3 - The Great and the Good: Identifying the Cure-Seekers within the Miracles

Summary

Having established the healthcare context, our journey towards miraculous cure begins by identifying the individuals at the heart of these selected miracles. While the primary aim of posthumous hagiography was to document, promote and celebrate the miraculous events themselves – as signs of divine intervention in the temporal world – accounts of holy healing required cure-seekers. As such, the individuals were central to the miracle stories and their encounters with the miraculous further our understanding of medieval cure-seeking.

The cure-seekers have unsurprisingly become the focus of many studies of medieval miracles, beginning with Finucane’s Miracles and Pilgrims which identified a general trend for wide social interaction with the shrines, but with a greater number of lower-status men recorded with accidental injuries. Sigal, similarly, highlighted that over ninety per cent of cure-seekers cured of blindness were ‘d’origine populaire’ (‘of popular origin’). As Yarrow has demonstrated, though, statistics are not the only method for analysing these individuals; anecdotal comments can provide a wealth of information. Using these methods together, as is done here, allows for the development of a rounded picture of these cure-seekers which considers them both as individuals and as representative of wider contemporary practices. This also offers a valuable method for comparative analysis between hagiographical collections. Within this chapter the focus is on identifying who these individuals were. The following chapter will consider the distances between the cure-seekers and the site of the cult.

Categorising the Cure-Seekers

Before analysing the cure-seekers within these seven sets of miracula, some consideration is needed of how the individuals in question have been categorised by age, gender and social status; and of the nature of the hagiographic materials. Throughout this book statistical analysis is based on what can be drawn from the twelfth-century accounts selected. In this chapter, where the details of the reports do not provide enough guidance to make a decisive categorisation, the cure-seeker has been categorised as ‘unclear’. This ensures that the cure-seekers are represented as they have been recorded and remembered within the miracles, for example with regard to details about their social status. It is also for this reason that the social categories employed here have been kept broad, to reflect the hagiographical data.