Reposted by Leah Pope Parker
Leah Pope Parker
@parkerchronicle.bsky.social
257 followers 295 following 43 posts
Baker of hand pies. Scholar of medieval literature and disability: www.leahpopeparker.com She/they. Views: own. Cat: Æthelthryth. Book: doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12571891 Banner: close-up of swirling shades of yellow in oil paint, vaguely floral.
![Part of the first page of chapter two in Light of the Everlasting Life, held open in front of the stone outline marking the Winchester Old Minster’s foundations in grass. The text reads:
Two
St. Swithun’s Crutches
Healing Miracle Narratives and the Relics of Disability
Near the end of his late-tenth-century homily on St. Swithun, Ælfric of Eynsham (ca. 955-ca. 1010) describes a practice that does not appear in any of his Latin sources: cure seekers leaving crutches as votive offerings at the shrine of St. Swithun at Winchester.
[Look, the picture also includes most of the subsequent block quotation, but the AC is out on this train back to London and I have been in this forced sauna situation too long to be able to handle figuring out eths and thorns on my phone. It’s the line about the Old Minster being all bedecked in crutches and stools of people who’ve been healed and they couldn’t even hang half of them up.]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vox6ybnpyncsihjddobcal22/bafkreidtrsk4zmq23zmfwvc6vpvp6slzgonhwqo3ujeujdr4cd5zosroe4)
