DISCUSSING THE CAUSES of paralysis in his medical compendium Rosa medicinae (The Rose of Medicine), John of Gaddesden describes the condition stupor by citing the conflicting theories of Avicenna and Galen about the condition's defining feature: its effect on the powers of sense and motion. While stupor is most explicitly described and used in medical texts, states of reduced or impaired bodily faculties suffuse writings of ecstatic religious experiences. In moments of spiritual ecstasy or rapture, the affected body becomes impaired in one or more faculties, manifesting often as temporary paralysis, numbness, blindness, and other sensory and motor impairments. For instance, Julian of Norwich's (1343–after 1416) deathbed vision of Christ occurs alongside partial paralysis and increasing blindness. In these moments, the body of the religious ecstatic becomes an object, not unlike the bleeding relics of Caroline Walker Bynum's work which “speak or act their physicality in particularly intense ways that call attention to their per se ‘stuffness’ and ‘thingness.’” Taking medieval medical stupor as a case study, we might understand how religious writers—whether male authors of anchoritic guides and vitae of anchoresses or anchorites themselves—used medical discourse to describe and make sense of powerful and complex somatic and cognitive experiences.

In some religious and devotional texts, stupor functions to describe the paralysis or temporary numbness of the faculties of movement or sensation. The hallmark biblical narrative for this physical state is the conversion of St. Paul in Acts of the Apostles. The biblical account uses precisely this language, describing Paul as “tremens ac stupens” (trembling and astonished) after encountering God on the road to Damascus. This moment is described in Paul's vita in the South English Legendary (thirteenth–fourteenth century) as astonishment, or the state of being astoned, as stupor becomes in Middle English: “he stod ase þei he a-stoned were.” The physi cal effects of this stupor or astonishment on Paul's body include the inability to move, temporary blindness, and trembling. Indeed, anchoritic materials acknowledge the interconnectedness of spiritual experience and bodily health or illness.