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Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England

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In this erudite study of the pilgrims who visited a select group of saintly shrines in England and France, R. Finucane has put numbers and statistics to the phenomenon of miracles and wonders in the central middle ages. Ranging from such canonized luminaries as Thomas Becket to obscure unknowns such as a boy named William who was killed in the woods, Finucane painstakingly reviewed the documents and quantifies them in terms of social class, gender, and type of miracle. What results is a picture of the people, more than half of whom were lower class, who resorted to seeking the aide of a revered saint when finding themselves in trouble. Not just illness, but shipwrecks, jousting wounds, blindness - a whole panoply of medieval evils is reported. The phenomenon of the spread of a saint's cult is also nicely interpreted. While it doen not read like a novel, the narrative is interesting in spite of its factual emphasis on research and stats. A welcome addition to the literature on religious pilgrimage in England.