'Smite me, oh mighty Smiter': Belief in Miracles in the Middle Ages

Article by Simon Lax. Edited by Hannah Lyons. Additional Research by Emma Carmichael.

Did the people of the Middle Ages believe in their own miracles? Simply on the evidence of the thousands of miracle stories which have survived from every part of the era, chronologically and geographically, we might suspect so. Interestingly, miracle stories offer us insights into the lives of people usually overlooked by chroniclers, such as the poor and women, and places them centre stage. The veracity of these sources is perhaps (and especially in light of how I spent my summer...comments welcomed) more important to establish than many others. It may offer sources useful in social history, above all others. Lately however, the prevailing historiographical trend has been against the idea that the people of the Middle Ages believed in miraculous phenomena, and this throws into serious doubt the scope for use of these rich sources.

We are sceptical nowadays about the miraculous. Historians have been focused on the uses of miracles by the politically adept, by those who wished to use the miracle to further their own ends. The historiographical reversal of the idea of a ‘credulous age’ filled with gullible peasants has been particularly effective, and it is a rare historian nowadays who patronises the inhabitants of the age by attributing them with stupidity, or more accurately, credulity. It has been argued that the sheer likelihood of so many people believing in things so outlandish to the modern mind, coupled with acts of independence from church control, suggest a society more sceptical of the church and its miracles than had been previously admitted.

To some extent a historical argument on whether or not miracles were believed relies on one’s own relationship with miracles. If you don’t believe in miracles, it becomes necessary to explain away the more explicable miracles (placebo effect healings), and deny the least explicable (resurrections). Even if you do believe that miracles can occur in the modern world, it is important to note that the Medieval period was far more miraculous than today. Lourdes, one of the more important miracle sites of the modern day, has had 67 Vatican-recognized miracles in the 150 years since the original miracle. The relics of Saints Marcellinus and Peter attracted nearly twice as many in two years. However, unless you believe that in walking through the Ghent in the summer of 828, you had a high chance of bumping into a healed blind man a day, we need to separate out those miracles which were misunderstandings, those which were false, and those which might even today be called miraculous.

With that in mind, a more sensible question might be ‘Which particular Middle Age miracles were believed in, and by whom?’ One of the many jobs of the clergy was to record miracle stories, and some of these are particularly detailed. The majority of clerical miracle stories certainly read as if the authors believed in them. Clearly, some miracles were shams: the amount of demon possessed children is (pardon the pun) unholy. Even the clergy of the time were worried about those who claimed to be miracle-workers; the fake Christ of Bourges caused St. Gregory of Tours to entertain millenarian worries: the early medieval version of existential doubt. That their scepticism extended thus far, but no further into the good supernatural is a hotly contested topic in the literature, but I think what is clear is that any attempt to understand the miracles of the age, requires the most rigorous critique of the authors that academics can muster. Whilst we might think of the Middle Ages as an age of miracles, to trust the rather biased accounts of the church, and people like Einhard and Gregory of Tours who profited directly and variously would seem to suggest a credulity amongst modern historians as great as used to be postulated of the Medieval Peasant.

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