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Thaumatology at One Remove: Empathy in Miraculous-Cure Narratives in the Later Middle Ages

  • Esther Cohen

Abstract:

The article deals with records of thaumaturgic cures, especially a series of miracle cures taking place within an enclosed community of Colettine nuns in fifteenth-century Ghent. These miracles, all performed by the local founder and saint, Colette Boëllet, consisted in curing several nuns from acute and chronic illnesses. The pain of these illnesses is described in a superlatively extravagant mode, and the record, made by an external notary, is evidence of a “competition in suffering” among the nuns, with harmony restored through the common written testimony.

 

June 2009: Esther Cohen is Professor of medieval history at the Department of History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She is the author of books on justice, crime and law in the later Middle Ages and numerous articles. Her work of the past decade deals with the subject of pain in the later Middle Ages. She has recently completed a comprehensive study on the subject.

 

Publisher's Version

Volume 7, issue 2 Life Writing
Last updated on 04/17/2020