2 - Holy Healing: An Analysis of the Ailments

Summary

Our cure-seekers shared one common goal: the desire to secure the saints’ intercession to bring about miraculous healing. The afflictions that these cure-seekers were relieved of are therefore central to the narratives recorded within the miracula, and to this current study. The accounts of holy healing that were documented in the miracle accounts must, of course, be recognised as only a literary representation of healing experiences. Nevertheless, they have the potential to indicate wider patterns of miraculous cure-seeking, providing an insight into the range and variety of complaints that were brought to the saints’ shrines.

The previous chapter established that monks, hagiographers included, would have had some understanding of health and healing but little reason to consult the medical literature available within their monasteries, unless their obedientiary responsibilities required it. That the period under discussion here also sat on the cusp of the wide dissemination of the translated classical medical corpus into the monasteries, and that cure-seekers had other avenues of healthcare available to them, makes the study of the twelfth-century accounts of miraculous healing all the more valuable. As well as providing an insight into how ill health and impairment were experienced, the language of the miracles can also be analysed to consider evidence of medical knowledge on the part of their compilers. Here it is worth exploring whether the hagiographers, and the cure-seekers who experienced these afflictions, demonstrate any medical awareness.

The reports of miraculous healing, and their representation of the afflictions brought by cure-seekers to these seven shrines, are central to this chapter, and here the use of statistical analysis is advantageous. Analysis of health concerns recorded in miracle accounts has been a feature of hagiographical studies since Finucane’s foundational Miracles and Pilgrims and continues to prove a useful method for revealing the range and patterns of curative miracles. As noted in the introduction, a key difference here from many previous studies is the intentional focus on a select, small group of miracula and the cure-seekers represented within these works. This focus allows this chapter to tease out the details from these accounts and to provide comprehensive discussion of some of the more notable cases that are included in the miracula. This results in a more ‘up close and personal’ approach than can be achieved with the great overview studies.