The Body Restored: Illness, Disability, and Healing in Early Medieval Miracle Narratives

This dissertation explores the experiences of people with illnesses and disabilities as they are depicted in early Medieval miracle narratives. Much scholarship on medieval medicine focuses on periods after the twelfth century; medical scholarship for the early Middle Ages trends towards the intellectual frameworks surrounding medical manuscript production. Yet, sick and disabled people from the early Middle Ages appear in miracles, and exploring hagiographies and miracle accounts allows their voices and experience to become part of the conversation around early medieval medicine. I consider miraculous cures obtained through the intercession of saints and the remedies provided by the medicus, the humoral practitioner of the early Middle Ages, as part of the medical marketplace of the early Middle Ages. Miracles were a sign of the continuing presence of both God and the saints in the Christian communities that surrounded reliquaries and indicated that these were places where healing, and thus salvation, might be obtained. However, many also consulted a medicus to cure their ailments. Although the medici are depicted in miracle accounts only where their remedies fail, their expertise and diagnoses served to confirm miracles and their failures pushed cure-seekers into saintly shrines, giving the divine an opportunity to intervene. Cure-seekers also found medicine in charitable institutions known as hospitia. Initially intended to shelter pilgrims and the poor, hospitia came to take in ailing cure-seekers, providing them with the food, shelter, and care that, according to ninth-century definitions of medicine, should be considered medicinal care. Healing miracles also reveal the relationship between the disabled and the able-bodied, wherein Christian communities had the opportunity to participate in the Christian call to charity by assisting and caring for their disabled friends, relatives, and neighbors, thus creating a pathway for their own salvation. People with disabilities likewise had the opportunity to confirm the presence of the saints and increase belief in others. I argue that disability created an opportunity for God to communicate his will and approval to the Christian community and aided the community as a whole in their pursuit of salvation.