Heaven and Health: Middle English devotion to Christ in its therapeutic contexts

Book section

Around 1580 in Valencia an illiterate female healer, or metgessa, attracted the attention of the Inquisition as part of their ongoing case against the demonically assisted doctor Jerónimo Pachet. While not in communion with the Devil, this metgessa was nevertheless scrutinized for a certain form of therapy she ofered. As the inquisitorial records make clear, she was practising a specifc treatment common at the time to both Christians and Moors, whereby a mirror was used to project a text onto the body of a patient: she was ‘curing by projecting over the mirror the pages of a book, the contents of which were supposed to be curative and these qualities being collected and transmitted by the mirror’.1 Te text, then, was believed to possess a therapeutic potential in and of itself, one that could be harnessed and directed onto the patient’s ailing body regardless of the literacy, or professional status, of the person administering the treatment. The anecdote serves as an introduction to the central concerns of this essay — the complex relationship between texts, religious regulation, and conceptualizations of therapeutic practices in premodern cultures.

Authors: McCann, D

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Brepols Publishers
• Host title: Devotional Culture in Late Medieval England and Europe
• Volume: 31
• Pages: 335-362
• Series: MEDIEVAL CHURCH STUDIES
• Publication date: 2015-02-20
• DOI: 10.1484/M.MCS-EB.5.103044
• ISBN: 9782503550022
• Keywords: History