The Golden Scabs of Saint Job - Part Three

The Golden Scabs of Saint Job - Exploring the Medieval Pilgrim Badges of Saint Job in Wezemaal (BE)

This series of three blog posts explores the pilgrim badges of Saint Job from Wezemaal, Belgium. This series considers these badges as a form of adaptation, informed by biblical, legendary, and literary accounts of Job that were popular in the medieval imagination. The overarching question that inspired these blog posts is: Why was Job the only Old Testament figure to be venerated by pilgrims as a saint? 

My name is Hannah Gardiner – I am a master’s student in literary studies, a research assistant for the SSHRC Insight Grant on medieval badges, and the writer/researcher of this Job blog series.

Part Three - Saint Job, Disease in the Middle Ages, and ‘Scab’ Badges

Latten-copper badge, Job on a dunghill with musicians around him, on round badge with inscription S. IOP ORDE, attachment not present, Antwerp, Belgium, 1475-1524, found in Nieuwlande, the Netherlands, 33 x 33 cm. The Van Beuningen Family Collection, inv. 1381 (Kunera 00242). Photograph courtesy of The Van Beuningen Family Collection.

Latten-copper badge, Job sitting nude on a dunghill, offering musicians a coin, in round frame on diamond shaped badge, attachment not present, Wezemaal, Belgium, 1475-1524, found in Arnemuiden, Belgium, 27 x 32 cm. The Van Beuningen Family Collection, inv. 4484 (Kunera 16451). Photograph courtesy of The Van Beuningen Family Collection.

The round latten-copper badges above depict a scene from an extra-biblical story about Saint Job, as explored in The Golden Scabs of Saint Job — Part One. This scene, which was frequently featured on Wezemaal badges, illustrates the moment where Job, having nothing else to offer, reaches out to give the musicians a scab from his body, which miraculously turns to gold. This moment is the turning point in Job’s story: a visible miracle and a sign of hope that fulfills Job’s earlier proclamation in the story when he defends his innocence, saying: “But [the LORD] knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I shall come out like gold” (Job 23.10). 

What immediately stands out about these two badges is their golden colour. Made of latten-copper, which turns gold after being fired, the material of the badges dually speaks of its own transformation and Job’s. While these two particular badges were both originally round in diamond frames (now broken off), other surviving golden badges are exclusively round. The form of these circular, golden badges recalls the golden scab Job would have offered from his body; in semiotic terms, they are iconic signs, bearing a strong resemblance to the object they represent. These badges invite a closer look at the way the story came to life on the pilgrims’ bodies.  

Bartholomaeus Steber, woodcut, a woman in bed and a man sitting on a stool are covered with lesions with physicians attending to them. Vienna: Johann Winterberg, 1497-1498. Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine.

Before looking at the pilgrims’ bodies, let’s consider the historical context of the syphilis epidemic occurring in Western Europe (c. 1495) and its relation to Saint Job. We know that the pilgrimages to the site of Saint Job in Wezemaal overlapped with this epidemic. While scholars disagree about whether there was an increase in pilgrimages to Wezemaal during these years, there is no question about the associations between syphilis and Saint Job, exemplified, for instance, by a French name for syphilis, le Mal Monseigneur Saint Job, and hospitals opening up at that time bearing Job’s name, as Old Testament scholar Samuel Balentine points out. 

The skin infections that would have afflicted those suffering from syphilis likewise linked the disease to the afflicted Saint Job. Being a venereal disease, people likewise witnessed that syphilis afflicted only specific individuals and not the entire population as other diseases had, forging the connection to the plague that afflicted Job as opposed to other Old Testament plagues that swept across Israel and its enemies, (Arrizabalaga et al., 52). While other pilgrim badges from Wezemaal depict the story of Saint Job, the golden scab badges specifically point to the greater social context of physical affliction. 

Like other pilgrim badges, these badges were made to be worn and seen. But what would it have meant to a pilgrim to wear this badge — a badge that was not only a token of having been on pilgrimage to the site of a Saint, but one that symbolized the diseased and redeemed body part of that Saint, which they then embodied on their own body? 

Since syphilis was an unknown and new disease, perceptions of it were informed by social perceptions of other skin-related illnesses such as leprosy. French medieval historian Francois-Olivier Touati illustrates that over the course of the twelfth century, leprosy came to be seen not as a divine punishment, but as an invitation by God to convert to a religious life and attain salvation. Following from Touati, medieval historian Elma Brenner argues that lepers were seen, in the centuries preceding the syphilis epidemic, as a religious group “chosen by God to suffer in this life in order to be redeemed in the next” (241). Sickness marked God’s intervention, not his absence. The sick, suffering body was therefore not seen by all as a punishment by God, but was viewed as an invitation into God’s grace, and a time of waiting for when all would be made new. 

A theology of the sick body anticipating newness is reminiscent of the Jobian narrative. The pilgrims who, in good or poor health, attached these badges to their bodies aligned their bodies into a participatory relationship to the innocent suffering and triumph of Saint Job in an embodied way. The presence of the story’s golden scabs on their own bodies can be seen as form of role-play, wherein the pilgrim body joins the body of another: first Job’s, and by typological association, to that of Christ’s. Bearing these golden scabs on their bodies would have transformed the body of its wearer into a sign of redemption. The pilgrim, like Saint Job and Christ, was close to God and may have been suffering from an affliction by no fault of their own, all the while persevering with a confidence that their suffering had already been redeemed and come out as gold. 

Whether such badges were later offered as tokens to others, as they had been offered to the musicians in the story, is unknown, but provocative to imagine. One has to wonder what feelings the pilgrims affixing these badges to their cloaks may have had as they wandered around the village church in Wezemaal and back home, disrupting linear time through their faith and bringing the story to life. 

Works Cited

Arrozabalaga, Jon, John Henderson and Roger Kenneth French. The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. 

Balentine, Samuel E. Have You Considered My Servant Job?: Understanding the Biblical Archetype of Patience. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015.

Brenner, Elma. “The Leprous Body in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Rouen: Perceptions and Responses.” In The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture, edited by Jill Ross, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, pp. 239-59. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.

Campbell, Gordon. “Syphilis.” Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 

Minnen, Bart. “‘Den heyligen Sant al in Brabant.’ The Church of St Martin in Wezemaal and the devotion to St Job 1000-2000 – Retrospective. The fluctuations of a devotion” [English summary of: Den Heyligen Sant Al in Brabant: De Sint-Martinuskerk van Wezemaal en de cultus van Sint Job 1000-2000 (Averbode, 2011).]

Suykerbuyk, Ruben. The Matter of Piety : Zoutleeuw’s Church of Saint Leonard and Religious Material Culture in the Low Countries (c. 1450-1620), vol. 16. Boston, Leiden: Brill, 2020.

Written by Hannah Gardiner. Edited by Dr. Ann Marie Rasmussen.