Full Description
Many historians of medieval art now look beyond soaring cathedrals to study the relationship of architecture and image-making to life in medieval society. In The Art of Healing, Marcia Kupfer explores the interplay between church decoration and ritual practice in caring for the sick. Her inquiry bridges cultural anthropology and the social history of medicine even as it also expands our understanding of how clergy employed mural painting to cure body and soul.
Looking closely at paintings from ca. 1200 in the church of Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, a castle town in Central France, Kupfer traces their links to burial practices, the veneration of saints, and the care of the sick in nearby hospitals. Through careful analysis of the surrounding agrarian landscape, dotted with cults targeting specific afflictions, especially ergotism (then known as St. Silvan's fire), Kupfer sheds new light on the role of wall painting in an ecclesiastical economy of healing and redemption. Sickness and death, she argues, hold the key to understanding the dynamics of Christian community in the Middle Ages. The Art of Healing will be important reading for cultural anthropologists and historians of both medicine and religion as well as for medievalists and art historians.
Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: "Confess Your Sins"
Part I: The Medieval Site
1. From Castle to Town
Inside the Painted Crypt
Oppidum and Parish
Lord and Borough
2. Chapels, Hospitals, and Healing Cults
Chapels
The Leprosery
The Maison-Dieu
The Porticus of Noyers
3. From Spatialized Body to Painted Crypt
Saint Silvanus's Fire
Local Cults: An Epidemiological Basis?
Local Cults: A System of Representation
Images and the Recapture of Therapeutic Powers
Part II: The Collegiate Church
4. The Architectural Framework: Spatial Disjunction, Social Displacement
Architectural Design and Building Chronology
The Crypt Redefined
Pilgrimage as Penance
5. The Paintings: The Saints in the Crypt
The Apsidal Theophany and the Altar of Saint James
The South Chapel: The Life of Saint Giles
The Axial Chapel: Lazarus, Mary Magdalen, and Martha
From Micro- to Macrocosm
Pictorial Resonance, Programmatic Texture
6. Image and Audience: Infirmity, Charity, and Penance in the Community
Exchange and Mediation
Gender Roles, Body Politics
Infirmity as Social Boundary
Conclusion: The Art of Healing
Epilogue: The Late Medieval Paintings
Notes
Bibliography
Index
