St Regina, Mal, Steve, Lyle …
some time in the sixth or early seventh century, a woman in Constantinople was suffering from severe abdominal pain. One night she crawled out of bed and dragged herself to the part of the house where frescoes of the Christian martyrs Cosmas and Damian had been painted on the wall. ‘Leaning on her faith as upon a stick’, she dug her fingernails into the plaster, then dissolved the scrapings in water and drank the resulting brew. Her pain abated immediately. As Jérémie Koering puts it in his new book, ‘the woman was healed by eating an image.’
Saints for Supper London Review of Books
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