Wollaston Research Seminar

Please join us for the Wollaston Research Seminar on Monday 21 July, either in-person at Wollaston Theological College campus, or online via Zoom.

Professor Megan Cassidy-Welch (Dean of Research Strategy, University of Divinity) to present: Health and healthcare in medieval pilgrim accounts: intersections of spiritual and physical wellbeing.

Abstract: In this paper I explore ideas of health and preventative healthcare measures undertaken by mobile religious populations during the Middle Ages. For crusaders throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, spiritual health and physical health were deeply entwined. Crusaders imagined the ‘holy war’ in which they were engaged to have a cleansing purpose, and they thought of their own suffering as an imitation of Christ’s suffering. In terms of healthcare, crusaders and other pilgrims were keen to calibrate carefully body and soul. This was achieved through practices of balance and the importance of movement, through ideas about ingestion and expulsion, and through particular understandings of the environments crusaders encountered. This paper will include examples from across the crusading period, but will pay specific attention to a thirteenth-century Regimen composed by Adam of Cremona for the emperor Frederick II prior to his crusade to Jerusalem, and to a specific pilgrimage site in Syria, Our Lady of Saydnaya, which produced miraculous healing oil and which was a destination for crusaders and pilgrims concerned to secure spiritual health through sensory and bodily encounters with the divine.

Join our mailing list by contacting research@wollaston.edu.au. Zoom invitations and pre-reading will be distributed to this list in advance. All in-person seminars are held in the Gerald New Room, Wollaston Theological College, Mt Claremont 6010.