Did the middle ages believe in their miracles?

Representations

Volumn 103, Issue , 2008, Pages 1-29

  Justice, Steven ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 57749135890     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2008.103.1.1     Document Type: Article

References (76)

1. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 12, 11, 39, 12. He does the same with religious narratives from outside the industrialized world
2. The work in late antique and early modern history of Christian cultures that helped to inspire this turn in medieval studies can be symbolized by a couple of classic essays: Peter Brown, "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 80-101
3. and Natalie Zemon Davis, "The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in 16th-Century France," Past and Present 59 (1973): 53-91
4. and he has repeatedly mused on his fateful encounter with Mary Douglas: Peter Brown, "The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity," Representations 2 (Spring 1983): 1-25
5. Peter Brown, "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity, 1971-1997," Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998): 353-76
6. An appreciative but nuanced reflection on this turn that medieval studies took in the 1970s and 80s can be found in Caroline Walker Bynum, "Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist's Perspective," Critical Inquiry 22 (1995): 1-33
7. wider in its focus and more dour in its conclusions is Paul Freedman and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, "Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies," American Historical Review 103 (1998): 677-704
8. See, for example, the essays in Journal of Early Christian Studies 6, no. 3 (1998), particularly Susanna Elm's introduction (343-51)
9. and Neil McLynn, "A Self-Made Holy Man: The Case of Gregory Nazianzen" (463-83)
10. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987), 8
11. Brown, "Rise and Function of the Holy Man," 88
12. Monika Otter, "The Temptation of St. Æthelthryth," Exemplaria 9 (1997): 139-41
13. see also Elisabeth Claverie, "La Vierge, le désordre, la critique," Terrain 14 (1990): 60-75
14. Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050-1200 (London, 1972), 6
15. Lawrence G. Duggan, "Was Art Really the 'Book of the Illiterate'?" Word and Image 5 (1989): 251. "The familiarity of this scheme is again all too obvious: living in an age of faith, Dante was protected from the self-consciousness that tormented Petrarch"
16. Lee Patterson, "On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies," Speculum 65 (1990): 98-99. "... the old form of seeing the middle ages as an Age of Faith"
17. Susan Reynolds, "Social Mentalities and the Case of Medieval Scepticism," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6, no. 1 (1991): 22, 25. "Pendant longtemps, on a affirmé que le Moyen Age avait été crédule et ingénu"
18. André Vauchez, Saints, prophètes et visionnaires: le pouvoir surnaturel au Moyen Age (Paris, 1999), 13. "The Middle Ages were not a straightforward 'age of faith'"
19. John H. Arnold, Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (London, 2005), 3
20. Walter Daniel, Vita Ailredi Abbatis Rievall'/The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx, ed. F. M. Powicke (London, 1950)
21. My assumptions about the date of the Life of Christina of Markyate follow Rachel M. Koopmans, "The Conclusion of Christina of Markyate's Vita," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51 (2000): 663-98, as against its editor
22. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), 136
23. Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record, and Event, 1000-1215 (Philadelphia, 1982), 205, 211
24. Instances of the approach can be found in Pierre Boglioni, "Miracle et nature chez Grégoire le Grand," in Epopées, légendes et miracles (Montreal, 1974), 11-102
25. Sofia Boesch Gajano, "Demoni e miracoli nei 'Dialogi' di Gregorio Magno," in Hagiographie, cultures et sociétés, IVe-XIIe siècles. Actes du Colloque organisé à Nanterre et à Paris (2-5 mai 1979) (Paris, 1979), 263-80
26. William McCready, Signs of Sanctity: Miracles in the Thought of Gregory the Great (Toronto, 1989)
27. Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages (New York, 1988), tries to promote this account into something like a philosophy of life
28. "Qui enim auctori omnium creaturarum fideliter et integro corde famulatur, non est mirandum si eius imperiis ac uotis omnis creatura deseruiat"; Bertram Colgrave, ed., Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert (Cambridge, 1940), 222-24
29. C. J. Holdsworth, "Christina of Markyate," in Medieval Women: Dedicated and Presented to Professor Rosalind M. T. Hill on the Occasion of Her Seventieth Birthday, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford, 1978), 202
30. For some other instances, see Henry Mayr-Harting, "Functions of a Twelfth-Century Recluse," History 60 (1975): esp. 341-42
31. R. C. Finucane, "The Use and Abuse of Medieval Miracles," History 60 (1975): 1-10
32. R. C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London, 1977)
33. John Wortley, "Three Not-So-Miraculous Miracles," in Health, Disease, and Healing in Medieval Culture, ed. Sheila Campbell, Bert Hall, and David Klausner (New York, 1992), 159-68
34. Augustine Thompson, OP, Revival Preachers and Politics in Thirteenth-Century Italy: The Great Devotion of 1233 (Oxford, 1992), 113-14
35. R. I. Moore, "Between Sanctity and Superstition: Saints and Their Miracles in the Age of Revolution," in The Work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History, ed. Miri Rubin, (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK, 1997), 55-67
36. Arnold, Belief and Unbelief, 94
37. André Vauchez, "Les stigmates de saint François et leurs détracteurs dans les derniers siècles du Moyen Age," Mélanges d'archéologie et d'histoire de l'Ecole Française de Rome 80 (1968): 595-625
38. see also Alain Boureau, "Miracle, volonté et imagination: la mutation scolastique (1270-1320)," in Miracles, prodiges et merveilles au moyen âge: XXVe Congrès de la S.H.M.E.S. (Orléans, juin 1994) (Paris, 1995), 159-72
39. David Gentilcore, "Contesting Illness in Early Modern Naples: Miracolati, Physicians, and the Congregation of Rites," Past and Present 148 (1995): 117-48
40. For a description of this stage of the process, see Vauchez, Sainthood, 54-55
41. Smoller, "Boundaries of the Natural," 333
42. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1975), 115
43. T. P. Mclaughlin, CSB, ed., "Abelard's Rule for Religious Women," Mediaeval Studies 18 (1956): 283. We see in these the ancestors of Chaucer's Pardoner, whose very conception relies on the distinction of nature and supernature. The same can be said even more pointedly of Giovanni Boccaccio's Ser Ceperello; that story, in which a faked saint effects real miracles, depends on the thorough internalization of the idea of a faked miracle. Thomas More, disputing in favor of saints and their miracles, acknowledges as a matter of course the methodological point that miracles can be faked and therefore must be proved, rather than used to prove other claims
44. A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, ed. Thomas M. C. Lawler, Germain P. Marc'hadour, and Richard C. Marius (New Haven, 1981), 1:62
45. David Knowles, Cardinal Gasquet as an Historian (London, 1957)
46. Eamon Duffy, "A. G. Dickens and the Late Medieval Church," Historical Research 77 (2004): 98-110
47. Conyers Middleton, A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers Which Are Supposed to Have Subsisted in the Christian Church (London, 1844), 54
48. On Gibbon's debt to Middleton, see J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737-1764 (Cambridge, 1999), 43-49
49. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury (London, 1896-1900), 2:69-70
50. David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (London, 1898), 146
51. see esp. George Gordon, Medium aevum and the Middle Age, vol. 19 of Society for Pure English Tracts (Oxford, 1925)
52. Theodore E. Mommsen, "Petrarch's Conception of the 'Dark Ages'," Speculum 17 (1942): 226-42
53. Nathan Edelman, Attitudes of Seventeenth-Century France Toward the Middle Ages (New York, 1946), 2-10
54. Fred C. Robinson, "Medieval, the Middle Ages" Speculum 59 (1984): 745-56
55. Henri Daniel-Rops, Histoire de l'Eglise du Christ, vol. 3, L'Eglise de la cathédrale et de la croisade (Paris, 1952), 45
56. Peter Brown, "Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change," Daedalus 104 (1975): 133-51
57. see also Paul R. Hyams, "Trial by Ordeal: The Key to Proof in the Early Common Law," in On the Laws and Customs of England: Essays in Honor of Samuel E. Thorne, ed. Morris Arnold, et al. (Chapel Hill, 1981), 90-126
58. Liz Herbert McAvoy, "'Aftyr hyr owyn tunge': Body, Voice, and Authority in The Book of Margery Kempe," Women's Writing 9 (2002): 159-76
59. Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, 1994), 83-90
60. Chiara Frugoni, Franceso e l'invenzione delle stimmate: una storia perparole e immagini fino a Bonaventura e Giotto (Turin, 1993), 25-28
61. McLynn, "Self-Made Holy Man."
62. R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, vol. 1, Foundations (Oxford, 1995), 237
63. see H. Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum, 23rd edition (Freiburg, 1963), no. 10 and attending commentary
64. Anent Aquinas: "Nous ne croyons, non au plan des raisons qui peuvent nous permettre de croire, mais dans l'acte de Foi lui-même"
65. Yves M.-J. Congar, "Le moment 'économique' et le moment 'ontologique' dans la sacra doctrina (révélation, théologie, Somme théologique)," in Mélanges offerts à M.-D. Chenu (Paris, 1967), 166
66. M.-D. Chenu, OP, La théologie au douzième siècle (Paris, 1957), 351-65
67. Increasingly, Thomas's own work is treated as an attempt to give systematic underpinnings to pastoral care; see Leonard E. Boyle, OP, The Setting of the Summa theologiae of Saint Thomas (Toronto, 1982)
68. Andrew Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: A Guide to Their Organization and Terminology (Toronto, 1982), 38
69. See the fine discussion of developments in thirteenth-century investigation of Cathars, in John H. Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia, 2001), 103-7
70. The importance of the problem was noted by Pierre-Marie Gy, "Evangélisation et sacrements au moyen âge," in Humanisme et foi chrétienne: mélanges scientifiques du centenaire de l'Institut Catholique de Paris, ed. Charles Kannengiesser and Yves Marchasson (Paris, 1976), 565-72
71. and Jean-Claude Schmitt, "Du bon usage du 'credo'," in Faire croire: modalités de la diffusion et de la réception des messages religieux du XIIe au XVe siècle (Rome, 1981), 340-42
72. For background on medieval liturgical colors, and for the reasons I can confidently assert these here, see Roger E. Reynolds, "Clerical Liturgical Vestments and Liturgical Colors in the Middle Ages," in Clerics in the Early Middle Ages: Hierarchy and Image (Aldershot, 1999), VI.1-16
73. The deliberate audacity of this work is brilliantly described in a different connection by Barbara Newman: "What could Thomas's readers have thought when it dawned on them that in this vita, mirabilis indeed, the demoniac was herself the saint?"; "Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century," Speculum 73 (1998): 763
74. Eucharist and Resurrection: Murray, "Piety and Impiety," 98-100
75. Eucharist: Craig Harline, Miracles at the Jesus Oak: Histories of the Supernatural in Reformation Europe (New York, 2003), 154
76. Eucharist, damnation, confession: John Edwards, "Religious Faith and Doubt in Late Medieval Spain: Soria circa 1450-1500," Past and Present 120 (1988): 3-25