The Art of Healing: Painting for the Sick and the Sinner in A Medieval Town (review)

Using the fragmentary surviving frescoes located in the crypt of the central church in Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher in central France as the basis for her study, Marcia Kupfer attempts to map out the social as well as the ecclesiastical landscapes for these images. At the heart of her work is a sense that an understanding of the imagery found in this parish church is to be located in the broader regional geography of the surrounding town and hinterland. Kupfer interprets the organizing theme of these paintings as one of saints, cults and cures. The idea that such works should be read not solely in terms of their specific iconographical programmes, but also in relation to the environment in which they are located, is an appealing one, and this book highlights the richness of the possibilities of this approach. While I have a great deal of sympathy for the approach taken in this book, I am not always convinced that Kupfer has achieved what she has set out to do.

The inspiration for Kupfer's approach is such exemplars of microhistory as the writings of Emmanuel Le Roy Laurie, Carlo Ginzburg and Jean-Claude Schmitt. Given her thesis, the town of Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher provides an ideal subject for such a study. It is surrounded by a network of chapels, hospitals and charitable institutions such as the leprosery and the maison-dieu. One of the arguments she advances is that the iconographical scheme spread across the three chapels located in the crypt reflected the chapter's desire to control the activities of these surrounding sites, through symbolically combining their dedications, creating in the crypt a focal point of curative cultic activity.

In her introduction Kupfer says that she is interested in investigating 'how the built environment, architectural space, and pictorial representation combined to structure viewers' approaches to the sacred so that the very act of looking at images opened a way into the circulation of grace'(p. 3). To do this she has divided the book into two parts. The first focuses on the medieval site, and provides fascinating information about the range of therapeutic structures in the region. She also mines the very limited archival information that records the types of illness encountered at them, as well as the regulation, patronage and brief history of the various chapels. There is, for example, a detailed outlining of the symptoms of ergotism and she speculates that the local disorder, known as Saint Silvanus' fire, might well have been a variant of this. One of the frustrations with this material is that there is little sense as to whether such a nexus of therapeutic cults was unusual. It would also have been useful to include more comparative material, for example a more detailed discussion of other medical buildings from the time. There is a great deal of speculative rather than evidential discussion in this section.

The second half of the book focuses on the town's principal parish church, its building history and the decoration of the crypt. Here Kupfer is on surer ground and it is disappointing that she does not spend more time drawing out this material before moving on to her final chapter. The material is fragmentary. The pictorial schema in the upper church was destroyed during the nineteenth-century restoration, while the crypt's frescoes are extremely fragmentary. The discussion is not helped by the reproductions. These, while generous in number, are muddy. The fragmentary nature of the evidence is difficult enough to decipher without this impediment. Kupfer's final chapter, 'Image and Audience: infirmity, charity, and penance in the community', explores three themes: that healing cults operated within an economy of gift exchange; an examination of gender hierarchies within this system; and the shifting location of infirmity as a social boundary. The second section, which begins with...