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Miracles for the Mad: Representations

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Miracles for the Mad: Representations Miracles for the Mad: Representations of Madness in English Miracle Collections from the Long Twelfth Century Thesis submitted to the Department of History for examination in the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, June 2016 Claire Louise Trenery Royal Holloway, University of London Page 1 Declaration of Authorship I, Claire Louise Trenery, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: Page 2 Abstract My thesis analyses representations of madness in miracle narratives produced in England from 1090 to 1234, examining Vitae (saints’ Lives containing miracles) and Miracula (miracle collections unaccompanied by a Life). I explore the impact of the local environment of a saint’s cult, and the wider influence of twelfth-century medical developments on monastic representations of mad pilgrims. This innovative approach places sickness and health in the context of medieval conceptions of the natural world and the functioning of the miraculous within it. Historians have long been interested in the transmission of ideas within the intellectual climate that accompanied the development of Scholastic learning in Western Europe. In terms of medical learning, translations of Greek and Arabic texts were produced in southern Italy in the vicinity of the schools of Salerno in the late eleventh century, when I begin my study, and circulated in Europe, not least in England, during the two centuries that followed. I assess their influence on hagiographical representations of madness, which I argue was dependent on the immediate local context of the individual cult and compiler. I end my investigation in 1234 when Pope Gregory IX made canonisation the exclusive prerogative of the pope, thus reducing the necessity for and popularity of large local miracle texts. Madness, as a condition variously affecting the body, mind, and soul, lay at the cross-section of a Christian philosophical tradition that distinguished between the material body and the immaterial soul, and medical premises that connected bodily humours with the faculties of the mind (imagination, reason, and memory). I demonstrate that these two models were not perceived as exclusive by hagiographers whose tentative explanations of madness are representative of the close interaction between religion and medicine. Through thematic case studies of six saints’ cults, my thesis reconstructs the ideas that influenced individual hagiographers and that contributed to cultural understandings of the healthy and the sick mind. Page 3 Table of Contents List of Abbreviations 5 List of Tables 7 Introduction 8 Madness in Twelfth-Century England 40 Cause and Classification 56 Chapter I - Patronage, Protection, and Punishment in the Miracles of Saint Edmund the Martyr at Bury 57 Chapter II - Medical Madness: Diagnosing the Mad in the Miracles of Saint Thomas Becket 102 Chapter III - Demonic Disturbances in the Miracles of Saint Bartholomew in London 145 Treatment and Cure 185 Chapter IV - Contending with Violence: Managing the Mad in the Miracles of William of Norwich 186 Chapter V – Madness at the Shrine: The Visual Significance of Mad Behaviour in the Miracles of Saint James at Reading 225 Chapter VI – Balance and Health: Restoring Sanity in the Miracles of Saint Hugh of Lincoln 256 Conclusion 296 Appendix: Madness Miracles in The Miracles of the Hand of Saint James 311 Bibliography 318 Acknowledgements 343 Page 4 List of Abbreviations AE Adam of Eynsham, Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis: The Life of Saint Hugh of Lincoln, ed. and trans. by Decima L. Douie and David Hugh Farmer, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) BP Benedict of Peterborough, ‘Miracula Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis’, in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. by James Craigie Robertson, 7 vols (London: Longman, 1875-85), II (1876), 23-298 Edmund Revised Goscelin of Saint-Bertin[?], ‘Miracles of St Edmund’, in Herman the Archdeacon and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin. Miracles of St Edmund, ed. and trans. by Tom Licence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 127-303 GCL The Miracles of the Hand of Saint James, Gloucester Cathedral Library, MS 1, fols 171v-175v. The miracles are not numbered in the manuscript but each new miracle begins with a red or blue initial. I have numbered them for ease of reference. GW Gerald of Wales, The Life of St. Hugh of Avalon, Bishop of Lincoln 1186-1200, ed. and trans. by Richard M. Loomis, Garland Library of Medieval Literature A, 31 (New York, NY and London: Garland, 1985) Herman Herman the Archdeacon, ‘Miracles of St Edmund’, in Herman the Archdeacon and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin. Miracles of St Edmund, ed. and trans. by Tom Licence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 1-125 Page 5 Metrical Life The Metrical Life of Saint Hugh of Lincoln, ed. and trans. by Charles Garton (Lincoln: Honywood Press, 1986) ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) TM1 Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich, ed. and trans. by Augustus Jessop and M.R. James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896) TM2 Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, trans. by Miri Rubin (London: Penguin, 2014) Vespasian B.IX The Book of the Foundation of Saint Bartholomew’s Church in London, London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian B.IX. The miracles are not numbered in the manuscript but each new miracle begins with an initial written in blue and decorated in red. I have numbered them for ease of reference. WC William of Canterbury, ‘Miracula Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis’, in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. by James Craigie Robertson, 7 vols (London: Longman, 1875-85), I (1875), 137-546 Page 6 List of Tables Table 1: Summary of Saint Edmund’s Madness Miracles. 70 Table 2: Madness Miracles in Benedict of Peterborough 111 and William of Canterbury’s Collections of the Miracles of Saint Thomas Becket. Table 3: Madness and Demonic Possession in the Liber 156 fundationis ecclesie sancti Bartholomei Londiniarum. Table 4: Gender of demoniacs in twelfth-century English 162 miracle texts. Table 5: Madness miracles in Thomas of Monmouth’s 197 collection of the miracles of William of Norwich. Table 6: Madness in the Miracles of Saint Hugh of Lincoln. 267 Page 7 Introduction But what is easier, to give health of the mind or of the body? He who brought light to these corporeal eyes also restored a youth of Fordwich, Henry, to his mind. He had been insane for some days and had inflicted an unexpected wound of pain on his friends. He was hauled to the saint with his hands tied behind his back; he was presented to the saint, although he struggled and cried out. He raved there all day but as the light of the sun receded, the light of reason little by little began to be restored. He spent the night in the church; the next day, his sanity returned.1 Henry of Fordwich was a madman who was believed to have been miraculously cured of his insanity when, in the early 1170s, he was brought to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. His story was made known to the monks of Christ Church Cathedral Priory and recorded in one of two twelfth-century miracle collections that contained more than seven hundred miracles attributed to Becket. In the miracle collection, the record of Henry’s cure follows that of Robert of Thanet, a blind man who miraculously recovered his sight.2 His are the ‘corporeal eyes’ referred to at the beginning of Henry’s miracle where a comparison is made between physical and mental healing. Within fifty years of its recording, Henry’s miraculous healing had been immortalised in stained glass as part of a series of miracle windows that 1 BP, II.13, p. 66. ‘Sed quid est facilius, dare salutem mentis an corporis? Qui oculos hujus corporeos illuminavit, juvenem de Fordwico Henricum menti restituit. Insaniverat diebus aliquot et amicis suis inopinatum doloris vulnus inflixerat. Colligatis a tergo manibus, ad sanctum trahitur; sancto, renitens licet atque reclamans, praesentatur. Ubi tota die insaniens, recedente luce solis, lucem rationis paulatim recuperare coepit. Pernoctavit in ecclesia; sanissimus in crastino remeavit.’ 2 Ibid., II.12, p. 65. Page 8 were produced to surround Becket’s new shrine. Eight hundred years on, this stained glass representation of Henry can still be seen in two roundels in window North IV of Canterbury Cathedral’s Trinity Chapel ambulatory. To both the modern observer, unable to read the Latin inscription,3 and the illiterate medieval pilgrim, Henry’s condition and his cure are nonetheless recognisable. As in the miracle record on which the stained glass was based, Henry’s hands are bound behind his back. He is restrained by two men holding clubs. In the second roundel, Henry kneels beside Becket’s tomb to give thanks for his cure. His cloak, previously dishevelled, hangs neatly over his shoulders. The rope and sticks that were used to restrain him are displayed at the bottom of the panel, as no longer necessary. 3 ‘Amens accidit. Orat, sanusq[ue] recedit.’ / ‘He arrives out of his mind. He prays and departs sane.’ Page 9 Image 1: The Cure of Henry of Fordwich, North IV, Trinity Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral.4 Both the written record of Henry’s cure and its stained glass representation reveal something of twelfth-century conceptions of madness. The miracle record and the stained glass inscription use different terms to describe the same state: ‘insanire’ (to be insane) and ‘amens’ (out of his mind). The Latin term insania literally referred to madness but was also associated with foolishness and rage.5 Amentia was a state of being out of one’s mind or mad but could also be applied to excited or senseless behaviour.6 The comparison with Robert of Thanet’s corporeal (‘corporeos’) ailment places madness in a separate category as a condition of the mind, and it was Henry’s mind (‘mens’) that required restoration.
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