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The ghost of Edward the Confessor cures Harold Godwinson's gout, a man with a hugely inflated testicle like Viz's Buster Gonad has it punctured and deflated by the the ghost of Thomas a Becket's fingernails, and St Thomas assists some small children in locating some missing cheese.
It sounds niche - and it was - but it was also, eventually, very interesting. It took me a bit of getting into, to be honest. Maclehose is a historian of medieval medicine and religion at UCL and he clearly knows his stuff. The same, I'm afraid to say, could not be said for me. At first I struggled to work out what he was even talking about as he ran through background details of Hypnos (the Greek personification of sleep), Apollo (in charge of medicine and healing), his son Asclepius who joined the family business and is known for carrying a snake entwined staff, and Hygieia (Apollo's grand-daughter, Asclepius's son) whose name we get the word 'hygiene' from.
Confused yet? Don't worry, it gets clearer - a bit. The doctor was quick to let us know that he'd been working on this stuff for some time but research was ongoing, some kind of caveat?, before drilling down on some of the theories he's unearthed while studying sleep and saints. Beginning with one that hardly needs disputing, I'd have thought. That people's sleep used to be more segmented. Instead of eight straight hours, it's believed something like two lots of four (with a little break to read a book or have sex in the middle) was more common.
These days we'd spend that interim period looking at our phones I guess. But the fact that some kind of siesta culture was more popularly observed in the past is hardly news. The talk was more about what goes on in our heads when we're asleep and how we explain this to ourselves and others.
We still don't know why we dream what we dream and we don't even really know why we dream. Some believed, some still do believe, that dreams can reveal the future but this idea was rejected as far back as Aristotle. Artemidorus wrote Oneirocritica in the 2c AD and it was the first Greek work on the subject of dream interpretation, but it doesn't tell us much other than that dreaming of dangerous animals signifies fears about dangerous enemies in real life and that dreaming of tools means an end to problems soon.
These are fairly standard interpretations of fairly standard dreams which is fair enough because Artemidorus, quite literally, wrote the book about them. Others have suggested that the Gods interact with us through our dreams and that's a more contentious, and frankly less believable, idea. Completely.
Incubation! Ill people come to temples and, following purification rituals, they sleep in a chamber (abaton) near their 'God' and, sure enough, dream of contact with a holy figure and wake up healed. One woman even has sex with a snake to cure her infidelity. Or at least that's what she said.
Incubo means 'to lie or rest upon', to compare the incubus and when Pagan temples were converted into Christian churches this practice continued, a prominent example being San Clemente al Laterano in Rome, a former mithraeum used by worshippers of Mithras.
The whole idea of Jesus and his apostles having the power to heal people is believed to have come from this concept of sleep-surgeons. Martyrs, virgins, and confessors were the main three groups of people who'd achieve sainthood and thus become sleep-surgeons and soon there was a huge market in relics belonging to these saints.
Some could be tiny parts of their body, or clothing, or things (just think of the sort of people who collect David Bowie's old household appliances after his death - I know one! - if you think this hasn't trickled down into the secular world) and, in other instances like Catherine of Siena, it can be an entire human head!
Anglo-Saxon saints included Edmund (representing Bury), Cuthbert (Durham), Aethelthrith (Ely), Dunstan (Canterbury), Frideswide (Oxford), Aebbe (Berwickshire), and William of Norwich but perhaps the break out star was, of course, the aforementioned Thomas a Becket.
Murdered by Henry II's 'minions' in Canterbury in 1170 ("will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?") and canonised just three years later, post-death Becket became something of a superstar and soon pilgrimages to Canterbury began. We're shown images of disabled children being wheeled to the Kent cathedral city and one guy's even rocked up on a camel. Presumably, he's had a long journey.
In 1400, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales was published and it told of a group of pilgrims who start their journeys from the Tabard Inn, London Bridge. The Museum of London has a collection of badges and ampullae from these pilgrimages (you could also get 'stickers' for completing a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain). The ampullae, apparently, contain minute amounts, to a negligible - almost homeopathic level, of saint's blood. Santa sangre!
Another popular dead saint to visit to get yourself healed was Edward the Confessor who doesn't get out of Westminster Abbey much these days. As we've read he managed to cure Harold's gout from beyond the grave but Dr Maclehose doesn't want to dwell on these ancient stories. He's got some more contemporary examples and he's gonna bring us kicking and screaming into the ........ twelfth century.
We hear about the miracle of the deacon's leg, the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People crops up, there's some stuff about the Temple of Epidaurus in Greece, and there's a story about a saint 'helping' a woman with a dead foetus inside of her. These holy types also found new and novel excuses for touching people where they weren't supposed to it seems.
By this point I was getting confused again but the doctor continued, sometimes keeping me with him, sometimes losing me. We hear about saints rearranging people's brains if their brains are 'wrong' and we hear that if you're too unwell to make a pilgrimage the saints could make house visits. This is how they cured two daughters of Godbold of Boxley. Those daughters were so satisfied with the service they received from the saints that, on full recuperation, they travelled to pay their respects at Becket's shrine.
I'd learnt a lot of stuff that was probably of no practical use to me whatsoever (so normal service, then) but it'd been, when I could follow it, a fascinating look into a subject I'd never given more than a moment's thought to in the past. A Q&A session took in miracles of the hand of St James in Reading Abbey, the tendency of St Ives (the Cambridgeshire saint, not the Cornish one) to round up a posse and beat people up, a man who was orally entered by a snake while sleeping, the theory that belief in alien abduction (lots of anal probing, apparently) has replaced that of sleep-surgeons, and a quite lengthy digression into sleep paralysis.
It all ended with another theory about the whole of Christianity coming out a Jew's dream, a nod of the head towards 12c Benedictine abbess and composer Hildegard of Bingen, and a good laugh about the doctor who recommended as a cure for insomnia a good night's sleep.
My head was abuzz as I walked back to Whitechapel and took the East London line home. I got home and watched Newsnight and wished some sleep-surgeon could come along and remove the nightmares of Brexit and Boris fucking Johnson from my life but, unlike these fun evenings in rooms above pubs, the bullshit they spout is real and dangerous so I had some cheese'n'crackers and I went to bed.
Dream, baby, dream!
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