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Medieval saints were thought to be able to provide miraculous cures for a wide variety of illnesses, and the restoration of sanity to those who had lost their minds accounts for about 10% of them in the high and later Middle Ages. Based on a monograph which explores four hundred and sixty of those stories through the lens of disability, this talk will consider how medieval texts classified the function and malfunction of consciousness as deriving either from natural causes or from the predations of demons. The talk will trace the contours of regional cultures of disability and the development of community consensus in such diagnoses in Latin Europe in the Middle Ages - and also account for those stories which expressed uncertainty about how best to categorize an experience of loss of mind.

About the Speaker

Leigh Ann Craig, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University. She studies the intersections between western European religion, medicine, disease, and disability in the high and later Middle Ages. Her present research focuses on medieval modes of treatment for bite exposure to rabies, taking an integrative approach to all such treatments, including those recommended by learned physicians, those recommended in folklore and those offered at the shrines of the saints. Her prior work has used the lens of disability to examine the process of diagnosis (inclusive of somatic diagnoses and demonic ones) where medieval people experienced loss of mind, and has explored the participation of medieval women in a variety of modes of Christian pilgrimage.