Michael Goodich died in 2006. His aim in the present volume was to investigate why and how the concept of miracle came to be provided with a philosophically rational and judicially defensible foundation (p. x). Other aims, implicitly anticipated in the introduction, crystallised retrospectively in the conclusion, were to explore how reason and revelation interrelated in the adjudication of miracles; how scepticism (heretical, Judaic or otherwise non-specific) pressured scholastic theologians to adopt a critical, investigative approach to the miraculous; how rules of evidence devised in response to such pressures were applied in the examination (and presentation) of miracles; and whether ‘popular’ conceptions of miracles – the ‘punctuation of doubt’ is Goodich's – differed from learned ones (p. 117). This last much-exercised debate is for the most part left in its kennel, except that Maimonides is cited in defence of the suppositious dichotomy (p. 28): an illustration of Goodich's sharp eye and versatility. Goodich is sharpest in chapters i and ii, which privilege analysis. Sophistication without obfuscation characterises, for example, his separation of different voices interwoven into miracle tales (p. 4). Chapters iii and iv, on miracles in sermons and hagiography, and on scepticism (the latter chapter an article re-worked), are harder on the reader: so studded is the fabric with examples that the background design is sometimes lost. Chapter v covers new territory with a detailed discussion of five late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century canonisation dossiers and criteria on which their miracles were accepted or rejected. Chapter vi conducts the ingenious and successful experiment of mapping these criteria on to a hagiographical narrative to demonstrate how reports of miracles were crafted to fulfil them. Chapter vii discovers that a papal revelation (such as a vision of the candidate for canonisation) in more than one case trumped rational objections to a would-be saint's elevation, probably – to build on Goodich – because fourteenth-century popes were sufficiently proximate to the divine to accept their own miraculous experiences unquestioningly. Goodich, to his credit, very often eschews obvious sources and employs unprinted ones, such as a treatise on miracles by the Parisian theologian Radulphus Ardens (d. c. 1200) and some sermons by Odo of Châteauroux (c. 1200–73). However, for all its strengths, this is no systematic study, and the reader may have difficulty drawing together its different threads. As Goodich tells us, the book was born as a byproduct of his interest in the social aspects of the miraculous (p. 117). It should not be mistaken for a church-historical monograph on the evolution of scholastic ideas about miracles, or on papal canonisation procedures. Rather thin on the period 1150–1250, it is also thin literally, and although the quasi-microscopic print might offer more words per page paid-for than your average book on the shelf, at £50 for only 160 pages (the conclusion ends on p. 121), this book is over-priced.