-
Thaumatology at One Remove: Empathy in Miraculous-Cure Narratives in the Later Middle Ages
- Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 7, Number 2, June 2009
- pp. 189-199
- 10.1353/pan.0.0143
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
The article deals with records of thaumaturgic cures, especially a series of miracle cures taking place within an enclosed community of Colettine nuns in fifteenth-century Ghent. These miracles, all performed by the local founder and saint, Colette Boëllet, consisted in curing several nuns from acute and chronic illnesses. The pain of these illnesses is described in a superlatively extravagant mode, and the record, made by an external notary, is evidence of a “competition in suffering” among the nuns, with harmony restored through the common written testimony.