Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I The Burning Disease: Different Names for the Same Disease or Different Diseases with the Same Name?
- Part II St Anthony the Abbot, Thaumaturge of the Burning Disease, and the Order of the Hospital Brothers of St Anthony
- Part III The Discovery of Ergotism (Saint Anthony's Fire?)
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- About the Author
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I The Burning Disease: Different Names for the Same Disease or Different Diseases with the Same Name?
- Part II St Anthony the Abbot, Thaumaturge of the Burning Disease, and the Order of the Hospital Brothers of St Anthony
- Part III The Discovery of Ergotism (Saint Anthony's Fire?)
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- About the Author
- Index
Summary
Abstract The introduction outlines the author's methodological approach. In a departure from the historiographical tradition, she aims to demonstrate that the term Saint Anthony's Fire, coined in the Middle Ages, was only rarely used at the time to describe ergotism – a disease triggered by the consumption of a parasitic fungus on grain cereals, which mainly caused gangrene in the limbs. Adopting appropriate epistemological criteria, the author collects and interprets the different meanings of the expression in medical, literary, hagiographical and legal texts. Differing methodological approaches are needed for these sources, particularly because the disease could sometimes assume a symbolic value in non-medical texts. This requires interpretation and complicates the task of the historian studying the diseases of the past.
Keywords: diseases; St Anthony's Fire; ergotism; morbus regius; retrospective diagnosis
The bibliography on Saint Anthony's Fire is extensive and there has long been a historiographical consensus on the precise profile of the disease: it is the medieval name for ergotism, a disease caused by the ingestion of ergot, a fungus that parasitizes rye, which was widely used in breadmaking in the Middle Ages. Carlo Ginzburg writes:
The ingestion of flour thus contaminated provokes real epidemics of ergotism (from ergot, the word that designates the mushroom in English and in French). Two varieties of this morbid condition are known. The first, recorded mainly in western Europe, causes very serious forms of gangrene; in the Middle Ages it was known as ‘Saint Anthony's fire’. The second, chiefly spread in central and northern Europe, provoked convulsions, extremely violent cramps, states similar to epilepsy, with a loss of consciousness lasting six to eight hours. Both forms, the gangrenous and convulsive, were very frequent due to the diffusion on the European continent of a grain-like rye, which is much hardier than wheat. In the course of the seventeenth century they often had lethal consequences, especially before their cause was discovered to be the claviceps purpurea.
Similar explanations of ergotism and Saint Anthony's Fire can be found in most books on medieval studies. In his work on disease in Europe, Jean-Noël Biraben writes:
The most remarkable of these epidemics, and the most serious in this period, [the early Middle Ages] was the so-called holy fire (or Saint Anthony's fire).
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- Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019