Miracle stories

 Medieval people, like modern people, believed in miracles, as I've discussed previously.  But miracles were not free floating events, being usually attached to a place, a relic, and a saint.

Miracles were one of the chief attributes of saints.  All saints worked miracles, and from the twelfth century onward one could not become a saint without sufficient post-mortem miracles, all properly verified.  (This is still the case for the modern Catholic church.)  Throughout the Middle Ages, an account of a saint's life and activities, his or her vita as it was called, was routinely accompanied by a second volume, stories of the miracles the saint worked after death.

Major shrines to particular saints all had collected stories of miracles their saint had performed.  By far the majority of these miracles involved healing, everything from the pox to a broken arm to gout, even an infected toe.  In an era without modern medicine, when few people could expect to live past their 50s, they turned to whatever healing procedures might be available.  And they may well have worked!  Who are we to dismiss their testimony, when we weren't even there? (and are in a society that has seen some, well, unlikely "cures" promoted for Covid-19).

Miracle stories tended to be very detailed.  The person who was healed was named, as was the specific ailment for which they had suffered.  We often learn a lot about such a person, their social status, their occupation, even which friends and relatives helped them reach the shrine if they did not walk there themselves.  (Pilgrims on the Santiago route, from Burgundy to northwestern Spain, walked 20 miles a day, pretty impressive considering a lot of them were sick and seeking healing or redemption.)

The specificity of the miracle stories added a note of verisimilitude that would not have been possible if they just spoke of generic people being healed of generic diseases.  The stories always stressed that saints were ready to help even the poorest petitioner, and that even the mightiest might need their help.  The miracle stories also tended to stress one particular kind of healing if the saint had a specialty; Saint Foy of Conques, for example (village seen below), was noted for cures of the eyes.

 

Often the miracle stories would speak of someone who had long suffered from an ailment, had visited shrines to other saints without relief, but had finally found healing when appealing to this particular saint.  Those healed were expected to be suitably grateful.  They needn't make a monetary offering (though it was never refused), but they would leave their crutches as a marker of being able to walk again or the like, and they were expected to live a properly virtuous life in the future.  A sinner who had been cured of an ailment was likely to sicken again if he returned to his sin.  And of course it was hoped that those healed would spread the good word about the saint's power.

The miracle stories then could be seen as a form of advertisement for a particular shrine, but they also stressed that the saints listened to people of all economic or social status, and that a moral, virtuous life was needed to accompany a healthy life.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022


For more on religion, saints, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

Martyrs

A martyr is someone who dies for their faith.  Originally in the early Christian church, only a martyr could be a saint.  Once Christianity became the dominant religion, however, it became much harder to die for one's faith, and "confessor" saints became the norm, people who "confessed" their religiosity through the holiness of their life and the miracles they worked (especially after death).

Interestingly, in the US after 911 "martyr" has become a pejorative term.  Those who crashed planes into the World Trade Center claimed they were willing to die for Islam.  (Many Muslims point out that this sure doesn't look like the faith they know, but that's a separate issue.)  Thus "martyr" and "terrorist" have been linked for many in the twenty-first century.  But in the Middle Ages martyrs were greatly admired.

The New Testament itself tells the story of Saint Stephen "protomartyr" (i.e. first martyr), put to death for believing in Christ.  Many churches in the West were dedicated to him, starting in the fifth century.

The West had very few saints before the sixth century, but in the sixth century a great many bones of early martyrs were discovered.  These people, it was universally agreed, had died while trying to convert the pagans of the Roman Empire, or else had been rounded up and put to death by pagan emperors like Nero or Diocletian.  The catacombs of Rome were full of bones, and the Christians were sure that a great many of these were the bones of Christian martyrs put to death in the Coliseum.

Elaborate accounts of the lives and deaths of those who had first brought Christianity to the provinces of the Empire were put together.  The city of Lyon traditionally had 177 martyrs, all supposedly put to death for their faith in the second century.  Attempts were made to name them all, though some of their names, like "Rhône River" or "Mature," seem at best odd.  Other missionaries to the pagans were sent out from Lyon, including Marcellus and Benignus, who in essence had a saint-off contest--they headed north, one on either side of the river, to see who could be martyred first (Marcellus won, or lost depending on your point of view).

By the late sixth century, elaborate explanations were being given for why the martyrs of the second and third centuries were forgotten for a few centuries, only to be rediscovered in the fifth or sixth.  The 177 martyrs of Lyon, for example, were said to have been burned and their ashes thrown in the river--though by the end of the sixth century a church in Lyon would tell anyone interested that it had those ashes, and indeed had had them all the time, since Christians (apparently too timid to be martyred themselves) had secretly pulled them from the river and buried them suitably.

It is easy to doubt the historicity of most of the West's martyr-saints, even though most western dioceses had a (supposed) martyr for their first bishop.  By the fifth and sixth centuries, with religious persecution far in the past, the West instead started producing historically verifiable confessor saints.

Martyrdom was still preferred, however.  Someone practicing extreme asceticism (living in the desert alone, eating almost nothing) was described as almost like a martyr.  Those who left the ordinary world for the monastery were said to be practicing a "bloodless martyrdom."  A priest or monk who was killed by a layman was presumed to be a martyr, though he would still need some good posthumous miracles for real proof.

When knights headed off on Crusade, starting at the end of the eleventh century, it was suggested that they might wear the crown of martyrdom if they died in the Holy Land.  However, dying of disease or shipwreck (as many did who did not make it back) was hard to construe as martyrdom, and even those killed in battle with Muslims didn't look all that saintly to those who might otherwise have declared them saints.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

For more on medieval religion and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

The Wood Nymph and the Cranky Saint

Saints were a major part of medieval Christianity, as I have discussed previously.  In writing stories set in a fantasy version of the real Middle Ages, I have therefore included saints.

The modern person may assume that saints were gentle and kind.  They could be, but medieval saints could also be frightening to malefactors, or even to those to whom they were well-intentioned.  In The Wood Nymph and the Cranky Saint, I used many motifs from real medieval saints' lives and miracle stories.

For example, my fictional Saint Eusebius has a backstory of how he came to die for the faith.  In his case, he was eaten by a dragon (this is, after all, a fantasy story), and the dragon miraculously choked to death on him, thus saving the people of the countryside, and leaving only his big toe.  This of course became the relic of the Holy Toe.

In the story, the Holy Toe is served by a hermit, who has several apprentice hermits living a short distance away.  This motif reflects a common medieval dilemma--a hermit would be so renowned for his holiness, his austere life in total isolation from society, that many people would want to go join him.

Eusebius shows his crankiness in one case by diverting a river so that the grave of a noted reprobate will be cut off from the rest of a cemetery full of good, decent dead people.  This is based on a real medieval miracle story.

A key feature of the plot is that two different groups of people want the saint's relics (the Holy Toe) for their own, both claiming that the saint has appeared in visions to them.  Again, this was a real medieval concern, wanting to have the relics of a saint near one in order to be sure of his favor.  There were many medieval stories of "holy thefts," people stealing a saint's relics and bringing them home when the saint was clearly not being properly revered or respected where he was (as evidenced of course by visions).

Click here if you're interested in seeing more of the Cranky Saint.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

Medieval saints

Although of course in medieval Christianity (as in modern Christianity) God the Father was the judge and God the Son was the savior, in day to day religious practice the saints got a lot more attention.

Originally there was no procedure for becoming a saint.  If one had lived a holy life, being recognized as a "living saint," and then worked miracles after death, one was a saint.  These are indeed the criteria still used, but before the twelfth century these determinations were made locally, whereas since the twelfth century they have been centralized in Rome.

Western Europe was Christianized slowly, as indeed was the whole Roman Empire, but by the fifth century all provincial capitals in the Empire had bishops.  However, the west had very few saints.  The city of Rome had by far the most, for its catacombs were full of bones, many of which were identified as Christians put to death under pagan emperors like Nero and Aurelian.  (Early Christians had indeed met for religious service in the catacombs.)

Europe's shortage of saints was solved by the sixth century, for not only were there a number of fifth-century holy bishops who could be declared saints, as well as such holy women as Genovefa of Paris, but Europe's bishops were constantly finding new ones!  Cemeteries outside of town (where the Romans had always put their dead, as discussed here) were as full of bones as were the catacombs.  A few visions would identify a set of bones as someone who had been martyred back in the second or third century while trying to spread Christianity, and once the bones started working miracles, their identity was proven.

Soon churches began being dedicated to saints, as they had not been earlier, and all churches needed relics, bits of bone of a saint, although in some cases a piece of clothing might do.  The cathedral of Chartres, for example, had the "chemise" of the Virgin Mary, the nightgown she was supposedly wearing the night she gave birth to Jesus.

One should of course be very careful, even if one does not believe in saints oneself, in calling them "superstition," as discussed more here.  Medieval people did not automatically believe in every story of a saint.  Bones about which there was doubt would be scientifically tested, as for example being thrown into a fire.  If they jumped back out, they were clearly saints' bones.  Saints were also not some manifestation of "folk" religion, for they were discovered, validated, and promoted by the elite.  They were also not polytheism in disguise, because all agreed that God gave them their power, as His agents.

Although there were some "universal" saints, like the Virgin or Stephen, who appears in the New Testament being put to death for his faith, most saints were local.  They were closer to the people of the region than some universal saint, much less God (who could be frightening), more likely to listen to their concerns.

Saints could be subversive.  They blasted anyone who harmed "their" churches--which usually meant the wealthy and powerful.  They also provided hope--no matter how horrible you had been, if you completely changed your ways, did penance, and made restitution, saints could help you achieve salvation.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on the medieval church, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.