The Rhetoric of Pain: Religious Convulsions and Miraculous Healings in the Jansenist Parish of Saint Médard, Paris (1727-1732)

This chapter explores the documentation of depositions regarding the experience of pain in the context of religious convulsions and miraculous healings. The author uses the corpus of testimonies related to the Convulsionaries of Saint Médard associated with Parisian Jansenism in eighteenth-century France in order to analyse the discursive procedures and rhetorical strategies concerning the new phenomenon of anatomic exhibition through the medium of detailed and redundant descriptions of the suffering body. It demonstrates how the dominance of medical terminology, combined with realistic descriptions of pain and suffering, works both to guarantee the reliability of the testimony and to create an emotional effect. Furthermore, it claims that both religious and cultural aspects have an impact on this exploration of the extreme limits of the sick body. Finally, this process of appropriation of methodological tools and new philosophical and ideological concepts points to the incorporation of commonplace knowledge into a discourse whose objective clashes with the liberal secular ideals of the Enlightenment.