محروم من الحس والعقل الجنون .. والمسّ، والتشخيص في أوروبا في العصور الوسطى

Medieval saints were believed to be able to provide miraculous cures for a wide range of ailments, and about a tenth of their miracles involved restoring the mind of those who had lost it. Deprived of Sense and Reason explores 460 of these stories, written across Latin Christendom between 1240 and 1500. The study uses a critical disability studies perspective to bridge the gap between discussions of demonic possession and naturally occurring physical conditions, as all such accounts of disability and supernatural healing are treated not as documentation of changes in individual functioning, but rather as evidence of intrinsic and intrusive interpersonal tensions in medieval societies. While medieval societies attributed these tensions to a defect in consciousness in a single individual, the miracle texts of that era also reveal how the functions and imbalances of consciousness were named and classified. In her study of these texts, Lee-Anne Craig explores the terms and discourses used to diagnose loss of mind, whether of natural causes or the result of demonic possession, tracing the use of Latin vocabulary in medical, legal, and theological references. Deprived of Sense and Reason concludes that because diagnoses were difficult and often uncertain, they varied based on regional cultures of disability in northern and southern Europe, influences on the development of societal consensus in Latin Europe during the Middle Ages, gender-based assumptions, physical evidence, and self-diagnosis.