Healing with Certain Conditions

Abstract

This article examines a specific component of medieval healing miracle accounts: the conditions set by the saint for helping those who require his/her mediation, focusing on two selections, an early medieval group and a thirteenth-century group. The former is represented by the miracles of Sts. Cosmas and Damian, St. Martin of Tours, St. Foy, and St. Benedict, the latter by the miracles of St. Elizabeth of Hungary (Thuringia), St. Stanislaus of Cracow and St. Margaret of Hungary. I analyze these miracles in the context of a broader set of do ut des type exchange transactions related to the supplication, the vow, and the ritual manifestations accompanying the experience of the healing and its public announcement. I also consider another miracle genre, the miracle of vengeance or miracle of punishment, which frequently sanctions the negligence of not fulfilling the supplicant’s original promise. I also ask whether there is a differentiation according to social status in this religious phenomenon, whether the “coercion of saints” has a distinctly lower class, “popular” variant. Surprisingly, the later dossiers, based on the massive miracle testimonies of the canonization processes present fewer examples for what I call hagiographic “pedagogy”. The more elaborate moral discourse of late medieval Christianity obviously used other constraining devices and miracles were no longer necessary for that purpose.