Windows Onto the Past III

Here we resume a series commenced in January and February of this year. The stories of two people who were brought to the shrine of the twelfth-century martyr Thomas á Becket, and the stained glass windows in Canterbury Cathedral that commemorate their respective recoveries, were then the subject of our attention. Our point of departure this time is not a window as such but what in 1875 a New York Times journalist called “a remarkable work of…carved wood” in which “a demon leaves the head of a lunatic woman cured by prayer” and “a lunatic in chains [is] waiting his turn for deliverance”.¹ The journalist identified the location of this woodcut as a twelfth-century chapel dedicated to another martyr, St Dymphna, in the Belgian town of Gheel. To our chagrin, we do not have a picture of it; maybe it no longer survives?

The precise contours of Dymphna’s life are contested, her story having been carried by oral tradition for centuries prior to being written down. Yet in Western Christian tradition, she is venerated as a saint and a martyr for having fled her native Ireland to avoid an incestuous marriage, and for preferring a violent death at the hands of her father (who chased her to Gheel) over capitulation to his plans. There are distinctive features to her story that led to her becoming known as one of the patron saints of ‘the mad’. Gheel was apparently home to a colony of ‘lunatics’, ‘raving and possessed’, and Dymphna may have settled there with the intent of doing ‘good works’ among them. In the event, according to the narrative anyway, she did more for them in death than she did in life.

‘…[W]hen Dymphna still refused to go home with her father, he took his dagger and beheaded her. As her head rolled down the path to the chapel, “five lunatics” watched. The following morning, they awoke with their minds “lucid and balanced”…’²

Presumably the sight of Dymphna’s courage in the face of death was thought to have (miraculously) fortified these sufferers, however much it might seem to us that events such as these would be more likely to intensify mental distress than to relieve it.

The story does not end there. The return of the “five lunatics” to their senses in the wake of Dymphna’s martytrdom was but the first of many mental recoveries attributed to her miraculous (and posthumous) intervention. As is well-known, Gheel developed into (and remains to this day) a centre for the care and treatment of mental ill-health in the community settings offered by the town itself, its residents acting as foster-carers. The characteristics of this mode of treatment have been read back (on rather slight evidence) into Dymphna’s biography, as well as forward to critique other contemporary models, the psychoanalyst Bernard Rubin writing that “the effectiveness of moral community therapy that began in Gheel in the seventh century has been largely forgotten today and supplanted by less compassionate methods”.³

¹ cited by Bernard Rubin, ‘St. Dymphna and the Lunatics: Moral Psychiatry’, in Meltzer, F. and Elsner, J. (eds.), Saints: Faith without Borders (University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 196.

² ibid., p. 195.

³ ibid., p. 197.

Windows onto the Past II

[ continued from previous post ]

In treating the early history of Bethlem Hospital, Edward O’Donoghue does not shrink from retrospective diagnosis of those who were brought to the shrine of Thomas á Becket for healing in the twelfth century. “Matilda of Cologne”, he wrote in 1914, “would find her place in a refractory ward today”.

“Her language was foul, she tore her clothes to pieces, and struck at everyone who tried to remove her. She also was tightly trussed, and thus bound she raved on for four or five hours [in the vicinity of Becket’s tomb], but by degrees she came to herself, when she said that she had seen in a dream the ‘martyr [Thomas] clothed in pontifical vestments with the blood streak across his face’.” ¹

This is a fair summary of the contemporary account of the miracle given by Benedict of Peterborough, but it omits the explanation given by Benedict of Matilda’s mental turmoil, which is twofold. At one level, the cause of her troubles was simply stated to be a “devil” who “left behind foul traces” at the time it was “driven out”. Yet Benedict intimates that there is more to Matilda’s case – or another way of looking at her case – than a solely supernatural perspective might offer. “When we asked her how she came to be insane, she said that her brother had killed a young man who loved her dearly, and that in a fit of madness she had struck with her fist her baby son [fathered by the murdered man, perhaps?]…and removed him from this world.” ²

This agonising story has a psychological depth that transcends the centuries. Matilda, we are told, left Canterbury “healed and joyful, concerned…about nothing but gaining forgiveness for her crime”. Both her torment and her recovery are vividly represented in the Cathedral windows (with rather less psychological realism, we venture to say) by the state of her hair. Interestingly, they were also the subject of a dramatic re-enactment staged in Canterbury Cathedral in 2009 by postgraduate students at the University of Kent.

Those interested in finding out more about medieval miracle accounts such as those of Benedict of Peterborough may consult Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2010) by Rachel Koopmans of Toronto’s York University.

¹ Edward O’Donoghue, The Story of Bethlehem Hospital from its Foundation in 1247 (London, 1914), p. 72.

² J.C. Robertson and J.B. Sheppard (eds.), Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, vol. II (London, 1876), pp. 208-209.

Images used with the kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral

Windows onto the Past I

Reaching deep into the past for accounts of mental distress that were contemporary with Bethlem’s foundation for his published history of the Hospital, Bethlem’s early twentieth century chaplain Edward O’Donoghue discovered what he considered to be “two stories of acute mania” in Benedict of Peterborough’s account of miracles wrought at the tomb of Thomas á Becket in the years immediately following Becket’s 1170 martyrdom in Canterbury Cathedral. Both of these stories were captured in stained glass as well as in narrative, and we have gained the Cathedral’s permission to highlight the first of them in this post, and the second in one to follow.

O’Donoghue reports the chronicler as recording that “the mad Henry of Fordwich was dragged by his friends to the tomb [of Thomas] with his hands tied behind him, struggling and shouting, and there remained all day, but began to recover as the sun went down, and after a night spent in the church went home, perfectly well in his mind”.¹

There is a more economical, even poetic quality to the version of the story that adorns the stained glass version of this miracle: ‘Amens accedit; Orans sanusque recedit’ (‘He arrives out of his mind; he prays, and departs sane.’) There is nothing lyrical, however, about the scene these glass panels represent (described in more detail here). The clubs wielded by Henry’s ‘friends’ tell their own story; not of punishment per se, but rather of an attempt to administer the kind of “sharp sudden shock” to the body which, it has often been thought, would prompt the sufferer to “snap out of it” and “somehow rearrange the disordered mental mechanism into order again”.²

O’Donoghue’s rationalising commentary on this miracle makes fascinating reading. “The treatment of patients in the Middle Ages was not quite as absurd or inhuman as it may appear on first sight”, he writes. “The ducking of maniacs, their confinement in a church all night, and the use of ligatures and whips were calculated to exhaust their fury, and instil in them that sense of terror which tames a wild beast. In that condition of mind they were, I take it, more sensitive to the associations of a miracle-working shrine, and more ready to profit by the healing ministrations of time and nature.”³

It is equally interesting that Benedict of Peterborough does not appear to regard Henry of Fordwich as demoniacally possessed. He is simply ‘mad’, and the miracle-working power of Thomas’ shrine was as efficacious for him as it was for those with physical complaints. In this perceived continuum between ailments and treatment of mind and body, is it too fanciful to detect a proto-medical mindset within which may have been the seeds of the first biological psychiatry?

[to be continued]

¹ Edward O’Donoghue, The Story of Bethlehem Hospital from its Foundation in 1247 (London, 1914), p. 72.

² W.L. Jones, Ministering to Minds Diseased: A History of Psychiatric Treatment (London, 1983), p. 9.

³ O’Donoghue, op. cit., p. 72.

Both images used with the kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral