Research Focus
While Gian Lorenzo Bernini was creating the colonnade of St. Peter’s Basilica, his contemporary Joseph of Copertino was said to be doing something very different: rising into the air.
I examined 103 seventeenth-century sworn eyewitness testimonies concerning the extraordinary phenomena associated with Joseph of Copertino. This study pursued two objectives. First, it evaluated a specific skeptical hypothesis concerning reported aerial motions using limited quantitative sensitivity analyses. Second, it examined eyewitness testimony for recurrent features compatible with modern neurological and psychiatric semiology, with attention to epileptic and functional/dissociative seizure frameworks, while avoiding reduction of religious experience to pathology. Statistical analysis did not support a proposed skeptical explanation attributing the reported aerial elevations to feigning. I identified recurrent behavioral features compatible with non-convulsive epileptic semiology.
Click the link below to read the article I published in Epilepsy and Behavior Reports.
Daniel Costa — Medicine, Religion, and History 