A surprising number of saints – the apostle Paul, Hildegard of Bingen, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Teresa, to name but a few – were touched by God during a bout of illness. It was not just the privileged who reported encountering God while ill.

Beginning in the second century c.e., infectious disease regularly besieged the population of the Roman Empire. Epidemic disease claimed inumerable lives and undermined everyday life and the constitution of subjectivity (e.g., being pagan, a woman, a citizen of the state). In an age of anxiety and “cosmic pessimism,” pagans embraced new beliefs and rituals that promised protection from Satan and the diseases he unleashed on the Roman world. Converts to Christianity acquired a new “family” and social relations to replace those devastated by smallpox, measles, malaria, and plague. Christian communities of Roman antiquity responded to epidemics with not only prayer and healing rituals but also awe-inspiring charity.

The monks and clerics who fanned out over Europe during the early Middle Ages were agents of charity and “soldiers of Christ,” armed with rituals and relics to combat and appease supra-human agents who bestowed plague and malaria on humankind. The strategy employed by the apostles, and later articulated by Gregory the Great and medieval hagiographers was largely one of reimagining rather than destroying “pagan” religiosity. Missionary saints unabashedly toppled pagan shrines, but just as often tolerated competing magical practices.