In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter three PainfulTimes Suffering Bodies and Healing Hands Pain—caused by hunger and thirst, heat and cold, injuries, overwork, and illness —was a commonplace of premodern life.In many cases there was not much people could do about it: work was hard, winter was cold, illness was often incurable.Worst of all, food, the heart-warming, belly-filling stuff of life, was all too commonly scarce. Described by Saint Basil as “the supreme human calamity ” (Holman 2001: 77), hunger reached its agonizing peak in periods of famine. According to one source, every morning on the streets of Padua could be found the bodies of some thirty people who had died of starvation overnight during the famine of 1528 (Camporesi 1989: 26). Other, more impoverished regions would have fared much worse (Le Goff 1988: 239–44). The severity of the suffering experienced by many is conveyed by the intensity of the language used to describe it:the sick man enveloped by an“atrocious storm of pain,” the afflicted nun whose head “boiled like a pot on fire,” the injured child who “hurt so acutely, that he suffered from bodily contortions, screaming and weeping as though insane”(Cohen 2003:206,207,212).Even if one were spared intense experiences of pain, life was full of minor physical annoyances, such as itches, rashes, and insect bites.Among its advice for housewives, The Goodman of Paris gives six different methods for ridding a home of fleas. Indeed,“one of the [author’s] infallible rules for keeping a husband happy was to give him a good fire in winter and keep his bed free from fleas in the summer” (Power 2006: 10).Away from home the situation might well be worse.When in the fifteenth century the middle-class Margery Kempe joined a company of poor pilgrims, she was shocked to see that “when they were outside the towns, her companions Classen_Text.indd 47 3/15/12 2:48 PM 48 chapter three took off their clothes, and, sitting about naked, picked themselves for vermin.” This was no doubt an important social activity for the group, as well as a health measure, but the more modest Margery would have none of it, with the result that she was“dreadfully bitten and stung both day and night”(Kempe 1936:281). While poverty was almost synonymous with suffering, even the wealthy were susceptible to common ailments,from flea bites to smallpox.Young King Henry, the dashing twelfth-century tournament player, died not of wounds incurred on the playing field but of the very commonplace illness of dysentery. In fact, even the plenteous diet of the wealthy might have dire consequences: Henry’s great-grandfather, Henry I, reportedly died from eating a “surfeit of lampreys” (a favorite dish of the nobility), while the young king’s brother John was said to have brought about his own demise by overindulging in peaches and cider (M. Evans 2007:65–66).Such accounts of the sad fate of gluttonous royals,while not necessarily accurate, drove home the point that pampering afforded no security against a painful end. There was a reason for this unhappy state of affairs according to the contemporary understanding of the world, and that reason was that pain was the result of human sinfulness.There had been no hunger,no illness,no cold in the Garden of Eden. By rebelling against God’s will, humans had exchanged a perfect world for a fallen one and doomed themselves to a painful existence from which not even the rich and powerful could ultimately escape. The notion of earthly suffering being ordained by God put something of a damper on attempts to alleviate pain.In the twelfth century Bernard of Clairvaux stated flatly that“to consult physicians and take medicines befits not religion”(R. Porter 1999:110).Nonetheless,while physicians were sometimes caricaturized as atheists,caring for the sick was included within the exercise of Christian charity and so not utterly divorced from godliness. Indeed medieval monasteries were often important medical centers as monks honed their healing skills on each other and founded hospitals for the public. However, not all forms of suffering held an equal claim to alleviation.The pains of childbirth, though acknowledged to be intense, had been instituted by God (Gen. 3: 16) and thus, theologians decreed, should not be lessened (though medieval medicine did, in fact, offer some suggestions for relief). Injuries and illness held stronger claims to treatment, as the suffering they caused was not so...

Share