ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on to answer two questions. First, when music was used as a form of therapy in the Middle Ages, what was the rationale for its use? Second, how did the medical doctors of the period justify the use of music as a therapeutic instrument? These questions are not necessarily linked. The chapter shows the opposite — that there is a link between the two questions, and that the rationale for the use of music as therapy did have a medical basis, and did positively influence practice. Music was famously used in the case of the Flemish painter Hugo van der Goes, who suffered an episode of mental disturbance sometime after 1477, while he was a conversus brother in the house of the Red Cloister in the forest of Soignes near Brussels. Music and demonic power can both be included in a naturalistic account of possible influences on the human mind.
