Curing the Soul: Medical Metaphors between Meditation and Conversion in the Medieval West
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6093/1593-2214/12300Keywords:
High and Late Middle Ages, 14th-15th centuries, spirituality, medical metaphors, preaching, devotion, penanceAbstract
This article analyses the theological and symbolic role of medical metaphors in two discursive traditions of the late-medieval West: devotional literature and mendicant preaching. Through a comparative analysis of sermons by Giordano da Pisa, Bernardino of Siena and Saint Vincent Ferrer, alongside the Passion chapters of Vita Christi by Isabel de Villena, it explores how images such as the wound, balm or ointment articulate divergent models of spiritual healing. While preaching activates a penitential lexicon centred on incision, purgation, and redemptive fear, the Vita Christi develops a rhetoric of sweetness and fragrance, wherein sensory meditation transforms the wound into comfort. This study combines a philological and symbolic approach and argues that such metaphors are not mere embellishments but structural elements: they shape distinct spiritual architectures in which language does not merely represent redemption, it enacts it.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Anna Isabel Peirats Navarro
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