Conclusion

Abstract

Even the most humble vernacular pastoral manual recognized the significance of medicine and the medicalized body in relation to the sins, whether functioning metaphorically, metonymically, or materially. Confessors and medieval writers were sensitive to, if not in agreement upon, the challenging pulls of physiology and the body’s natural inclinations in reference to both private confession and widespread social phenomena. Furthermore, the wide range of medical images produced reveals the circulation of medical ideas in culture and a multifarious understanding of the body and behavior in the later Middle Ages. The discussion of the medical underpinnings of religious imagery might smack of the “medical materialism” deployed to make sense of religious experience that William James disparages in The Varieties of Religious Experience.¹ Understanding the medical contexts of the seven deadly sins—their status in relation to the passions, their symbolic and material effects upon both body and soul—do not undermine their significance in medieval culture. However, rather than seeing medicine as a material reduction of religious experience and spirituality, it is integral to better understand cultural meanings of living and suffering, being a body and a soul.