Medieval Music: Chant as Cure And Miracle

As the monks were singing in a French abbey of the twelfth century, a cripple, who had crawled into the church suddenly, began to cry aloud and to extend his contorted limbs, ‘and thus he that came into the church on four legs departed on two’. It has been generally forgotten that men and women in the Middle Ages believed that the singing of monks and clergy during worship had the ability to produce sudden and dramatic cures: the music entered the ear as a healing spiritual balm that could hasten results beyond the reach of any contemporary physician.

Crooked limbs became straight with a loud, cracking sound; wounds and sores were closed and healed. This lecture will be devoted to this little-known landscape of medieval musical experience.