A Brief Preface on the Antonine Order

The term Saint Anthony's Fire derives from the thaumaturgical cult that developed around the presumed remains of St Anthony the Abbot, or the Great, an Egyptian saint from the third or fourth century, originating in the south of present-day France in around the eleventh century. Anthony was portrayed as the father of monasticism by all the medieval Churches following the circulation of the first biography about him, Life of Anthony, written in Greek by Athanasius (295c-373), Bishop of Alexandria. The author explains that on his deathbed the saint asked to be buried in a secret place, with the burial arranged by two of his closest and most loyal disciples who would not reveal the exact location to anyone else. Nevertheless, in the early Middle Ages various chronicles and most martyrologies in the West started to suggest that the saint's body had been transferred from an unknown location in the Egyptian desert to the Basilica of St John the Baptist in Alexandria at the time of Justinian (sixth century). This probably led to the creation of subsequent legends about the inventio and translatio (‘discovery’ and ‘translation’) of his body, firstly to Constantinople and then to the Dauphiné in the South of France. Being one of the most important Christian saints and given the value always attributed to saintly relics, it is no surprise that his remains were highly coveted.

The bibliography on Saint Anthony's Fire is extensive and there has long been a historiographical consensus on the precise profile of the disease: it is the medieval name for ergotism, a disease caused by the ingestion of ergot, a fungus that parasitizes rye, which was widely used in breadmaking in the Middle Ages. Carlo Ginzburg writes:

Similar explanations of ergotism and Saint Anthony's Fire can be found in most books on medieval studies. In his work on disease in Europe, Jean-Noël Biraben writes:

Medieval Epidemics of the Burning Disease as Told by Historians in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century

The historians that focused on Saint Anthony's Fire and ergotism from the nineteenth century onwards (in historiographical terms the two diseases tend to be considered as one and the same) drafted precise timelines for the occurrence of epidemics throughout history, starting in the early Middle Ages. They considered medieval sources and sometimes also works by early-modern authors, who had in turn retransmitted medieval accounts. The interpretation of these sources from two different periods somewhat inevitably led to inaccuracies. Firstly, it is not always possible to trace the original narrative source used by sixteenth and seventeenth-century historical authors who retranscribed descriptions of medieval epidemics that occurred at a regional or national level. Secondly, even when the source is known, the more recent version is not always an exact transcription of the medieval text, often taking shape as a summary padded out with arbitrary additions. Thirdly, there are changes in the medical lexicon as a result of interpreting the disease with different nosographic references from those used by the medieval authors. The dating of events is also revised in some cases.

The Frenchman Jean Bouchet serves as a prime example of the way in which medieval sources were interpreted by historians in the early modern period. In his sixteenth-century Annales d’Aquitaine, written in French, he focuses extensively on the Life of St Hilary and its accounts of miracles during his lifetime and post mortem.

Ignis Sacer (‘Holy Fire’) in the Ancient World

The different diseases that afflicted France in the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th and 16th centuries which were variously called sacred fire, burning disease, hell fire and Saint Anthony's disease owe their origin to the use of rye ergot.

Taken from the 1771 Traité du Siegle ergoté by Read, a French physician at the Faculty of Medicine in Montpellier (‘Mr. Read, Docteur en Médecine de la Faculté de Montpellier’), this statement is a perfect synopsis of eighteenth-century medical thinking regarding cases of ergotism in previous centuries, a perspective that influenced subsequent medical literature and historiographical output. Discovered approximately a century beforehand, the disease caused by the ingestion of ergot became the focus of numerous medical and scientific treatises abounding with theories about its nature. At the same time, it was concluded that all conditions defined as Saint Anthony's disease or fire in medieval sources, or indeed ignis sacer (feu sacré in Read's text) and ‘mal des ardents’ on French soil should be interpreted as cases of ergotism.

These sources now need to be reread in the light of a philologically correct modern interpretation to understand whether it was accurate to link occurrences of Saint Anthony's fire to epidemics featuring ergotism and to establish when the expression was first used in the central period of the Middle Ages.

Chapter Three analyses the ‘theoretical’ connections that many physical-psychical scientists made between ‘physics and psychics’.It analyses general physical arguments against philosophical materialism and other ‘stumbling blocks’ to the idea of mind and spirit in the cosmos; vague analogies between physical and psychical effects; and more radical physical theories and explanations of telepathy and other psychical phenomena.The chapter highlights the extrordinary creativity of physical scientists in applying their concepts, ideas and theories to psychical puzzles.It also examines the criticism that many physicsts levelled against such psychical uses of physics and argues that while leading physical-psychical scientists accepted many of the problems with physical theories of largely non-physical phenomena, they never completely abandoned the idea that some kind of physical theory would ultimately help render psychical effects more intelligible.

Chapter Six examines the trajectory of physical-psychical scientists in the early twentieth century.By 1900 the network of physical-psychical scientists was weaker because many had died or were too old or busy to commitment themselves to new experimental enquiries. Those strongly committed to psychical research tended to explore connections between physics and psychics via writing rather than new experiments.The writing of Lodge, Barrett, Kingsland and others explored the connections between psychical research and modern developments in physics and religion.Many thought that Lodge’s connections went too far while others did not think the connections went far enough.Among those who sought to transcend Lodge wereprofessional and amateur radio enthusiasts, and psychical researchers, and a younger generation of psychical researchers who believed relativity and quantum theories was more effective than older, mainly ether-based physics, at rendering psychical effects plausible.

The conclusion examines the legacy of physical-psychical scientists.By the 1940s even the most sympathetic physical-psychical scientists were ambivalent at best about the ‘psychical’ achievements of Crookes, Lodge and other veteran physical-psychical scientists.From the 1940s until the 1960s very few of the connections between physics and psychics involved the modern physics of relativity and quantum theories; the 1970s, however, saw a rejuvenation of interest in these possibilities, which became a major focus of the new field of ‘paraphysics’ whose theories and practices continue to cause controversy.I argue that the protagonists of this book would have recognised many of the problems faced by practitioners of paraphysics but repudiated these practitioners’ perceptions that Victorian physics was materialistic, rigid and closed to psychical significance.

Chapter Two surveys what we call ‘physical-psychical scientists’ - physical scientists who, from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century, showed some kind of interest in psychical phenomena. It uses the membership of Society for Psychical Research to identify many such physical-psychical scientists.Analysing this membership, and individuals who expressed their psychical interests outside the organisation, the chapter argues that these interests were far more extensive and complex than historians have argued.The chapter analyses the ways in which this collective interest was facilitated by existing institutional and other connections.It explores the range of intellectual, religious, moral and emotional reasons that underpinned this interest, the different positions and conclusions that different scientists reached after their investigations, and the reaons why so many scientists abandoned their interest in such studies or were actively hostile to them.

Chapter Four focuses on the experimental approaches of physical-psychical scientists to psychical phenomena.It focuses on four key examples from the 1870s-1890s: William Crookes’s investigations of ‘psychic force’ ; Crookes and Cromwell Varley’s electrical tests of mediumship; the SPR’s studies of Reichenbach’s ‘od’ ; and Oliver Lodge and Benjamin Davies’s ideas about and experimental tests of telekinesis.The chapter shows the extraordinary lengths to which physical-psychical scientists went to achieve greater control over, to measure and record psychical effects, and to turn domestic seances into sites of experimental physics.The limited effectiveness of this work was partly due to perceived flaws in experimental design, a lack of suitable experimental subjects (mediums), and because physical-psychical scientists believed their professional and intellectual goals were better served by focusing experimental research on purely physical topics.