Pierre of Cambrai was a thirteenth-century canon of Saint-Aubert at Cambrai who wrote the earliest known Vita of Dymphna under Bishop Guy I. The later Geel tradition belongs as much to townspeople, pilgrims, parish clergy, physicians, and boarding families as to one author, because Dymphna's cult became a living social practice of household care for mentally ill guests.
c. 1247; Geel colony tradition from the Middle Ages · Medieval · Hagiography
St. Dymphna and the Geel Colony is less a single book than a layered dossier: a thirteenth-century Latin Vita by Pierre of Cambrai, a medieval shrine in the Brabant town of Geel, and a centuries-long practice of boarding mentally ill people with local families. The legend tells of an Irish princess whose widowed father, deranged by grief and desire, attempts to marry his daughter because she resembles her dead mother.
