• 1  H. C. Kee, Medicine, Miracles and Magic in New Testament Times, Cambridge, Cambridge University Pr (...)
• 2  Gregorius Turonensis, De virtutibus sancti Martini episcopi, ed. B. Krusch, Monumenta Germaniae Hi (...)
• 3  M. Hamilton, Incubation and the Cure of Diseases in Pagan Temples and Christian Churches, London, (...)

1The models for the healing miracles of the saints were above all those ascribed to Christ in the Gospels1, and the miracles in vita described in the late antique and early medieval «holy biographies» did indeed amply draw on this model. As Gregory of Tours put it, saints were repeating the acts of the Savior, with the help of his virtus2. As for the other, much more numerous class of miracles, the miracula post mortem, which occurred near the relics or even at a distance after a solemn vow addressed to the saint, other antique traditions may have had some influence, such as dream healing in the Asclepius temple in Epidaurus, or holy wells and trees, or other faith-healing sites3.

• 4  M. Heinzelmann, «Une source de base de la littérature hagiographique latine: Le recueil des miracl (...)
• 5  G. Dagron, ed., Vie et miracles de sainte Thècle: texte grec, traduction et commentaire, Bruxelles (...)
• 6  Hippolyte Delehaye, «Les recueils antiques de Miracles de saints», Analecta Bollandiana 43 (1925), (...)
• 7  V. S. Crisafulli and J. W. Nesbitt, The Miracles of St. Artemios. A Collection of Miracle Stories (...)
• 8  Gregorius Turonensis, De virtutibus sancti Martini episcopi; id., De passione et virtutibus sancti (...)
• 9  L. Robertini, ed., Liber miraculorum sancte Fidis, Spoleto, Centro Italiano di Studi sull’alto Med (...)
• 10  E. de Certain, ed., Miracula S. Benedicti, Paris, Société d’Histoire de France, 1858; cf. B. Töpfe (...)

2Miracle stories have been central constituents of hagiographic narrative since late antiquity.4 Besides being added to the accounts of the passion of the martyrs and the legends of confessor saints, miracle lists related to important shrines also existed as an autonomous genre: those of St. Thecla5, Sts. Cosmas and Damian, Sts. Cyrus and John6, St. Artemios7, or later of St. Martin8, St. Foy9, St. Benedict10, and others provided many hundreds of miracle accounts with elaborate references to eyewitnesses and including colorful oral reports.

• 11  J. A. Hardon, «The Concept of Miracle from St. Augustine to Modern Apologetics», Theological Studi (...)
• 12  Hagiographie, cultures et sociétés. Actes du Colloque organisé à Nanterre et à Paris (2-5 mai 1979 (...)
• 13  S. Boesch Gajano and M. Modica, ed., Miracoli. Dai segni alla storia,Roma, Viella, 2000.
• 14  D. Aigle, ed., Miracle et karāma. Hagiographies médiévales comparées,Turnhout, Brepols, 2000.
• 15  K. Herbers, M. Heinzelmann and D. R. Bauer, ed., Mirakel im Mittelalter, Konzeptionen, Erscheinung (...)
• 16  The rich material of this conference is still unpublished.
• 17  R. C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, Popular Beliefs in Medieval England,London, J. M. Dent & So (...)
• 18  B. Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind. Theory, Record and Event 1000-1215, Aldershot, Wildwood H (...)
• 19  A. Vauchez, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge. D’après les procès de canon (...)
• 20  P.-A. Sigal, L’homme et le miracle dans la France médiévale (XI^e-XII^e siècle), Paris, Cerf, 1985.
• 21  M. Wittmer-Butsch and C. Rendtel, Miracula. Wunderheilungen im Mittelalter,Köln-Wien, Böhlau, 2003
• 22  M. Goodich, Miracles and Wonders: The Development of the Concept of Miracle, 1150-1350, Aldershot, (...)

4This rich source material has understandably attracted the attention of historical (but also theological, psychological, literary, anthropological and medical) research11. The genre of the miracle has been analyzed by a series of important conferences, including those organized by Evelyne Patlagean and Pierre Riché on Hagiographie, cultures et sociétés in Nanterre, 197912. Sofia Boesch Gajano on Miracoli in Rome, 198913, Denise Aigle on Miracle et karāma in Ivry, 199514. Klaus Herbers and Martin Heinzelmann on Mirakel im Mittelalter in Weingarten, 200015, or Fernando Vidal on Miracles as epistemic things in Berlin, 200516. Parallel to this, several monographic analyses treated this genre. In 1977 Ronald Finucane drew above all upon the rich material of the canonization of St. Thomas Becket, complementing it with other English miracle-lists17, and this has been the central dossier for the subsequent synthesis by Benedicta Ward in 1987 as well18. The phenomenon of miracles occupied a central place in André Vauchez’s investigation of late medieval canonization processes in 198119. The most comprehensive analysis of early medieval miracles was done by Pierre-André Sigal in 1985, based upon the statistical analysis of 2050 posthumous healing miracles, collected from seventy-six saints’ lives and 166 miracle lists, before the end of the twelfth century20. From among the more recent syntheses the book by Maria Wittmer-Butsch and Constance Rendtel deserves mention, who studied a sample of 454 healing miracles from the dossiers of six late medieval and one early modern saints21. And finally, we have the posthumously published monograph on Miracles and Wonders (and several other books and studies) by Michael Goodich –the synthesis of his life-long inquiry on the subject22.

• 23  H. Hubert and M. Mauss, «Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice,» L’Année Sociologique (1 (...)
• 24  P. Geary, «La coercition des saints dans la pratique religieuse médiévale», in La culture populair (...)
• 25  For the process of supplication and vow in medieval miracle collections see Sigal, L’homme et le m (...)
• 26  P.-A. Sigal, «Un aspect du culte des saints: Le châtiment divin aux XI^e et XII^e siècles d’après la (...)
• 27  For a rich inventory of these gifts in the canonization processes, see Vauchez, La sainteté en Occ (...)

6Miracles of the saints have frequently been described as yet another phenomenon obeying the traditional do ut des logic of the sacrifice and gift in general23, employing a set of methods to «coerce» the saints for providing the required help24, The habitual procedures to approach the saints or their relics include the following elements. The miracle-seeking person or his relatives («representatives») should supplicate the saint for help and make a vow (votum) to the saint, promising a votive offering or different types of services to the shrine in exchange for the healing25. This general condition is also enforced by numerous «miracles of vengeance» which illustrate that the saint could withdraw the healing effects of the miracle if the vow was not fulfilled according to promise26. The miraculé generally thanked the saint for the successful healing in ritual form –the healing is instantaneously and loudly proclaimed at the shrine, it is repeated in sermons, in miracle testimonies, it is remembered by ex-voto gifts, inscriptions, and later in the early modern period by paintings27.

• 28  See the literature cited in note 3.

7Within this broad set of ritualized transactions between the «patients» asking for a miracle and the saints one can find several miracles where the saints set some specific conditions for helping the persons turning to them, and, as it were, negotiate the «price» of the miracle with the clients. Such a negotiation is only feasible in two situations: in the miracles performed by the «living saint» or in the miracles where the saints appear to the patient in a dream-vision –i.e. the incubation miracles. Let me describe this latter genre first28.

• 29  L. Deubner, De Incubatione capita quattuor, Leipzig, B.G. Teubner, 1900; H. Delehaye, «Les recueil (...)
• 30  Miracles of Cosmas and Damian (KDM), 2, Festugière, op. cit.,p.100-2.
• 31  KDM 9, Festugière, Sainte Thècle, Saints Côme et Damien,p. 110-112; Miracle 10 is also related to (...)
• 32  KDM 17, Festugière, ibid.,p. 134-136.

8In the archetypal miracle collections of Sts. Cosmas and Damian, recorded in their Constantinopolitan church, the Cosmidion, between the fifth and the thirteenth centuries and comprising forty-eight miracle accounts29, one can find several miracles where the conversion of the clients is the precondition of the healing. The second miracle in the collection narrates the story of a Jewish woman with cancer in her breast. For her healing she resorted to the rite of incubation in the church dedicated to Sts. Cosmas and Damian. This meant sleeping in the narthex with the other ailing pilgrims, waiting for the healing saints to appear in their dream and heal them on the spot or to instruct them about the kind of remedy they should take. The saints appeared to her three times, commanded her to eat pork, and refused to heal her unless she fulfilled this condition. Because of her intolerable pains, she ordered her Jewish servants and family members to bring her a piece of pork. They tried to dissuade her in vain, telling that following the saints’ command would turn her against the Law and ancestral customs. But this was in fact the very aim of the saints, according to the hagiographer. When the relatives finally brought the pork and the woman was just at the point of starting to eat, she noticed her husband approaching, and she got frightened and hid the meat under her dress. Meanwhile the Lord, thanks to the saints’ prayer, made the illness of the woman «jump» from her breast onto the meat. As soon as she became aware of the miracle, she hastened to get baptized30. Another miracle of Cosmas and Damian tells the story of a pagan man visiting the saints and addressing them in a provocative manner as Castor and Pollux. He could not get healed until he justly acknowledged them as Cosmas and Damian and converted to Christianity31. A third case is about an «Exakionite» (Arian) heretic. Though the saints reproach him for his erroneous faith, instead of refusing him the cure or tying it to the condition of his conversion, they cure him and then expel him from their church so that he does not contaminate the place with his heresies32. Conversion to Christianity as the precondition to miraculous healing, certainly logical from all points of view, refers also to a more generic concept on healing: in order to heal the body one must heal the soul as well, or rather, heal the soul first.

• 33  Miracle 6, Festugière, ibid.,p. 107.
• 34  Miracle 11, Festugière, ibid.,p. 116-120.
• 35  Miracle 16, Festugière, ibid.,p. 131-134.

9Besides this clearly propagandistic issue, other miracles set simpler conditions, such as commanding the client to stop cursing and pronouncing blasphemies or to turn to a diet and abstain from eating chicken33, or to constrain the ill person to drink a repulsive but ultimately beneficial substance such as cedar-oil34 or the kerote (the blessed liquid candle-wax)35.

• 36  Miracle 24, Festugière, ibid.,p. 158-159.
• 37  Miracle 3, Festugière, ibid.,p. 102-104.
• 38  Festugière, ibid.,p. 125.

10There are a few miracles in this collection where the two saints appear to be real tricksters, advancing shocking or enigmatic conditions for healing. The most famous story is about a mute noblewoman and a paralyzed man, both awaiting their cure sleeping in the church of Cosmas and Damian. The saints appeared in dream to the paralyzed man and told him he could only be cured if he made love to the mute woman besides him. He was really shocked, but then became gradually convinced by the insisting saints. When he finally made his attempt, tried to crawl closer to and approach the mute woman, she cried out loudly, calling a host of relatives to protect her. The paralyzed man had to run away for fear of getting lynched. Thus both of them got instantaneously cured from their illnesses36. A similarly tricky advice was given when the saints suggested to a man who suffered from the retention of urine that he could only get healed by the pubic hair of Cosmas. This advice seemed to him a true sacrilege and an impossible condition until he discovered that a sheep given to the saints as votive offering and being kept there in the sanctuary also bore the name Cosmas, and willingly offered its hair for his healing37. The miracle collection explains these cases by pointing out that the believers should really have a blind trust in the saints: «nobody should dare to refuse to accept any miracles or gestures from these saints […]»38.

• 39  Gregorius Turonensis, De passione et virtutibus sancti Iuliani martyris (VJ), De virtutibus sancti (...)
• 40  Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Martyrs, ed. R. van Dam, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 198 (...)

11Turning to Latin Christianity, the fitting counterpart to these Eastern miracle collections is the hagiographic œuvre of Gregory of Tours (d. 594), recording fifty miracles of St. Julian of Brioude, subsequently 207 miracles (grouped in four books) attributed to St. Martin of Tours39, and also including two hagiographic overviews on the Glory of the Martyrs and the Glory of the Confessors40.

• 41  VJ 6, Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles,p. 168.
• 42  Sulpice Sévère, Vie de Saint Martin, ed. J. Fontaine, Paris, Cerf, 1969, vol. I, p. 278-279, mirac (...)
• 43  Miracle 17, Sulpice Sévère, Vie de Saint Martin,p. 289-291.
• 44  VM I, 11, Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles,p. 211-212.
• 45  VM II, 40, Van Dam, ibid.,p. 249-250.

12As in the case of Cosmas and Damian, the miraculous power of the saints is frequently put to the service of conversion as the necessary condition of the miracle. In the Vita Iuliani the negotiator setting the condition for the miracle is not the saint himself but the priest who only starts his intercession asking the saint when he gets the promise from the pagans to convert41. As for St. Martin of Tours, already his first life by Sulpicius Severus described several miracles of conversion. He transfixed a pagan funeral cortège through the sign of the cross, and only allowed them to move on when it turned out that their procession was not for a religious ceremony42. He only accepted to heal the pro-consul Tetradius from his possession when he promised to convert43. Gregory of Tours continues this tradition in his own collection of St. Martin’s miracles. He describes how the Sueves were converted from Arianism when «the king perceived that his son could not be cured until he believed that Christ was equal with the Father. He constructed a church of marvelous workmanship in honor of the blessed Martin, and upon its completion he announced: ‘If I am considered worthy to receive the relics of this just man, I will believe whatever the bishops have proclaimed’»44. The aim of conversion could also be pursued in a pastoral way: in the case of Sisulf, a poor man from Le Mans whose hand got disabled, the healing condition was his preaching service in the eradication of sins. At first he did not know what caused the crippling of his right hand, but an old man in a vision who later identified himself as St. Martin, explained: «Your disability reveals the anguish that awaits sinful people. Therefore go now through the villages and the fortresses, travel as far as the city, and proclaim that everyone is to abstain from perjury and usury and on Sundays no one is to do work contrary to the mystical rites… Therefore be prompt in announcing that people are to reform lest they die a cruel death as a result of their own crimes». By accepting this instruction and repenting of his similar transgressions, Sisulf could eventually be healed45.

• 46  The miracles of vengeance are the following: VJ 5, 8, 10, 11, 13-20, 40, 44.
• 47  Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles, p. 171.
• 48  The miracles of vengeance are the following: VM I, 2, 11, 17, 20, 21, 29, 30, 31; VM II, 24, 40; V (...)
• 49  Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors, Cap.6, 18, 20, 31, 34, 39, 44, 53, 55, 58, 74; cf. Bozo (...)

13The «pedagogical» aspect of the miracle accounts is also revealed in Gregory’s œuvre by the unusually high percentage of «punishment miracles»: In the Vita Iuliani fourteen miracles out of fifty (i.e. 28%) belong to this genre46.Gregory explains: «it seems to me that just as illnesses are reversed and healed by the saint’s power, so also the depravities of unbelievers are restrained and exposed by his prayer for the correction of other people, lest they seek similar [follies]»47. In the more ample collection of St. Martin’s miracles the proportion of the punishment miracles is more modest (fourteen among 207 accounts), mostly related to the protection of the saint’s cult-site from robbery or the prohibition of work on Sunday48. In Gregory’s overview of the miracles of the confessors, the miracles of vengeance allow a good typology of the consequences of the misuse of relics by unworthy persons or in an unpermitted way; the sacrilegious violation of the saint’s sanctuary; and the punishment for perjury on the relics49.

• 50  Sheingorn and Clark, ed. and trans., The Book of Sainte Foy, p. 127.
• 51  III, 14, ibid.,p. 162-164.
• 52  I, 5, 6, 8, 10-15; III, 10, 13, ibid.,p. 58-81, 158-162.
• 53  I, 1, Sheingorn and Clark, ed., op. cit.,p. 50.
• 54  I, 19, Sheingorn and Clark, ed., The Book of Sainte Foy, p. 85 (this story is followed by several (...)

14The genre of the miracle of vengeance has a marked presence in several later medieval miracle collections. In the eleventh-century Liber miraculorum sancte Fidis, one can read: «there is no more serious offense against Sainte Foy, none that will lead more surely to sudden disaster, than to intend evil against the affairs of her domain»50. St. Foy struck blind a knight called Reinfroi who usurped a manor of the abbey, and whose sight could only be restored when he relinquished what he had taken and made a bare-foot pilgrimage to ask pardon at her relics. Subsequently she also appeared to him three times during the night, reminding him to stick to his promises and menacing him with renewed sanctions51. Alongside with a number of similar miracles punishing irreverence, aggression against St. Foy, her monastery or the pilgrims on their way there52, the other reason for the vengeance of the saint is that the beneficiary of the miracle does not keep his promise or vow, and because of this he/she falls back into the same illness. Already the famous initial miracle of the collection, the healing of the blind Guibert, whose eyes, torn out of their roots, had been miraculously cured, contains such a series of sanctions: «when he slipped back again and again into his habitual hog wallowing, divine vengeance soon followed: he lost the sight of one eye and repenting, recovered»53. As for the do ut des type healing conditions, this collection offers some of the most straightforward formulations. In one account St. Foy appeared in dream to the wife of William, Count of Toulouse, and she told her that the reason for her apparition was that she should make a pilgrimage to Conques and give her her golden bracelets, placing them above the altar of the Saint Savior. The countess answered she would do it if she might conceive a male child, upon which St. Foy responded: «The Omnipotent Creator will do this quite easily for His own handmaiden, if you do not refuse what I ask». This is a remarkable case: it is not the saint who came forward with the condition, but the prospective miraculée54.

• 55  E. de Certain, ed., Miracula S. Benedicti.
• 56  H. Platelle, «Crime et châtiment à Marchiennes. Étude sur la conception et le fonctionnement de la (...)
• 57  Sigal, «Un aspect du culte des saints»; id., L’homme et le miracle, p. 276-282.

15Another ample miracle-collection filled with many miracles of vengeance and conditions for healing is the Miracula sancti Benedicti, from the middle of the eleventh century55. Henri Platelle has studied St. Rictrude, a seventh-century noble widow and abbess of Marchiennes in northern France, whose miracles, assembled around 1130, contain twenty healings, twenty-five protecting miracles and twenty-three cases of vengeance56. Pierre-André Sigal based his pertinent observations on the miracles of vengeance above all upon these collections, supplementing them with a few more cases from the early Middle Ages57.

• 58  On this category, in vogue in the 1970s and then falling in disfavor in the 1980s, see P. Burke, P (...)
• 59  Geary, Living with the Dead,p. 111.
• 60  E. de Certain, ed., Miracula S. Benedicti,p. 282-283; Geary, Living with the Dead,p. 112-113.
• 61  Cf. the chapter «Peasants and Saints» in A. Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief (...)
• 62  I, 26, Sheingorn and Clark, ed., The Book of Sainte Foy, p. 94.

16There has been a slight temptation in the historiography of the past decades to relate this kind of business-like relationship of the lay clients to the saints to what was labeled as «popular religion»58. Sigal’s path-breaking article on the miracles of vengeance appeared in a volume dedicated to popular religion. Patrick Geary distinguished in his article on the monastic rituals of the «humiliation of saints» also a «popular» ritual «designed to force the saints to protect their followers, the ritual of beating the saint’s relics»59. He quotes a case from the Miracula sancti Benedicti, where a peasant woman, mistreated by a certain nobleman called Adelard ran to the relics in the church, threw back the altar cloths, began striking the altar and cried to the saint. «Benedict, you sluggard, you sloth, what are you doing? Why do you sleep? Why do you allow your servant to be treated so?»60 Aron Gurevich also investigated the early medieval miracle accounts from the point of view of distinguishing «popular» and «official» conceptions of saintliness61. One can also find a case in the Liber miraculorum sancte Fidis, where the saint was menaced that her reliquary statue would be flogged «and even thrown in a river or well unless Saint Foy avenged herself on the evil-doers immediately». Nevertheless, in this last case we do not have to do with a peasant or even a layperson but with a monk named Gimon62, so the elite-popular distinction is difficult to be maintained for this case.

• 63  A. Picard, P. Boglioni, «Miracle et thaumaturgie dans la vie de Saint Bernard», in Vues et légende (...)
• 64  On the explosion of miracles after the death of Saint Francis, see Thomas de Celano, Vita Prima, I (...)

17It would be fascinating to follow the evolution of this miracle type in the collections produced by the amplified hagiographic production of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a period which witnessed the forceful reappearance of the miracle-working «holy man» with St. Bernard of Clairvaux63, and subsequently with St. Francis64. There is no space for this here. In the second part of my study I would like to confront the early medieval examples, where the miracle stories were shaped by the rhetoric of hagiography, with the slightly changed genre of late medieval miracle collections, recorded in the legalistic atmosphere of canonization processes. Could the educative and pedagogical intentions of early medieval hagiographers and miracle-tale-tellers impose themselves also in these new conditions? Apparently there were some difficulties: we only find sporadic– though interesting– examples of this kind among the thousands of miracles documented in late medieval canonization processes. Let me present a few cases before putting the question: why?

• 65  On her life and cult see D. Blume and M. Werner, ed., Elisabeth von Thüringen: Eine europäische He (...)
• 66  A. Huyskens, Quellenstudien zur Geschichte der hl. Elisabeth, Marburg, N. G. Elwert’sche Verlagsbu (...)
• 67  I, 18, Huyskens, Quellenstudien,p. 174-175.

18The first example is from the canonization process of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, a saintly princess, daughter of King Andrew II of Hungary, and pious widow of Ludwig IV, landgrave of Thuringia (d. 1231)65, whose investigation had been carried out between 1232 and 1235, recording the testimonies of about 800 witnesses on altogether 129 miraculous healings66. The only miracle-story among these with a specific condition for the cure is related to the healing of a widow named Guta, who had a polyp in the nose, suffering from it for twelve years. «While she was ill, she had been a member of the unbelievers’ sect called the Poor of Lyons. In this condition she could not obtain remedy to this illness, neither from a living human being, nor from those who have left their bodies and are now in a glorious state. But finally she changed her mind, denied her sect and turned to the benefices of the confession, and received due penance from her priest. Having accomplished this, she hastened to the tomb of Lady Elizabeth, wife of the landgrave, to implore her for her help… and having finished her prayer she instantly got liberated from her illness.»67

• 68  This has recently been underlined by D. Elliott, Proving Woman. Female Spirituality and Inquisitio (...)

19This story, recorded in the dry tone of the notaries, is certainly not the construction of a hagiographer; it rather shows the imprint of a strong-handed interpreter, the initiator of the canonization of Saint Elizabeth, her confessor, Conrad of Marburg, who was, at the same time, a relentless persecutor of Waldensian heretics. In fact the whole canonization investigation of Elizabeth was intended to be a statement against the heresies of the age68. just as in general the whole religious ideal embodied by St. Elizabeth, the new-style sponsa Christi, the aristocratic and mendicant widow living in renunciation as a nurse in a hospital of lepers.The ideal incorporated by her could indeed be the symbolic antithesis of the one represented by the heretic widow in the miracle account, punished by God with that nasty illness.

• 69  A. Patschowski, «Zur Ketzerverfolgung Konrads von Marburg», Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des M (...)

20The condition for this healing is clearly set by Conrad of Marburg, Elizabeth’s stern confessor who was regularly preaching in the church in the proximity of Elizabeth’s sarcophagus, presenting her example as an antidote to sin and heresy. His interpretation of her exemplarity was conditioned by his multiple functions of inquisitor and papal legate documenting and investigating Elizabeth’s life and miracles and, as mentioned above, as a persecutor of Waldensian heretics69. With all these involvements one might even wonder, why he did not include (or generate?) more miracle accounts of this kind in the collection of the first 106 miraculous healings (Miracula Sancte Elyzabet) he compiled in 1233, before his being murdered by heretics on 30 July, 1233.

• 70  I, 3, Huyskens, Quellenstudien,p. 159-60: …mater irata murmuravit contra dominam Elyzabet, dicens, (...)

21Elizabeth’s miracle accounts also include a few examples of the miraculés attempting to set their own conditions in the transactions with the saint, this archaic feature reminiscent of the earlier medieval cases we have referred to. The mother of a nine-year-old girl having a hump and goiter and having spent ten days at the sepulcher of the saint without receiving the miraculous healing they were begging for, «…started to grudge against Elizabeth, saying: ‘I will warn everyone not to visit your tomb since you did not listen to me!’». And this threat did have its effect: the girl was cured by a nightly vision of the saint not long thereafter70.

• 71  I, 28, Huyskens, Quellenstudien,p. 184: «Sancta Elyzabet, ad te de cetero non veniam, nisi de tua (...)

22Another account describes the healing of a lame burger from Frankfurt, called Gerhardus, who also had a big hump on his back. Having been carried by a carriage to the grave of St. Elizabeth in Marburg and spending three weeks there his hump was miraculously cured. Then he decided to offer a bargaining supplication so that he could get cured also from his lameness: «St. Elizabeth, I cannot come back to you again unless you have mercy on me; I would come [to your grave] if I have the ability»71. As an apparition in a dream indicated to him, his plea was heard and his faculty to stand up and walk gradually returned.

• 72  A. Huyskens, Der sogenannte Libellus de dictis quatuor ancillarum s. Elisabeth confectus, München/ (...)

23The question arises: could one build a sociological interpretation upon these two slightly exotic cases from among more than hundred more «standard» vows, simply promising gifts, services and pilgrimage to the saint? Could one label them as a more «popular» version of miracle belief than the attitudes to be discerned from the testimonies of her handmaids, whose recollections were compiled into the charming Libellus de dictis quator ancillarum72? There is certainly a difference in the religious attitudes, but the evidence is unfortunately rather thin.

• 73  A. Rożnowska-Sadraei, Pater Patriae: The Cult of Saint Stanislaus and the Patronage of Polish King (...)
• 74  The canonization documents of St. Stanislaus were edited by W. Kętrzyński, Miracula sancti Stanisl (...)

24My second set of thirteenth century examples are from the canonization process of Saint Stanislaus, the martyr bishop of Cracow, the Polish Becket (avant la lettre) murdered in 1079, whose cult only developed in the thirteenth century73. There were two rounds of investigation gathering the testimonies on fifty-two miracles and obtaining his canonization in 125374.

• 75  Miracula sancti Stanislai, p. 305-306.
• 76  Ibid., p. 311: dixit ei, cum quadam indignatione se eleuando super eum: Et tu neglexisti!

26As a first attempt she made the pilgrimage to the grave without telling there the dream and stepping up as an agent for the initiation of Stanislaus’ canonization, and indeed, she did not get healed. Then a second nightly appearance, this time of a homo venerabilis speaking in Teotonica lingua and repeating the same recommendation convinced her that she should obey, and having done this eventually she got healed75. Another very similar account (Miracle 35) is told by a comes named Falus, who is sent by a nightly vision during his illness to bishop Prandota to urge the canonization of Stanislaus. At first he gets better after this vision, but when he neglects the order of the saint, he gets ill again and is reprimanded in a second nightly vision by a «homo quidam canus et reverende persone indutus superpellicio albo, who rises above himand exclaims indignantly: ‘And you neglected!’». Then he indeed went to the bishop and got healed76.

• 77  Rożnowska-Sadraei, Pater Patriae,p. 43-45.

27These two miracle accounts preserve the memory of the uneven support of the cult of Stanislaus by the bishops of Cracow: after the initiatives by Vincent Kadlubek (1208-1218) and Iwo Odrowąż (1218-1229) their successor Wisław (1232-1242) neglected the issue, and only Prandota (1242-1266) carried it to conclusion.77 It is also typical that the nightly «envoys» of Stanislaus solicit the advocacy of a noblewoman and a comes– i.e. from high social status.

• 79  Cf. J. Le Goff, La naissance du Purgatoire,Paris, Gallimard, 1981.

Together with a brief reference to the emergent doctrine of the Purgatory79, this miracle account bears the imprint of the pedagogy of late medieval moral preaching.

• 80  On the life and cult of St. Margaret of Hungary see G. Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princess (...)
• 81  Vita beate Margarite de Ungaria Ordinis Predicatorum, in K. Bőle, Árpádházi Boldog Margit szenttéa (...)

29My third set of thirteenth-century examples comes from the cult of St. Margaret of Hungary, St. Elizabeth’s niece, daughter of BélaIV, King of Hungary, who spent her life as a Dominican nun and died in 1270, in the royal convent founded for her on the Danube island near Buda80. Two investigations into her sanctity were held between 1272 and 1276, providing documentation of altogether ninety-five miracles81.

• 83  G. Klaniczay, «Miraculum and Maleficium: Reflections Concerning Late Medieval Female Sainthood», i (...)

31This miracle, which I once analyzed in an essay entitled MiraculumandMaleficium83, is very reminiscent of the bewitchment narratives: the person with supernatural capacities detects by mind-reading the hostility or the offense against her, retaliates with magical vengeance, and liberates the victim of the harmful effects only after receiving expiation for the offense or after being constrained to do so. I am not saying that the Margaret miracle corresponds precisely to this case, yet there are intriguing similarities, which also relate to a number of older miracle accounts considering the illness as a punishment for an offense against the saint.

• 84  Fraknói, ed., Inquisitio,p. 187: soror Margaretha, filia domine Anne dixit: «Virgo Margaretha, si (...)

32The probably tense relation between St. Margaret and her namesake is also underlined by another account which recalls the early medieval cases of the coercion of saints. Not long after the death of St. Margaret she is reported to have said, «Virgin Margaret, if you want me to believe that you are a saint, show me some kind of a miracle!»84