Contesting Illness in Early Modern Naples: Miracolati, Physicians and the Congregation of Rites

How did ordinary early modern Europeans regard health and sickness? How did they explain their illnesses? How did they manage their encounters with the whole range of healers that existed in a time of medical pluralism? The early modern body was a battleground for differing interpretations of disease: natural, divine and diabolical. Miracle cures exemplify this ambivalence. They represent a useful focus for study because with them ‘the body finds itself at a limit: between health and disease, life and death, nature and the supernatural, the real and the imaginary’. Rather than deal with miracles per se, however, the focus of this study will be on what miracles – and stories about them – can tell us about the healing process in general. In the first section, I shall consider how the miraculously cured sick people represented illness and the healing process. What can the miracle stories tell us about the links between medicine and religion in Catholic Europe during the early modern period? To answer this we must return to religious and medical concepts of disease. The second and third sections will therefore focus on how two different professions – physicians and ecclesiastics – competed over self-definitions, skills and roles, as evinced in the miracle cure.