JISCMail - MEDIEVAL-RELIGION Archives

Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I would certainly (as I think I tried to say) be willing to agree that sometimes illnesses like migraines or ergotism might have played a role in visions. Let's leave aside ignis sacer for the moment and concentrate on the visions of people like Hildegard. I'm not fond of using "Ockham's razor" because I think these matters (like miracle stories!) are "overdetermined" - that is, there's always more mess than a single theory can account for, and multiple theories that are incompatible at points may be necessary to give a full and satisfying account of a phenomenon like visions - in which case one sacrifices a degree of systematic consistency. Nonetheless - I'm leery of piling up theories about migraines and ergotism as factors in visions simply because they don't have unique explanatory power (that is, they don't explain things that nothing else can explain) nor do they have high probability of occurrence (that is, we would expect that in a given set of circumstances, the phenomenon was probably present - see my comments on fasting, below).

However, when it has been suggested that migraines or ergotism are the cause (or the occasion, or a stimulus) for visions, it is usually possible to show that this judgment can be made only by blocking out important pieces of evidence. In the case of Hildegard, as McGinn points out, it is clear that the "light(s)" she experienced were more or less constant and permanent, and not confined to times when she was ill (and of course H was ill a great deal) - which rules out any sort of migraine, unless you want to suggest that she had a continuous, non-stop migraine, whereas the kind of migraine Singer hypothesizes is (like every form of migraine I know of) sporadic. Perhaps - but only perhaps - migraines sometimes added to the stew, but I have not seen evidence that they can be precisely identified. And if they're present only sometimes, and we cannot tell precisely when, then what explanatory power do they have? Same thing with the suggestion that H suffered from ergotism: Somebody suggested - was it John Parsons? forgive me - that H would have been rotting where she stood if she had ergotism, and given her medical acuity, we might expect that she'd make some comment about having external symptoms of ergotism, which, as far as I know, she does not.

I'm willing to consider these kind of medical explanations as part of the stew of explanatory factors when they have unique explanatory power or high probability of occurrence. This principle, it seems to me, helps tread a middle road between reductionistic explanations (that fail to take seriously the religious and literary dimensions of visions, or rather, that try to explain visions away rather than giving a full and rich account of them) and, on the other hand, excessive piling up of merely possible explanations for which persuasive evidence is not to be found.

Hildegard is one case; there are yet others in which, I think, medicalized explanations can be more helpful. In the case of women visionaries (such as those Bynum studies) who engaged in excessive fasting, it seems credible to me that, since excessive, long-term hunger frequently produces delusions (a very unfortunately loaded word, but other than "hallucinations" I can't think of a better "medicalized" term), the visions of these women may well have been occasioned by their fasting. But only occasioned: how they remember, recount, interpret, craft, and reshape these visions into oral and written "literature," and how they interact with the visionaries' religious lives, far exceeds the bounds that any medical diagnosis can account for. Hunger with its effects is not just a medical condition: it's a cultural construction (a spiritual discipline, even a divine gift, for a thirteenth-century nun, a tragedy for a twentieth-century Somali or an eleventh-century peasant, a spiritual discipline for a 20th-century Trappist, a political strategy for a Bobby Sands). Likewise in the case of millennial movements that might have been occasioned by outbreaks of ergotism: even if ergotism produced visions or millennial excitements, the material for these visions came from the surrounding culture (they weren't having visions of the Buddha or of Elvis, or at least Ralph Glaber doesn't mention them), and the content of the visions was culturally appropriated and gave rise to movements that vastly transcend the medical condition and its symptoms. (By the way, d.v., Steven Sargent will be delivering a paper at Leeds this summer, in a panel on "Miracle Collections: New Approaches," which examines late-medieval peasant visions and their appropriation. The eleventh-century collections I study are also full of ordinary people having visions, but I can't figure out - I don't think it's possible to know - whether they really did, or whether these are literary creations of the miracle collectors.)

This is perhaps more than you bargained for, Richard; my apologies for the length of this, but as you can perhaps tell by now, these are issues I'm trying to think through for myself. I have fantasies of, someday, after the diss. is done & published & I have stable work somewhere, writing a book on illness as a religious practice in the Middle Ages (whatever those are), in which both miracle stories and the experiences of women visionaries and mystics would provide important material.