Daniel Costa — Medicine, Religion, and History

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 and identified recurrent behavioral features compatible with epileptic semiology.

Daniel Costa, MD, PhD, FRCPC

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ebr.2026.100865