A new collection of essays regarding the current state of scholarship on medieval miracle stories is most welcome. Such narratives have emerged in recent times as a privileged window into lay religiosity and lived religion but come with serious interpretive baggage. Edited by Christian Krötl and Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, the aim of the work is to outline “a comprehensive methodological analysis of miracle collections from the high and late Middle Ages in Western Christianity” (4). The book succeeds in this on many levels.
Divided into three main sections, the work is a culmination of a series of presentations that took place in 2012 and 2013 but, admirably, the selections are quite up-to-date bibliographically, one of the volume's most useful features. In particular the introduction by the editors is a very thorough historiographical presentation of the status of miracle stories in contemporary scholarship. Given this, however, there is much repetition in the chapter bibliographies and in the footnotes, as each author nods to seminal works such as those by André Vauchez and Michael Goodich.
The first section is given over to the evolution of inquisitorial processes for the investigation and collection of miracle stories for presentation to the Roman Curia. Gábor Klaniczay opens the collection with a consideration of Hungarian cults, which is his speciality. He gives a useful overview of how the inquisitiones in partibus developed and details the distinction between miracles recorded and preserved at shrines, as opposed to the more thoroughly vetted and stylized miracles finally presented as evidence for canonization. Laura Ackerman Smoller continues this theme in her chapter as she recounts some of her excellent work on St. Vincent Ferrer. She also notes differences between the official canonization dossier and the miracles compiled in pious lives after canonization, which did not have to meet the same strict requirements for proof. Letizia Pellegrini completes the section with a meditation on the politics of canonization. She shows that mutual interest could cause competing groups to band together in canonizations, in this instance for the glorification of St. Bernardino of Siena. She also demonstrates the use made of St. Bernardino's cult in service of the reformation of the Observant Franciscans. Dovetailing with the theme of the section, she shows how cultic investigators could depreciate miracles of exorcism and punishment (aggression miracles) in favor of resurrection, which seemed to be the miracle par excellence in fifteenth-century canonization dossiers.
The second section moves to the methods by which miracles came to be written down. Anders Frömark allows us to peer into Scandinavian processes in order to see the interaction between miracle recipient or miracle witness and the scribe who wrote it down. He points to instances of direct speech, which he defends as having less mediation than third person accounts. He writes, “The writing down of a miracle tale was a meeting point between the oral culture of the lay people and the literate culture of the clergy” (151). This is true in a sense, but perhaps hews too closely to a two-tiered model of religion (elite verses popular) that is increasingly being challenged. Christian Krötzl offers a chapter on the evolving strategies of saint invocation and suggests a transition from common experiences of shrine and pilgrimage to private, individualized experiences of vows and petitions at a distance in the later Middle Ages. Didier Lett provides a useful investigation of punitive (or aggression) miracles and asks incisive questions about the nature of medieval disbelief. He rightly insists that we must avoid generalizing unbelief, and rather situate all such expressions of opposition to saints within the local, social, and religious contexts in which they were uttered.
The final section deals with the depositions themselves, and the ways in which the deponents presented themselves to the inquisitiones. Jenni Kuuliala studies how witnesses described and communicated physical symptoms related to healing miracles. She makes the point that witnesses conformed their testimony to established rhetorical forms. While this increased their believability in the Middle Ages, it raises an interpretive barrier for us. Sari Katajala-Peltomaa supplies a very interesting chapter that engages in close readings of miracles testified to by several deponents. Often some miracles would be told separately by related people, for example husbands and wives. This chapter carefully examines the differences in the depositions and demonstrates how the witnesses reinforced the positive elements of their own social and religious conditions when narrating their tales. Katajala-Peltomaa also makes the interesting point that while people of the lower classes predominate in miracle stories, when investigators sought information about the lives and practices of saints, they tended to prefer deponents from the upper classes or clergy. The book ends with Jonas Van Mulder's contribution on ways in which lay visions were understood in the fifteenth century. He discusses a rising distinction between dreams and visions, whereby lay visions would be appropriated as dreams, lowering and privatizing their value, but also of protecting them, since visions could be imaginary and subject to doubt.
The collection in quite useful, and the bibliography is especially attractive to the student of medieval miracles. I have only a few quibbles. The majority of the chapters focus on the late Middle Ages, with not very much attention paid to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when many of these categories and processes were being established. In addition, the translation policy seems to be unevenly followed. In some cases there is just an English original, in others Latin with an English translation, and in a few cases just Latin. Further, since Lett's essay was untranslated, we have in his chapter Latin/French. It would have been useful for students to have Lett's essay translated since much of the best work done on aggression miracles has been done in French, and an English introduction would have been welcomed. However, overall this work is very interesting, thoroughly researched, and a clear road map to the study of miracle narratives in the medieval west.
