When the Sun Danced

Bennett's work is in the very best tradition of Marian apparition scholarship. His book is of equal or superior quality to other acclaimed works in this field, including William Christian Jr.'s Visionaries (Berkeley, CA, 1991), David Blackbourn's Marpingen (New York, 1994), and Ruth Harris's Lourdes (New York, 1998). The excellence of Bennett's scholarship ensures that this new book will make an immediate and lasting impact in the academy, especially so in the fields of comparative religion politics, sociology, and Portuguese studies.

-- "The Catholic Historical Review "

In When the Sun Danced, Jeffrey Bennett provides a sustained analysis of the sociopolitical context of the 1917 apparition of the Virgin Mary in Fatima, Portugal. This study of the intertwining of popular religious movements with Portuguese political history is a must-read for anyone interested in visions, religious experience, and the appropriation of religious movements for political purposes.

--Sandra Zimdars-Swartz, University of Kansas, author of Encountering Mary: From La Salette to Medjugorje

Jeffrey S. Bennet's When the Sun Danced: Myth, Miracles, and Modernity in Early Twentieth Century Portugal is an in-depth and finely written investigation into the very apparition whose centennial was marked by Pope Francis's canonization of the child-seers, Our Lady of Fatima.... I recommend this book most highly and agree with previous reviewers who feel it should take its place among the finest studies of modern Marian apparitions.... [F]or anyone wishing to fully understand the ways in which the Fatima apparition was ultimately transformed from a deeply national early twentieth-century phenomenon to a broadly international Cold War one.

-- "Religious Studies Review"