Miracles, Health and Healing in Norman Italy, c. 1080 – c. 1200

This thesis is concerned with uncovering the cultural and social conception of health and illness in southern Italy. By using the miracles from nine key hagiographical texts, this study places the understandings of the cure-seekers, the scribes and their audience at the forefront and attempts to place the sufferers back at the centre of the history of medicine. Rather than looking at the understanding of health and illness through the prism of academic medicine, it aims to do so through the eyes of the sufferers. Through a close analysis of the miracle narratives and by listening to the illness narratives within them, this study engages directly with Roy Porter’s thought-provoking research agenda to discover the understandings of health and illness from a sufferer’s perspective and their experiences in southern Italy during the Norman period.

Chapter 1 examines the hagiographical sources that form the foundation of this study. It begins by establishing who the authors of each text were, and who the intended audience of each text was. It then moves on to explore the motives and aims of the author in creating the text, the historical context in which the narratives were written and seeks to understand how healing and illness were employed within the texts by the authors in support of their objectives. Using demons as a case study, chapter 2 aims to address several points in Porter’s research agenda. It starts by examining how and why demons were believed to be an ontological cause of ill-health during the twelfth century. This is followed with a close analysis of the language and the descriptions employed in the miracle narratives, which allows a consideration of how such an affliction was characterised and classified. It concludes by exploring the reasons for the choice of saint as an appropriate and successful avenue of care for such afflictions. Chapter 3 considers how individuals experienced and expressed pain when they fell ill. By closely examining the language of pain (how people talk about and describe pain) within the miracles, the chapter considers how pain was understood to be holistic: both physical and psychological, and to what extent the articulation of such experiences has remained consistent across time. It concludes by examining how different emotional communities emphasised different aspects of pain in their descriptions of their experiences. Chapter 4 directly tackles the final point in Porter’s proposed research agenda by looking beyond medical professionals as the primary care-givers. By adopting a more holistic and contemporary understanding of health and healing, the chapter considers how family, friends and neighbours played a prominent role in identifying, seeking out and securing the assistance of the saint in the restoration of an individual’s health. It examines the different roles of each care-giver and suggests how they can be seen as health-care providers. The study concludes with an English translation of a selection of the miracle narratives that formed the basis of this study.