improved diet as the first phase of therapy. Next, softening salves or plasters were
applied; a “French remedy” was cited by the 12th-century Syrian traveler Usamah.
Surgery was to be used only if medicaments failed, as stipulated in a contract by which a
Toulouse barber in 1400 promised a cure for the price of eight écus payable after doctors
certified success. A last resort was the noisome application of caustics. Patients who
found no help in medical treatment might make a pilgrimage to St. Marcoul, whose
specialized cult spread after 1300. They could also seek the ceremonial royal touch for
the “King’s Evil.” Remissions, often spontaneous, were celebrated as miracles. Claims to
healing power were made by French kings from the Capetians to the Bourbons and
contested by English dynasties. Ironically, scrofula may have claimed the lives of several
members of the house of Valois.
Luke Demaitre
[See also: DISEASES; HEALTH CARE; MEDICAL PRACTICE AND
PRACTITIONERS]
Barlow, Frank. “The King’s Evil.” English Historical Review 95 (1980):3–27.
Bloch, Marc. The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans.
J.E.Anderson. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.
SEALS AND SIGILLOGRAPHY
. From the 13th through the 15th century, the use of seals in France was a generalized
phenomenon that involved the society as a whole and crossed boundaries of gender, age,
religion, and social and professional status. All persons and corporations could, and most
did, legally commit themselves by affixing their seals to charters recording their
transactions and decisions. The seal’s function as a means of documentary validation
should not obscure its broader implications as a cultural phenomenon.
The seal presents a dualistic aspect. The seal matrix, made of metal, such as brass,
bronze, latten, or gold and silver for the ruling elites, was carved in the negative and
designed to impress repeatedly a raised image, the seal impression, upon a secondary
surface, most often of wax or lead. Seals thus evoked notions both of being (matrix) and
of becoming (impression) and projected a creative capacity analogous to life itself, which
may account for the intense psychosocial identification of medieval individuals with their
seals. For the seal was a personal object incorporating both a text—the legend—and an
image. The legend identified the sealer by name and by rank, and the importance of
identity, repeatedly declared under a wide variety of circumstances, rendered the choice
of title significant. The image, however, dwelt less on individuality than on status and
sociopolitical function, less on subjective than on group consciousness. Persons appeared
on their seals within such categories as kings, queens, knights, abbesses, artisans, even
peasants and Jews. Moreover, when displaying coats of arms individuals defined their
locus within their family, since heraldic emblems expressed the identity of a kindred in
relation to its subbranches and other groups. Underlying conventions therefore dictated
that sealers be represented by conceptual images and not as individuals and that seal
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