Abstract
Focusing on representations of healing in institutional spaces in Middle English religious texts, this essay analyses the ways that medicine and medical practice underpin the ideas of sin and salvation. I argue that this relationship between medicine and religion is achieved through recourse to a register common to both spheres. I consider three examples – the injunctions of a monastic customary pertaining to its infirmary, a hagiography set in a prison, and a visionary account of purgatory – and show how they share an institutional imaginary predicated on the integration of punishment, marginalisation, and care. Such an analysis, informed by Foucauldian perspectives on space and power, contributes to the medical humanities by emphasising the importance of discourse both in affirming institutional hierarchies and questioning them.
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