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.

This study concentrates on the reported miracles of the century, and attempts to exploit them not as accurate accounts of Medieval occurences but rather as an indication of the mentality and attitude toward religion and death during this unsettled period of history.

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.

"Scott has written a magnificent book on the realities of religious healing. He brings sensibility, reason, impressive insight, and the best information to bear—qualities seldom manifested in the centuries of claim, cynicism, and controversy on the topic. His analysis is destined to raise the level of discourse on dramatic religious experiences."—Neil Smelser, author of The Odyssey Experience

In this absorbing book, Michael Goodich explores the changing perception of the miracle in medieval Western society. He employs a wealth of primary sources, including canonization dossiers, hagiographical texts, theological treatises and sermons, to examine the Christian church's desire to create a sounder legal definition of the miracle.

This book integrates the problem of violence into a larger framework, showing how economic and political behavior are closely linked.

Following from themes explored during the 2005 International Medieval Congress on ‘Youth and Age’, this interdisciplinary volume focuses upon social, cultural and biological aspects of being young and old in the medieval north. The contributors progress definitions of young and old in the north, taking into account changing mentalities as a result of political and cultural transformations such as the Christianisation of the north. This book invites discourse on youth and age amongst medieval archaeologists, historians, and philologists, while introducing particularities of medieval research to sociologists and gerontologists working within other periods and areas. The contributors, representing both established and up-and-coming scholars in the field, showcase the diverse issues that surround interdisciplinary studies of youth and age. Contributors are Christina Lee, Lotta Mejsholm, Berit J. Sellevold, Anna Hansen, Bernadine McCreesh, Joanna A. Skórzewska, Nic Percivall, Carolyne Larrington, Philadelphia Ricketts, Jordi Sánchez-Martí, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Shannon Lewis-Simpson, Ármann Jakobsson, and Yelena Sesselja Helgadóttir Yershova