Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century: Private Grief and Public Salvation

by Michael E. Goodich

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 one hundred fourteenth-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. Particularly, the miraculous escapes documented during the Hundred Years' War, the Italian communal wars, and other conflicts are vivid testimony to the end of aristocratic warfare and the growing victimization of noncombatants.

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 mentalite . This work expands our knowledge of that state of mind and the grim conditions that colored and shaped it.

Genres: Medieval History

227 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1995

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

We think of Europe as a place where Attila turned out the lights on Europe which remained off until the Renaissance turned them back on in Italy. But like any span of history, the Dark and Middle Ages had their good centuries and bad ones. The Fourteenth was one of the bad ones. If it wasn't the Hundred Years War, it was the Black Death. Populations declined, the roads grew more dangerous. Torture returned to the trials -- Goodich argues that previous centuries had actually made strides in setting up something of a genuine legal system. Scientific energy was expended by that indispensable arm of the church, the investigators of miracles attributed to potential saints. Goodich examines the anxieties of the age and finds some familiar themes, the difficulty of finding a secure place to store money, the threat posed to family and community by sexual transgression, the possibility of languishing in jail on false charges (or of buying one's way out). And some not so--the Devil was clearly abroad, if not in fact, in the nightmares and visions of the populace, and childhood and childbirth were dangerous. Goodich doesn't neglect the comic moments, like the riot between rival factions for control of relics of Saint Francis.

[Miriam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great way to get a sense of just how secure our lives are in comparison to those who lived in Europe during the 13th and 14th centuries. The miracle chronicles document the fears and dangers of the time in a way that is quite vivid.