Dr%20Daniel%20McCann: List of publications

Around 1580 in Valencia an illiterate female healer, or metgessa, attracted the attention of the Inquisition as part of their ongoing case against the demonically assisted doctor Jerónimo Pachet. While not in communion with the Devil, this metgessa was nevertheless scrutinized for a certain form of therapy she ofered. As the inquisitorial records make clear, she was practising a specifc treatment common at the time to both Christians and Moors, whereby a mirror was used to project a text onto the body of a patient: she was ‘curing by projecting over the mirror the pages of a book, the contents of which were supposed to be curative and these qualities being collected and transmitted by the mirror’.1 Te text, then, was believed to possess a therapeutic potential in and of itself, one that could be harnessed and directed onto the patient’s ailing body regardless of the literacy, or professional status, of the person administering the treatment. The anecdote serves as an introduction to the central concerns of this essay — the complex relationship between texts, religious regulation, and conceptualizations of therapeutic practices in premodern cultures.

This article explores the idea of therapeutic reading during the later Middle Ages in relation to Richard Rolle’s Meditation on the Passion. Focusing on Rolle and his therapeutic conception of reading as a medicine of words, the article begins by noting the great frequency with which medical terms, images, and phrases occur in his vernacular writings. It highlights how sin is understood by Rolle as an affective poison, one that must be removed from the soul through intense affective states that are held to be purgative. The article then moves to consider how exactly medieval texts evoke affective states. It notes the importance of vivid images and their ability to elicit emotive responses, but then turns to medieval texts on grammar and the art of poetry for new ways of understanding precisely how words can evoke the passions of the soul. The article then offers a close reading of Rolle’s Meditation on the Passion in light of these grammatical texts, and demonstrates how it functions as a medicine of words — as a texts that works to purge the soul of sin through intense affect states.