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Medieval Hagiography and Healthcare across Media and Performances

Objective

HagioHealth will develop the novel concept of ‘comparative hagio-medical aesthetics’ to explore the medieval healthcare structures and aesthetics shaping and shaped by sanctity. The project’s double hypothesis is that medical developments went hand in hand with changes in the fashioning of sanctity and that saintly healthcare played a key role in both medieval medical cultures and artistic creation. The healer’s function, fundamental to the construction of sanctity, has yet to be properly explored. Instead, saints have so far chiefly been studied according to their type of holiness as depicted almost solely in textual sources and within determined geographic, linguistic, and cultural contexts. Meanwhile, medical history has not sufficiently considered the importance of sanctity and its history in grasping premodern healthcare and well-being. HagioHealth will address these gaps and blind spots. The concept behind it has at its centre three interconnected actors: saints acting as healthcare providers; hagiographers becoming healthcare mediators and, at times, healers; and suffering devotees seeking saintly cures. Holding at once a hagiographical and a medical lens, and drawing on theories of lived religion, intertextuality, intervisuality, and intermediality, HagioHealth will provide the first complete picture of sanctity revealing its inherent medical aesthetics and changing position within medieval medical pluralism. To test its hypothesis and achieve its objectives, HagioHealth will span various media (texts, visual arts, and objects) and performances (practices and rituals) in three important and highly interrelated hagiographical and medical cultures: Byzantine, Latin, and Slavic (9th–15th c.). In addition to creating a step change in hagiography and medical history, the project will offer new research avenues also for medieval studies, religious studies, and literary and art criticism, contributing significantly to the current ‘medical turn’ in the humanities.

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Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) ERC-2025-ADG

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Host institution

UNIVERSITY OF CYPRUS
Net EU contribution
€ 2 482 000,00
Address
AVENUE PANEPISTIMIOU 2109 AGLANTZI
1678 Nicosia
Cyprus
Region
Κύπρος Κύπρος Κύπρος
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
No data

Beneficiaries (1)