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PainfulTimes 51 while Saint Apollonia was appealed to for dental problems. Often the connection between saint and ailment was based on the particular torture the saint had suffered during his or her martyrdom. Saint Sebastian was shot with arrows, an experience thought to be similar to the sufferings of the plague, and SaintApollonia was tortured by having her teeth broken, which allied her with sufferers from toothache.The notion may have been that, having personally experienced a particular bodily torment, a saint would be sympathetic to others suffering from a similar ailment. More simply a connection could have been based on the common principle that like is drawn to like. Occasionally a visit to a saint’s shrine would be accompanied by a vision in which the saint directly acted to heal the patient.In the case of Saint Martin,one story told of a woman who dreamt of the saint after visiting his shrine hoping for a cure for a paralyzed hand. In her dream she felt the saint moving his fingers among hers and she awoke to find her condition improved.In another story a nun with paralysis in one hand and both feet dreamt of an old man gently stroking her. In the morning her feet were cured. Now mobile, she was able to follow the inspiration of another dream and visit Saint Martin’s church, whereupon her hand was healed as well (Moreira 2000: 133–34). In England a paralyzed monk who fell asleep after praying to be healed at the tomb of Saint Cuthbert “seemed to feel a great, broad hand rest on the seat of the pain in his head.At this touch, the entire area of his body affected by the disease was gradually eased of its pain, and health was restored right down to his feet” (Bede 1990: 264). Such stories depict how the sacred power flowing from a saint’s body was believed to revitalize a disabled body through the medium of touch, even a visionary touch. While exceptional curative powers were attributed to saintly bodies, corpses in general were believed to have certain healing abilities. Many an ailment in the Middle Ages (and long afterwards) was treated with a touch from a dead man’s hand. It would seem that in this case it was the power of death itself—the power to undo—that was being invoked and applied to a particular bodily disorder. When it came to vanquishing disease, a touch of death, it seemed, could be a good thing. Blind Touch Blindness was a not uncommon condition in the MiddleAges,when malnutrition, disease, and injury resulted in the loss or severe impairment of sight for many. Interestingly, blinding seems to have been one of the preferred punishments for overthrown monarchs.Where the outright execution of a king might be seen as too offensive to God and man,blinding served to both physically and symbolically disempower a monarch.This happened, for example, to the eleventh-century Classen_Text.indd 51 3/15/12 2:48 PM 52 chapter three Byzantine emperor Romanus IV who was blinded after being deposed.The same fate befell Magnus IV of Norway in the twelfth century—he,however,was more thoroughly disempowered by also having a foot cut off and being castrated.There was a biblical precedent for the blinding of defeated monarchs:King Zedekiah of Judah had his eyes put out after opposing Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon (2 Kings 25:1–7). In Greek mythology the ill-fated King Oedipus dethroned and blinded himself after discovering that he had killed his father and married his mother. While a serious social handicap, blindness did not necessarily lead to social exclusion or to complete dependency. Many common chores and handicrafts, reliant as they were on manual skills for their execution,could be undertaken by the blind as well as the sighted.A few blind individuals would become renowned for their exceptional abilities at craftwork. One such was the carpenter Martin Castelein, who in the mid-fifteenth century was famed in Belgium for his woodworking skills,which included making an organ with wooden pipes.Other blind men, such as Francisco Salinus in Spain and Ludovico Scapinelli in Italy, made a name for themselves as musicians or writers (Levy 1872).The age-old tradition of the blind seer was sometimes invoked to explain how such apparently disadvantaged individuals could manifest such extraordinary abilities. However, a number of negative stereotypes hampered the attempts of blind individuals to earn...

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