Abstract

This essay uses saints’ lives and miracle stories to demonstrate the various ways that religiously affiliated women managed for a socially marginalized population the daily experience of health and illness. In this essay I explore how people came to believe in a saint’s ability to heal, how they adapted their feelings and intentions to affective models provided by her vita and miracles, and how they recounted their experiences of this adaptation in stories of bodily healing. I argue that, by examining the healing community that sick petitioners formed around female saints, we might come to recognize whole new categories of health on which medieval medical resources were premised. Furthermore, as scholars of religion, we may better understand the affective and devotional mechanisms through which the sick and indigent came to experience relief.

pdf