Until relatively recently, historians of psychiatry were inclined to view the Christian Middle Ages as a medically primitive era, and the period before 1200 was considered particularly bleak.[646]

In his History of Medical Psychology (1941), Gregory Zilboorg painted a picture of an early medieval world mired in superstition and irrational belief. According to Zilboorg, the baleful influence of the Christian Church meant that mental illness was interpreted as demonic possession, and ‘psychiatry...

In an effort to distance themselves from the Whiggish discourse of earlier generations, revisionist scholars of the late-twentieth century turned their attention to demon-free sources.^[649] In the last couple of decades these have included legal and medical texts which articulate symptoms of insanity in purely pathological terms.^[650] In this respect, it may be telling that hagiography from the early and central Middle Ages—in which demons so freely abound— is rarely consulted by medievalists researching information about mental illness.^{[651] [652] This is despite the fact that by far the largest body of evidence for men­tal and behavioural disorders in north-west Europe between late Antiquity and 1200 is found in hagiographical narratives. Much of this occurs in miracle accounts which describe—and often in some detail—the symptoms of sick and infirm pilgrims visiting healing shrines.[653]}

When, on occasion, miracle collections are examined for evidence of men­tal pathology, the tendency is to separate the supernatural from the natural in pursuit of either a ‘religious' or ‘medical' model of interpretation.^[654] However, the inclination to set religion and medicine apart speaks more of our own cognitive preoccupations than it does of medieval ones, and runs the risk of setting up irreconcilable structural oppositions—such as demonology versus pathology—which were not necessarily present in the Middle Ages.

The merging of Christian belief and medical science in this period is per­haps nowhere better illustrated than in miracle narratives compiled in twelfth­century England which—paradoxically to modern thinking—sought to prove and validate the miraculous by scientific means. Written in a century which prided itself in its ‘concern with scientific truth', these sources reflect the new intellectual rationalism and pragmatism of the so-called twelfth-century ‘renaissance'.^{[656] [657] [658] In this notably sceptical age, miracles came under particu­lar scrutiny, and miracle stories—in common with other written genres— verified their claims of supernatural events with appropriate evidence.11 Reports of miraculous healing not only employed eyewitness testimony as a means of bolstering their integrity, they also exploited available medical authority to demonstrate that miracle beneficiaries had indeed been suffering from serious medically-attested conditions.}

Although the monastic and clerical authors of twelfth-century miracle accounts possessed varying degrees of medical knowledge inherited from the classical world, their narratives were nonetheless works of hagiography and followed a religious agenda, not a medical one. Since demonic possession was a traditional ingredient of the miracle genre, it is perhaps understandable that modern scholars still fight shy of these demon-infested sources. As a result, rel­atively little is known about the ways in which mental disorders were inserted into the medico-religious framework in twelfth-century England, or how con­temporary hagiographers negotiated the awkward boundary between medi­cine and demonology in miracle accounts.

This chapter seeks to investigate this neglected area of medical history, drawing on a sample of twenty miracle collections (miracula) compiled in England in the ‘long' twelfth century (cio8o-ci2oo).i² Selected for the inclusion of incidents of madness and demonic possession among their healing stories, these miracula collectively yield ninety-five case studies of mental disorders.^{[659] [660]} Focusing in particular on stories which attribute the symptoms of mental dis­turbance to demonic causes, the chapter examines the ways in which these supernatural agents are depicted affecting mental health, and looks at the medical symptoms they are said to induce. In assessing the wider narrative function of demons in stories of mental illness, the chapter also contributes to the on-going debate about the reception of miracle narratives, and argues that madness-causing demons carried multivalent messages to culturally diverse audiences.