medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
> likewise (i assume), in French a "Hotel Dieu" is not a place for
> traveling gods, but what we would call a "hospital," i.e., a place
> reserved exclusively for the treatment of the sick.
Christopher,
You are getting hung up on the modern definition of "hospital". An Hotel Dieu would be more
like a "hospice", which could accommodate the indigent, whether they came from the city
involved, or whether they were travelling, either for pilgrimage or any other reason. The
"clients" of an Hotel Dieu were not, at least in the Middle Ages, "treated" for their maladies
but only taken care of, because they could not do so themselves, either because they lacked
a support system among family and/or friends, or because they were far from their homes
(the Greek distinction between a xenodocium and a ptocotrophium, or any of the other
"ociums" was not generally maintained in Europe, where the Hotel Dieu subsumed all these
functions). Sometimes, patients did recover and could leave an Hotel Dieu, but there was no
treatment as such -- and the Hotel Dieu at Chartres had at least one extramural cemetery,
just in case. At a pilgrimage site, some pilgrims may have come there for a cure, but at
Chartres, they didn't expect it in the Hotel Dieu but in the crypt near the miraculous well, the
Puits des Saints Forts, or at the high altar, in the presence of the Holy Tunic.
>
> and Jim assumes that that place/institution served a dual purpose, as
> (in modren parlance) a "hospital" and as a "pilgrims' hostel," but i
> see those two as being somewhat incongruous, within the same physical
> space.
>
> of course, that "space" might have been quite large.
The Hotel Dieu at Chartres was very large, larger, in fact, than would have been necessary
for a city that size. That's about the only way one can ascertain, other than foundation
documents, whether an Hotel Dieu was intended specifically for pilgrim traffic, so far as I can
see.
>
> this reconstruction is based upon the size of the God Hotel as it
> existed in the 1850s:
>
> by that time --and presumably in centuries before-- it appears to have
> been a large, complex of quite a few buildings (i believe that the
> large, church-looking structure was the actual "Hospital" (in the
> modren sense); one (or more) of those ancillary buildings could have
> served as a "hostel," as well as serving as dwellings and service
> buildings (dormitory, kitchen, storage, administrative offices) for
> the clerics and others who staffed both.
From about the 16th century onwards, many Hotels Dieu were transformed from their
medieval function of being a "hospice" towards what we would think of more directly as a
"hospital". That, perhaps, makes the medieval reality difficult to recover.
Cheers,
Jim Bugslag
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