Introduction

Visitors to saints’ shrines during the European Middle Ages (c. 500–1500) believed that miraculous healings would cure worthy petitioners, something secular healers could not offer with their skills. Indeed, miracle tale collections promulgated by saints’ cults argued that their patrons’ spiritual healing was superior to that of secular practitioners. According to saints’ lives, ill or injured people needing medical assistance typically sought care from secular practitioners first, before seeking it from saints. It was perhaps only in the direst cases that people turned to saints; few diseases or conditions, it seemed, were beyond the miraculous healing abilities of saints, who, according to large numbers of miracle reports, reversed even death.

A saint’s life offered propaganda for his or her cult, as well as justification for the holy person’s admission into the Church’s litany of saints. The primary purpose of miracle stories was thus to demonstrate the power of God and the sanctity of the intercessor. Descriptions of secular healers in such texts typically demonstrated the failure of their interventions, thereby proving the superiority of the saint’s curative power. At times, such narratives even claimed secular medical expertise for the saints, such as calling Luke the great healer, depicting Saints Cosmas and Damian in surgery and describing in detail the medical attention that Saint Elizabeth provided to sick men and women. In fact, this hagiographical approach actually shows great respect for medical workers, since it is only when the best possible secular care has failed that the saint’s cure is deemed remarkable. Similarly, it is only when the saint demonstrates better medical talent than a secular expert that her charity is considered holy. Rather than attacking the medical profession, such texts make reference to secular practitioners in order to demonstrate both that the patient’s issue had no mortal solution and that the miracle or holy treatment was truly glorious.

Scholars have consulted documents related to the cult of the saints since at least the 1970s for information about medieval medicine, patients, disease and disability. Texts such as saints’ lives, miracle tales and canonisation proceedings document the medieval experience of illness, injury and disability as well as the search for treatment and cure.