Carolyn Muessig wrote:
>
> Today, 4 October, is the feast of...
> [...]
>
> Francesco d'Assisi (1226): Noted stigmatist. Founder of Order of Friars
> Minor. According to *Journal of Paleopathology* 3 (1991) 133-135, his
> blindness was most likely caused by iridocyclitis. (Another
> 20-century diagnosis.) [...]
>
> Two years ago Gary Dickson added this interesting tidbit:
> Several years ago I read an article in *Franciscan Studies* (Ithink it
> was), suggesting that Francis died of leprosy. Now a current item in
> *Mediaeval Studies* argues that Margery Kempe had a neurological
> complaint. The fashion for medicalizing medieval figures goes on.
> [...]
I don't think what's at work here is just medicalising mediaeval figures. I
also encounter the same way of thinking a great deal in modern (eg,
post-WW2) exegetical writing and I think it is the modern equivalent of
allegory in the late ancient world. A question many modern exegetes are
trained to ask of scriptural texts is, 'what must the truth at the root of
this story have been if an author writing at this time presented it in this
way?' It is for example the question that Ray Brown put about the nativity
stories in Matthew's and Luke's gospels: what must Jesus have been like if
thes are the kind of OT-based stories that were told about his birth? In
the same way I think people are asking the question, what must have really
happened, physically or psysiologically, to St Francis or Margery Kempe or
Hildegard of Bingen, if their condition is described in this way.
You could argue endlessly about the philosophical or theological
assumptions about such issues as 'truth' or 'reality' or the form-crit or
lit-crit presuppositions that are at work here but that's not why I bring
it up. I only bring it up because I do think that understanding what it is
that modern writers who do this are doing can actually help us to
understand what some patristic and mediaeval exegetes and preachers were
doing. I think what is going on in both cases is a desire to use modern
knowledge (science, medicine, what have you) to preserve, to protect from
misunderstanding, and to present to a modern audience, what the author
believes are the deepest and most essential truths about scripture or about
a person's life.
Abigail
--
Abigail Ann Young (Dr), Associate Editor/Records of Early English Drama/
Victoria College/ 150 Charles Street W/ Toronto Ontario Canada
Phone (416) 585-4504/ FAX (416) 813-4093/ [log in to unmask]
List-owner of REED-L <http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~reed/reed-l.html>
<http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~reed/reed.html> REED's home page
<http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~reed/stage.html> our theatre resource page
<http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~young> my home page
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