ABSTRACT
Montse Cabré and Fernando Salmόn take us into the heart of Christianised Europe and the world of miracles and devotion to the Virgin. They analyse the story of the apparent poisoning of a young girl who had been fasting intensely – but not poisoned by a human agent, nor by a poison introduced from outside her body. She was devoted to the cult of Mary and signalled that her heart was the locus of her illness. Her mother appears to have called for her heart to be anatomised. When the heart was dissected, the onlookers found ‘a likeness of the Glorious one, which She [Holy Mary] had graven there’. The finding leads the onlookers to praise Mary. It looks like a case of self-poisoning, the possibility of which had been expounded in the writings of Avicenna, the great Persian writer who developed the Greek tradition from Galen. Cabré and Salmόn explore some of the different ways in which poisoning could be believed to happen, even ‘through a glance, a sound or a smell’.
