This is the fifth volume to be published as part of Brill's Reading Medieval Sources series which aims to introduce and analyse a range of sources, and to provide evaluation of a genre's value and the scholarship surrounding it. A companion to medieval miracle collections champions the work of fifteen medieval scholars whose research engages with miracle collections, and reveals the ways in which these primary materials can be used to illuminate the often hidden experiences of lay ‘lived religion’. The term lived religion reflects the more day-to-day experiences of, and engagements with, religion that would have dominated much of life in the Middle Ages. This volume's attention to it is therefore a welcome addition to the field of medieval religious studies.
The aim of the editors was ‘to offer practical tools for the methodological understanding of miracle narrations’ (p. 2). The need to be methodologically aware while reading and analysing these materials is of utmost importance. Miracle accounts and collections can be multifaceted, offering an understanding of religious practice and lived religion but also shedding light on daily life, concerns about health, contemporary political challenges and other socially-focused issues. The motivations behind the creation of these miracle collections, however, cannot be overlooked. The need to take a nuanced approach has long been recognised by those who work with hagiographical materials, yet, thus far, there has been little scholarship dedicated to the methodological approaches to reading miracle collections: a point which this volume sets out to correct.
To address this analytical aspect, the volume focuses attention on later medieval miracle collections. While not explicitly documented in the contents list, the fifteen chapters are divided between two parts. The first six chapters consider the miracle collection process itself, including the canonisation process as well as the broader purposes for collecting these materials. Chapters vii–xv then shift attention to the ways in which miracle collections can be used in the study of medieval society.
In contextualising the processes, and evolution, of miracle collecting the contributors to the first six chapters – Louise Elizabeth Wilkinson, Emilia Jamroziak, Roberto Paciocco (translated by Lauren Jennings), Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Jenni Kuuliala, Donald S. Prudlo and Jussi Hanska – provide a useful foundation on miracle collections, including those produced as part of canonisation processes. Wilson's chapter opens the volume by discussing the process of collecting miracles in and of itself: from the initial reporting of the miracle to the final, edited, compilation. She concludes that despite differences between collections, all hagiographers ‘grappled with a similar set of basic requirements’ (p. 35). This sense of inherent requirements and yet differing contexts is continued through the following five chapters which locate miracle collecting in different environments. Jamroziak addresses monastic, especially Benedictine and Cistercian, collections in the later Middle Ages. Paciocco, Katajala-Peltomaa and Kuuliala, and Prudlo contribute chapters on collections produced as part of canonisation proceedings. Hanska completes part i by examining the relationship between miracula and exampla.
Taken together, these six chapters provide a useful introduction to a range of different miracle collections. Their primary focus is the high to later Middle Ages (a point especially evident when discussing canonisation, due to the increasingly formulaic, centralised and bureaucratic process for recognising new saints). A key message is the researcher's need to consider the manner in which miracle stories were shaped by their collectors and by the purposes that lay behind their collection.
Chapters vii–xv provide more of a ‘case-study’ approach to various miracle collections. In so doing, the contributors to part ii – Marika Räsänen, Leigh Ann Craig, Jenni Kuuliala, Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, Jyrki Nissi, Iona McCleery, Nicole Archambeau, Jonas Van Mulder and Ildikó Csepregi – draw attention to the ways miracula can be used to explore diverse aspects of social history. Räsänen and Craig's chapters, on Cistercian devotion and pilgrimage respectively, address the ways in which saints’ cults played a part in lived religion within and ‘without’ the religious communities which housed the saints’ shrines. In evaluating the use of miracles for the study of pilgrimage, Craig recognises the ‘invaluable window’ (p. 185) these collections can provide into lived religion. This statement can also be applied to other aspects of lived experience, including medieval healthcare and the body, as is well illustrated in the following three chapters: Kuuliala addresses disability; Katajala-Peltomaa madness and demonic possession; Nissi mortality in childbirth. Corporeal healing tends to dominate collections of posthumous miracles, but McCleery (focusing on late medieval Portugal) and Archambeau (addressing Provençal cults) highlight the importance of studying ‘non-healing miracles’. Such miracles, whether liberating prisoners or saving the shipwrecked, shed light on regional and political influences behind miracle collections, but also the cults themselves. The closing chapters of the volume take a more detailed look at the miracle narratives themselves. Van Mulder introduces the reader to the complex topic of dreams and visions in Low Countries miracle collections and their use in narratological construction. Csepregi completes the volume by focusing on the narratives in the collections produced for St Margaret of Hungary, showing how they reflect both wider practices of adapting lived experiences into written record, and the particular noteworthiness of Margaret's canonisation. As such, this final chapter brings the volume full circle back to Wilkinson's initial reflections on the juxtaposing nature of these collections as being both individual materials and part of a long-standing tradition.
This book will be of interest to those beginning to explore miracle collections as well as subject experts more familiar with materials. As such it is a welcome addition for researchers of medieval hagiography, lived religion and more socially-focused topics such as healthcare.
