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Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy by Hannah Marcus (review)

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whether it is mental or physical is not clarified. Moreover, the phrase describing his insomnia, from which the saint cures him, is taken as an accurate reflection of his emotional… Click to show full abstract

whether it is mental or physical is not clarified. Moreover, the phrase describing his insomnia, from which the saint cures him, is taken as an accurate reflection of his emotional distress rather than a rhetorical flourish on the part of the chronicler. Justifying this at more length might have been helpful. The fourth chapter demonstrates that the vast majority of cure-seekers came from within one to two days’ journey of the saints’ shrines. Salter convincingly argues that intimacy between saint (and shrine) and community was an important factor in cure-seeking. Chapter 5, in examining road infrastructure and incidental hazards such as bad weather or opportunistic criminals, seeks to reconstruct the lived experience of those traveling, with limited resources and sometimes impaired mobility, to the shrines of saints. As Salter demonstrates, travel was a key element of the social experience of cure-seeking. Miracle accounts indicate awareness of the dangers of travel and a desire to mitigate these, as well as the importance of accompaniment and assistance in making places of cure accessible. Both here and in chapter 6, which evaluates the uses of space at shrines, it would have been valuable to see more exploration of accessibility as defined by the field of disability studies. The question of when and how laypersons could access the shrine of the saint was one with important implications for the fulfillment of monastic obligations. Salter concludes that pilgrims and cure-seekers were seen as constituting a distinctive group of visitors, and that monastic communities ensured their access to shrines. Use of Jacalyn Duffin’s work on healing saints might have made for interesting comparison.2 Still, the careful analysis in Salter’s work will make it useful to medievalists, and its engagement with broader questions should enable scholarly comparison with the experiences of cure-seekers in other historical periods and today.

Keywords: medicine science; forbidden knowledge; cure; cure seekers; medicine; knowledge medicine

Journal Title: Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Year Published: 2022

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