ABSTRACT
Research conducted over the last decade has greatly enriched and complicated the understanding of the relationship between religion and medicine in early modern Europe. This chapter seeks to add a further dimension to this intricate and ambivalent picture by exploring the impact the Reformation had upon the beliefs and practices associated with healing springs in early modern Britain. Hallowed wells were an integral part of this late medieval geography of the sacred. The emphasis that Elizabethan writers placed on the natural causes of the cures wrought by healing springs was driven by a fervent distaste for the cult of saints and underpinned by a conviction that in the modern age, miracles had, for the most part, ceased. The search for a deeper comprehension of the mysterious workings of nature in these marvellous waters was by no means incompatible with providential piety.
