Miraculous Bodies: Archives of Medieval Impairment

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper Bodies: Excavating Archival Tissues and Traces", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Among the “cacophony” of medieval bodies (Walker Bynum 1995) were those affected by physical impairments. The embodied social and physical realities of those living with impairment might be glimpsed through different material traces. Hagiographies and chronicles provide textual descriptions of impaired bodies, most often in the context of miraculous cures and the “therapeutic landscapes” of medieval Christianity (Horden 2014). By their nature, these narratives link bodily difference to the sacred but skirt the lived experience of those inhabiting such bodies. In this paper, I bring together the unruly bodies that emerge from extant chronicles and hagiographic texts of early medieval Central Europe. I examine patterns of impairment and ‘cures’ across the sources with a focus on miraculous and ‘othered’ bodies that might have parallels in human remains from archaeological sites in the region. These textual bodies complicate and substantiate medieval notions of wholeness, the sacred, and physical and spiritual health.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Paper Bodies: Excavating Archival Tissues and Traces

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow