At 10:32 AM 12/30/98 -0500, you wrote:
> John Parsons writes:
> >Again, a quite sensible idea. But it does make me wonder about later German
>>convents--Helfta, obviously--in which numbers of nuns experienced visions
>>concurrently!
Patrick Nugent writes:
>May I once again express discomfort with the tendency to medicalize? I
write about miracle >stories, and find myself often fighting an uphill
battle against those who want to try to diagnose >symptoms. Miracle
stories seem to me to relate what are better thought of as cultural
practices >that carry enormous symbolic weight, perform social and
religious functions (although they do >much more - lest I be accused of
functionalism), and tend to reproduce themselves over time. >(I.e., where
some people are doing it, other are likely to pick it up and do it some
more.) I am >convinced that visionary practices are like this. They are
culturally sanctioned and validated, they >carry a certain authority
(though not indisputed). They are instantiated as literary practices
>(visionary texts) but not reducible to those texts (something I fear I
implied in my last posting on >this). They are a sort of common language -
all the speakers knew the rules, but could bend them >creatively, though
not too creatively as Jeanne d'Arc and Marguerite Porete learned [wasn't it
>Porete who was burned? I'm too lazy to look it up . . . ]. To chalk them
up to disease is too >reductionistic, though migraines, ergotism, etc. may
well have been one ingredient, on occasion. It >also imposes a
twentieth-century construction of "disease" upon a culture who drew that
boundary >very differently.
i think there's a middle path here: lots of people have migraines, not
everyone has visions. the cultural work is on the way in which the
"disease" (or dis-ease) is experienced. in order to experience intense
migraines as visions takes an extraordinary soul, and i do not think it
belittles hildegard to argue something along those lines. Similarly for
ergot. I always wondered why people at the turn of the millennium -- when
it first appears in earnest (eg acc to the writings of Ademar and Glaber
and others) -- referred to it as "sacer ignis". Clearly we are dealing
with a socially/culturally constructed experience of something whose
medical "symptoms" are only part of the problem.
[snip, some very good and interesting comments]
>All of this is to say that I don't think we need ergotism or migraines or
even theories about >delusions (though nobody's proposed that here) to
understand the visions of medieval nuns, even if >those events sometimes
enter in. And I think it is only in the rarest of circumstances (I haven't
seen >any yet) that we can mount a persuasive argument that such things are
the determining factors.
determining is obviously a hard cause to come by. but wd you be willing to
consider "constituant".
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Patrick J. Nugent
richard landes
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