Venenum Bibit: The Poison Trial in Medieval Hagiography

This study investigates the capacity of medieval poison metaphors to express anxiety about the human ability to distinguish the truth from a falsehood. Because poison was often administered covertly, things that were described as "poisonous" in the medieval world were not simply destructive, but dangerous in a way that relies on both deception and adulteration. I argue that poison imagery in the medieval monastic context was a tool adapted to deal with epistemic crises, in that it was used to simultaneously highlight the dangers of verisimilitude and false signifiers and to attempt to adjudicate seemingly plausible alternatives. The language of poison provided a vocabulary to think through problems of deception and hypocrisy, and, in the context of medieval hagiographical stories of saints surviving the ingesting of poison, to arbitrate competing claims to truth using the medium of holy bodies. Using liturgical manuscripts, collections of saint's lives, poetry, hymnody, theological treatises, histories, and sermons, I trace poison trials from their origins into the thirteenth century. Once it had become a means of asserting a saint's ability to distinguish truth from falsehood in the presence of ambiguity, the hagiographical poison trial was used to arbitrate a variety of contests internal and external to religious communities, both theological and political.