Michael E. Goodich – författare

As war, pestilence and famine spread through Europe in the Middle Ages, so did reports of miracles, of hopeless victims wondrously saved from disaster. These "rescue miracles", recorded by over 100 14th-century cults, are the basis of Michael Goodich's account of the miraculous in everyday medieval life. Rescue miracles offer a wide range of voices rarely heard in medieval history, from women and children to peasants and urban artisans. They tell of salvation not just from the ravages of nature and war, but from the vagaries of a violent society - crime, unfair judicial practices, domestic squabbles and communal or factional conflict. The stories speak to a collapse of confidence in decaying institutions, from the law to the market to feudal authority. In particular, the miraculous escapes documented during the Hundred Years' War, the Italian communal wars and other conflicts are testimony to the end of aristocratic warfare and the growing victimization of non-combatants. Miracles, Goodich finds, represent the transcendent and unifying force of faith in a time of widespread distress and the hopeless conditions endured by the common people of the Middle Ages.Just as the lives of the saints, once dismissed as church propaganda, have become valuable to historians, so have rescue miracles, as evidence of an underlying medieval mentality. This work aims to expand our knowledge of that state of mind and the grim conditions that coloured and shaped it.

As war, pestilence and famine spread through Europe in the Middle Ages, so did reports of miracles, of hopeless victims wondrously saved from disaster. These "rescue miracles", recorded by over 10 14th-century cults, are the basis of Michael Goodich's account of the miraculous in everyday medieval life. Rescue miracles offer a wide range of voices rarely heard in medieval history, from women and children to peasants and urban artisans. They tell of salvation not just from the ravages of nature and war, but from the vagaries of a violent society - crime, unfair judicial practices, domestic squabbles and communal or factional conflict. The stories speak to a collapse of confidence in decaying institutions, from the law to the market to feudal authority. In particular, the miraculous escapes documented during the Hundred Years' War, the Italian communal wars and other conflicts are testimony to the end of aristocratic warfare and the growing victimization of non-combatants. Miracles, Goodich finds, represent the transcendent and unifying force of faith in a time of widespread distress and the hopeless conditions endured by the common people of the Middle Ages.Just as the lives of the saints, once dismissed as church propaganda, have become valuable to historians, so have rescue miracles, as evidence of an underlying medieval mentality. This work aims to expand our knowledge of that state of mind and the grim conditions that coloured and shaped it.

Beginning in the late twelfth century, scholastic theologians such as William of Auvergne, Thomas Aquinas and Engelbert of Admont attempted to provide a rational foundation to the Christian belief in miracles, bolstered by the Aristotelian theory of natural law. Similarly in this period a tension appeared to exist in the recording of miracles, between the desire to exalt the Faith and the need to guarantee believability in the face of opposition from heretics, Jews and other sceptics. As miracles became an increasingly standard part of evidence leading to canonization, the canon lawyers, notaries and theologians charged with determining the authenticity of miracles were eventually issued with a list of questions to which witnesses to the event were asked to respond, a virtual template against which any miracle could be measured. Michael Goodich explores this changing perception of the miracle in medieval Western society. He employs a wealth of primary sources, including canonization dossiers and contemporary hagiographical Vitae and miracle collections, philosophical/theological treatises, sermons, and canon law and ancillary sources dealing with the procedure of canonization. He compares and contrasts 'popular' and learned understanding of the miraculous and explores the relationship between reason and revelation in the medieval understanding of miracles. The desire to provide a more rational foundation to the Christian belief in miracles is linked to the rise of heresy and other forms of disbelief, and finally the application of the rules of evidence in the examination of miracles in the central Middle Ages is scrutinized. This absorbing book will appeal to scholars working in the fields of medieval history, religious and ecclesiastical history, canon law, and all those with an interest in hagiography.