Peregrine’s sore. An analysis of the hagiographical reports on the leg disease of Saint Peregrine Laziosi of Forlì (1256–1345)

Abstract

Saint Peregrine Laziosi of Forlì (1265–1345), healed in slumber by the Christ from a fatal leg lesion at the age of sixty, is considered in the Catholic tradition as the patron Saint of people suffering from incurable malignancies. On the basis of later sources relating his miraculous healing, both Roman Church and contemporary medical literature have hitherto endorsed various diagnostic interpretations of Saint Peregrine’s disease, either to ascertain its incurability and therefore the truthfulness of the miracle described by the sources, or, on the contrary, aiming to provide a complete naturalistic account of his lesion and instant healing. Albeit conflicting, both perspectives rest upon a literal reading of the available texts about Peregrine’s life. Medical scholarship on the subject, in particular, taking hagiographical reports as reliable sources to establish the ‘clinical’ truth of the matter, ends up neglecting the religious nature and the edifying purposes of extant written witnesses. I propose in this article to tackle this problem through a narratological lens, stressing on the literary templates and the medical terminology which shape the most ancient and authoritative report about Peregrine’s lower limb pathology. A retrospective diagnosis of venous varicosity complications may indeed appear convincing, although not beyond every doubt: notwithstanding its terminological accuracy, consistent with ancient and medieval medical accounts of infected leg ulcerations, this text builds strongly on a traditional scriptural and hagiographical background, ranging from the Old Testament and the Gospels to early Byzantine Lives of Saints. The impossibility to clearly distinguish the literate convention from the historical account prevents us from stating with certainty the originality of Peregrine’s pathological history, and hence the reliability of our sources as clinical reports.