Saints as Therapy

Sponsoring Organization(s)

Medieval Academy of America

Organizer Name

Monica H. Green; Sara Ritchey

Organizer Affiliation

Arizona State Univ.; Univ. of Tennesee-Knoxville

Presider Name

Lydia Walker

Presider Affiliation

Univ. of Tennessee-Knoxville

Paper Title 1

Authority and Expertise in Arabic Medical Commentaries

Presenter 1 Name

Nahyan Fancy

Presenter 1 Affiliation

DePauw Univ.

Paper Title 2

The Faithful Healer: Trust, Belief, and the Professionalization of Medicine in Late Medieval Castile

Presenter 2 Name

Naama Cohen-Hanegbi

Presenter 2 Affiliation

Tel Aviv Univ.

Paper Title 3

The Problem of Charisma in the Late Medieval Portuguese Cult of the Saints

Presenter 3 Name

Iona McCleery

Presenter 3 Affiliation

Univ. of Leeds

Start Date

11-5-2018 3:30 PM

Session Location

Bernhard Brown & Gold Room

Description

Modern critical editions have made hagiographic texts far more widely accessible to scholars working at a distance from manuscript repositories. At the same time, however, such editions have elided or obscured many of the scribal details and readers’ marks that showed hagiographic scripta in their original reading context. Building on recent scholarship that has demonstrated the therapeutic uses of saints’ lives, liturgies, and miracles, this panel asks how specific manuscript copies of hagiographic texts suggest their medical uses. What can attention to bindings, compilational strategies, and scribal contingencies, tell us about the therapeutic uses of hagiographic inscriptions? What can the manuscript matrix tell readers about the potential physiological effects of reading the lives and miracles of saints?

Monica Green