Season 1, Episode 132

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Violant reveals a new detail about Joan’s near-death illness on April 28th, that the doctors had given up hope.

Today’s Document

• Subject: new details about Joan’s miraculous recovery from an illness that almost killed him
• Date: the hour of Vespers, May 5, 1387
• Day of the Week: Sunday
• Language: Catalan
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR R2053 f9r
• Link to PARES
• Place: Barcelona
• Sender: Violant
• Recipients: the Ambassadors of the Crown of Aragon in Avignon

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: the reason that Violant chose the ambassadors as the ones to divulge the intimiate details of Joan’s illness remains uncertain, but perhaps Violant thinks that God’s evident favor in preserving Joan from death will help raise his stature in the eyes of the Pope in Avignon

• Contextualization: Violant’s mention of the doctors reveals that experts in both secular methods and ecclesiastical authorities admninistered to Joan in the dire moments of the illness that struck him on the evening of April 28th; in the Late Middle Ages, elites could afford to pay multiple doctors and their political importance would also lead ecclesiatical officials to rally spiritual forces to their aid; the spiritual and the secular mixed in situations like this and there was no inherent contradiction

• Corroboration: this letter significantly overlaps with the information in Violant’s letters to the same recipients examined in Episode 127 and Episode 131; repeating some of the details of the case across multiple letters might have been an intentional rhetorical device to underscore the severity of what had happened; at the same time, in other letters around these weeks Violant considers it an urgent priority to present Joan’s health as stable and improving

• Close-Reading: Violant uses the phraase ‘article de mort’ which is an idiom for ‘the moment of death’; this document contains a level of specificity in the dating clause that is very unusual, labeling its composition in the ‘hora de Vespers’

What is this document doing?

• This document invokes divine intervention in the preservation of the life of the king.
• The document prioritizes the ambassadors in Avignon for receipt of sensitive information about the health of the king.

Questions

• What were Violant’s motivations for repeating the near-death quality of Joan’s illness across multiple letters to the ambassadors in Avignon?
• What were the customs that governed the level of cooperation between physicians and priests when administering to a severely ill person?
• Why does Violant mention evil curses in some letters to the ambassadors and leave that out in other letters to them?
• Is it possible that Violant is describing a subseequent attack of the illness, after April 28th?

AI Usage

The transcription and translation of this document was carried out by my OpenClaw pipeline. For today’s document the AI output was very helpful in drawing my attention to some of the subtleties in Violant’s expression.

Bibliography

• Lindberg, David C. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450. 2nd ed. University of Chicago Press, 2007.

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