern visual culture. Foregrounding devotional practices created and sustained by women, this dissertation traces the emergence of ideologies surrounding gender, reproduction, and religion that continue to resonate in the present.