In 1694, Dr. Thomas Guidott published a series of oral testimonies that he had heard while sitting at Mass in Bath Abbey. Guidott wrote that, during a church service, a young man named Henry Higdon stood up and gave a public testimony. Higdon claimed that he had been cured of paralysis by swimming in Bath’s spas, and he offered his gratitude for this healing aloud. Conflating God’s healing power with the medical benefits of the spa, Higdon devoted his “publick thanks to GOD, the prime Founder and Creator of the Baths, whence all good things come.” Higdon’s act of testament in Bath’s Abbey reveals the importance of sacred acts in late seventeenth-century England, and it also suggests that spa towns served as important spaces for the simultaneous expression of spiritual belief and medical knowledge.
Focusing on the major English spa towns, this paper examines the wide range of religious rituals that took place at the spa. Historians typically describe spa towns in this period as either sleepy and countrified, or as entirely devoted to libertine excess. This paper re-envisions seventeenth-century spas, demonstrating their significance within English spiritual life. Within spa towns, visitors and residents performed important religious rituals: in parish churches, worshippers like Higdon made public declarations of healing; in the streets, patrons participated in religious processions; in “pump-rooms” adjacent to the wells, health-seekers gulped beakers of mineral water while uttering prayers; and in the warm pools themselves, bathers engraved their names and prayers onto iron rings, gazed at religious statuary, and constructed impromptu crosses out of discarded crutches, all in order to celebrate the cures they believed had been achieved through divine and medical aid. This paper recovers the spiritual spaces of early modern spas and illustrates how religious rituals influenced perceptions and descriptions of health and healing.
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