Saints, Cure-Seekers and Miraculous Healing in Twelfth-Century England

Abstract

The medieval cult of saints was in equal measure pious and practical. The reputation of the saints, their imagery, relics, and curated shrines together offered both a framework for spiritual self-expression and facilities to stimulate health and wellbeing. Although the legends of the saints carried claims of diverse, tangible benefits brought to their devotees—protection in battle, punishment of enemies—the weight of their tradition was with cures, of congenital conditions and of contracted disease. It is this almost axiomatic association between cult and cure that is the prompt for Ruth Salter's study, derived from her doctoral dissertation of 2015. Her aim is not purely a medical history of cult practice; rather, she hopes that the hagiographical reports of healing at the shrine-scene might present a point-of-entry into the personal experience—physiological, social, and material—of the supplicant. Her source base here is seven of the miracle collections made in twelfth-century England, selected to provide coverage of England's settlements large and small (Norwich, Reading, Burton, Ely) from north (Coldingham) to south (Canterbury, Winchester); no doubt their modest scope, counting only a little more than 250 brief miracula between them, and their ready accessibility in parallel text translation were also important considerations. Nonetheless, the witness of even this small sample of the wealth of hagiography has a certain value given how little hard evidence of post-Conquest healthcare has survived.Surveying the wider landscape in her opening chapter, Salter is frustrated to find it largely obscured. The clearest indications of the study of medicine in monasteries lies largely outside of her chosen period, as do almost all of the insular contributions to the science, such as Henry of Winchester's De fleubotomandis, and the Anglo-Norman translation of Roger Frugard's Chirurgia. Instead Salter digresses into summary digest of medical lore and treatments transmitted in the work of early and high medieval auctores and in the primary codes and customs of the regulars. In fact, under analysis the testimony of the miracula is somewhat sparse. Naturally a proportion (nearly 20%) of the reports of cures carry scant details of the subject or their circumstances. Of the remainder, more than 40% concern just two conditions: blindness and paralysis. There are only two other conditions that feature with any frequency: tumors and fits. Salter draws particular attention to the absence of gynecological and obstetric complaints which are met in some larger, later miracle collections, not least, William of Canterbury's compilation made at the shrine of Thomas Becket. Notwithstanding, women and girls were the subject of almost as many cure stories as men. In the collection made at Coldingham Priory they formed the largest cohort, a response, Salter suggests, to the restriction of female access to the shrine of St. Cuthbert at Durham. There was likewise an even match of high and low status subjects; laity outnumbered clergy, however, by more than 10:1. The lay focus of these miracula is typical of the collections made at monastic shrines and Salter's speculation that women religious are absent because “stricter rules of enclosure were already imposed” is surely unnecessary (p. 209). It is also unremarkable that she discovers these cure-seekers almost always came from the locality of the shrine. Still, Salter reflects on the “necessity of some form of travel to the shrine” (p. 145), despite a ready acknowledgement that the observation is an “obvious” one understandably passed over in previous studies. Now she allows herself a chapter-length digression (chapter 5), a discourse, Austen-esque, on “the weather and the state of the roads.” Her defense is more than a little elliptical: “travel offers a new angle for approaching cure-seekers’ experience of travel” (p. 175).It is also intended to build anticipation of a final, sharply focused examination of the curative experience itself “upon arrival at the shrine” (p. 176). The promise is not precisely fulfilled. It was the purpose of these monastic narratives to prioritize the people and the process of the miraculum, to inform the shrine's devotees and to instruct its custodians. So Salter can trace only the circumstances of the cure, which for readers familiar with medieval cults will appear to have been no more than might have been expected. Cure-seekers came mostly as pilgrims, although the high-and-mighty may also have been the monastery's guests. There were few if any restrictions on entry to the stricken supplicant. At Norwich Cathedral Priory they were even allowed to approach the reliquary when it was placed in the monastery's chapter house. They were tolerated for weeks on end with a shared awareness that the timing of the intercessory transaction could not be known. Sojourning cure-seekers were surely familiar to their hosts, although Salter's claim of “strong relationships” of “long term compassion” (pp. 196–97) is to overinterpret. No reader will be surprised that “proximity to the relics was recognised as important” (p. 186) but here Salter is too ready to generalize from her sample since other collections of the period carry tales of cures that came in absentia, at the lighting of a votive candle or the invocation of the saint's name. Of the moment of “desired remedy” (p. 197), of course, Salter's sources have little or nothing to tell other than that for some it happened all of a sudden while for others it seemed very hard won.Her book does provide a thoughtful commentary on her chosen miracle collections, perhaps especially welcome for those—from Burton and Coldingham—edited and translated in the past twenty years. It might also be said to demonstrate the undoubted limits at which sociocultural readings of medieval Latin devotional literature can be profitable.