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

Examining miracle stories associated with approximately one hundred fifty cults of the fourteenth century, Michael Goodich offers an interesting study of popular belief and mentalite in a turbulent century. He finds that in comparison to earlier periods, the fourteenth century saw a higher percentage of "rescue" miracles relative to the still predominant thaumaturgic (healing) miracles that continued to monopolize hagiography. Such rescue miracles revealed a universal appeal to divine assistance for relief from the ravages of climate (the "Little Ice Age"), plague, and warfare (the Hundred Years' War, Italian communal strife). Despite the attempts of theologians and canon lawyers to limit the realm of miracles, and despite the displacement of early medieval "ordeal" by more rational evidentiary proceedings in the central Middle Ages, the resort to miracle endured as a solution for natural catastrophe and the failure of human institutions, especially in the face of unjust imprisonment, torture, ransom, brigandage.

In some cases, the appeal to miracle was an extension of the appeal to the Church as a mediator for conflict resolution. In one of his more intriguing arguments Goodich identifies structural parallels between the arbitration agreements of warring parties and the requests, vows, and default penalties found in miracle accounts describing the invocation of divine assistance. Such appeals to "informal" spiritual mediation may have been especially common, he argues, in cases of domestic violence, adultery, sexual crime, and insanity, where resort to secular authority may have proven embarrassing or damaging. The most persuasive section of Goodich's book concerns the revival of the cult of Martial of Limoges and the emergence of the cult of Charles of Blois. The fourteenth-century miracula compiled to buttress both cults reveal the climate of violence and chaos occasioned by the Hundred Years' War and illustrate the collective solidarity such cults could reinforce, even beyond the local to the "protonational" level.

In his reading of miracle stories Goodich finds a mirror not only of religious belief but also of a larger social reality. Aside from saints' lives and the descriptions of the inventio, ostentio, and translatio of relics, miracle accounts were also found in the systematic "processes" of canonization. In the latter, testimony of witnesses is recorded (659 witnesses in Urban V's processus of 1374-76), and such transcriptions provide an unexpected source for retrieving popular experience and expression - much as inquisitorial and court records provide such a source in the studies of Carlo Ginzburg, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Natalie Davis. Thus, in a chapter on miracles concerning children - the majority of which involved drowning accidents - Goodich explores miracle accounts for evidence of popular speech (as in measurements of time and distance), medical care, child labor, and domestic life. He might have strengthened his analysis of such accounts by providing more details on the social composition of such witnesses (by gender at least, and where possible by religious, professional, and social status).

Like many studies of mentalite, Violence and Miracle is somewhat susceptible to speculative overgeneralization. As Goodich himself concedes at one point: "It may not be possible to establish a clear correlation between mental structures and such factors as demographic change, family structure, or climatic and economic dislocations" (105-06). Yet too often the author does rather force such a vague and unsustainable correlation, and at times assigns the fourteenth century a singularity it perhaps cannot claim. Moreover, the author's central thesis concerning a rise in rescue miracles in the fourteenth century could have been strengthened with quantitative evidence. Secondly, in his analysis Goodich sometimes does not fully distinguish cases in which belief in divine intervention actually effected change (e.g., in the resolution of a conflict) from those in which it was merely imposed ex post facto by believers as an explanation for fortuitous deliverance. Despite these problems, Goodich's engaging and well-written book will be of interest to religious, social, and legal historians alike.

GEORGE MCCLURE University of Alabama