Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLVII:3 (Inverno, 2017), 267–285.

Anne E. Bailey

Miracle Children: Medieval Hagiography and
Childhood Imperfection Medieval miracle narratives,
written to promote the posthumous miraculous activities of saints
from their shrines, document the stories of pilgrims seeking inter-
cessory aid. They contain much of interest for social historians, his-
torians of medieval medicine, and scholars researching the history of
emozioni. Those featuring children are a testament to how child-
hood was less than perfect in the Middle Ages; imperfection was
often writ large on small bodies in the form of disease and crippling
disability. Although historians of childhood and medicine have made
use of miracle stories, they have paid little attention to the hagio-
graphical context that informed descriptions of children in these
texts, or to the narrative function of the young protagonists. Like
Finucane in his inﬂuential The Rescue of the Innocents, many social
historians primarily treat miracle stories about children as “registers
of miracles” and “shrine-side records,” giving insufﬁcient consider-
ation to their underlying religious discourse. Although the socio-
historical and medical approaches to miracle narratives yield a
wealth of information about children’s lives and health in the Middle
Ages, they often fail to consider fully the nature of the medium
through which this detail is conveyed.1

Anne E. Bailey is a member of the History Faculty, University of Oxford. She is the author of
“Gendered Discourses of Time and Memory in the Cult and Hagiography of William of
Norwich,” in Elizabeth Cox and Liz Herbert McAvoy (eds.), Reconsidering Gender, Time,
and Memory in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2015); “Women Pilgrims and Their Travelling
Companions in Twelth-Century England,” Viator, XLVI (2015), 115–134.

© 2016 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, Inc., doi:10.1162/JINH_a_01012

For studies of children in miracle stories, Vedere, Per esempio, Ronald Finucane, The Rescue of
1
the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval Miracles (Basingstoke, 1997), 2, 55; Christian Laes,
“Disabled Children in Gregory of Tours,” in Katariina Mustakallio and idem (eds.), The Dark
Side of Childhood in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Unwanted, Disabled and Lost (Oxford,
2011), 39–62; Eleanora C. Gordon, “Child Health in the Middle Ages as Seen in the Miracles
of Five English Saints, AD 1150–1250,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, LX (1986), 502–522;
for a survey of other sources, Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Medievalists and the Study of Child-
hood,” Speculum, LXXVII (2002), 446–448, 454–456. Other sociohistorical treatments of
miracle evidence include Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (Nuovo paradiso, 2001), 98–100,
106–111; Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London, 1990), 145–148, 148–149.

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The aim of this article is to take a less conventional, and more
interdisciplinary, approach to childhood illness in miracle stories by
reading the sources not only as straightforward historical documents
but also as religiously inspired literary texts. Combining literary anal-
ysis with approaches from social history and medical anthropology,
the article adopts the stance that childhood and imperfection are culturally
constructed concepts. From this perspective, it examines the ways in
which miracle stories drew on contemporary moral and religious
ideas about children to create an emotionally appealing discourse that
served a traditional hagiographical agenda as well as reﬂected chang-
ing attitudes toward children in twelfth-century Europe.

What follows is based on a study of 100 children whose stories
are documented in ﬁfteen Latin miracle collections produced in
England during the long twelfth century (C. 1080–c. 1200). Although
the sample is intended to be illustrative rather than representative,
the different collections evince a notable consistency in their por-
trayal of children. Frequently recurring motifs suggest that medieval
writers were tapping into a shared cultural discourse of childhood.
This hagiographical construction of children’s experiences is what
the present article seeks to explore.2

There is some debate among scholars about whether the in-
tended audience for miracle narratives of this period was limited to

2 The ﬁfteen collections examined for this article are “Alia Miracula Sancti Johannis,” in Acta
Sanctorum, Mai II, 181A–182A; Arcoid, “Miracula Sancti Erkenwaldi,” in E. Gordon Whatley
(ed. and trans.), The Saint of London: The Life and Miracles of St Erkenwald, Text and Translation
(Binghamton, 1989); Ato of Ostia (ed. and trans. Paul Anthony Hayward), “Miracula Inven-
tionis Beate Mylburge Virginis,” English Historical Review, CXIV (1999), 543–573; Eadmer of
Canterbury, “Vita Sancti Dunstani Archiepiscopi Cantuariensis,” in Andrew J. Turner and
Bernard J. Muir (eds. and trans.), Eadmer of Canterbury, Lives and Miracles of Saints Oda, Dunstan
and Oswald (Oxford, 2006), 161–211; Foreville and Keir (ed. and trans.), The Book of St Gilbert;
E.O. Blake (ed. and trans), Liber Eliensis (London, 1962), 263–294; Brian Kemp (trans.), "IL
Miracles of the Hand of St James,” Berkshire Archaeological Journal, LXV (1970), 1–19; “Miracula
Sancta Ætheldrethe Virginis,” in Rosalind C. Love (ed. and trans.), Goscelin of Saint-Bertin: IL
Hagiography of the Female Saints of Ely (Oxford, 2004), 96–131; William D. Macray (ed.),
Miracula S. Ivonis (London, 1886), lix–lxxxiv; Michael Lapidge (ed. and trans), “Miracula S.
Swithuni,” in The Cult of St Swithun (Oxford, 2003), 648–697; Prior Philip, “Miracula S. Frideswidae,"
in J. Van Kacke et al. (eds.), Acta Sanctorum, Octobris (Brussels, 1853), VIII, 567–589; Thomas of
Monmouth (ed. and trans. Augustus Jessopp and Montague Rhodes James), The Life and Miracles
of St William of Norwich (Cambridge, 1896); Robert Bartlett (ed. and trans.), “Vita et Miracula S.
Æbbe Virginis,” in The Miracles of St Æbbe of Coldingham and St Margaret of Scotland (Oxford, 2003),
2–67; William Ketell, “Miracula Sancti Johannis,” in Van Kacke et al. (eds.), Acta Sanctorum, Mai, II,
175C–175F; William of Malmesbury (ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom), Gesta Pontiﬁcum
Anglorum (Oxford, 2007), 498–663.

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M I R A C L E CH I L DR E N | 269

the monastic community or whether the stories were also dissem-
inated to the laity through oral channels such as sermons. For the
purpose of this article, the question of audience is largely irrelevant
because the moral imperatives and religious idealism promulgated
in the stories were fundamental elements of Christian teaching.
They would have been familiar and meaningful to the celibate clergy
and family-oriented laity alike, although those with a monastic edu-
cation were better-placed to understand the traumas of parenting
within a religious framework. Since it is possible that some stories
may have been told to pilgrims and parishioners with the inten-
tion of advertising the beneﬁts of bringing sick children to a healing
shrine, some consideration will also be given to how hagiographic
descriptions of childhood illness may have evoked emotional
responses—such as fear and empathy—in a lay audience.3

Before looking in detail at these stories of childhood imper-
fection, Tuttavia, it is necessary to begin with some fundamental
deﬁnitions. What was meant by the term childhood in this period,
and what criteria did twelfth-century hagiographers use to identify
children in their miracle reports?

IDENTIFYING CHILDREN IN MEDIEVAL SOURCES The span of childhood
was deﬁned in the Middle Ages with reference to pre-existing con-
cepts, such as the various life-cycle classiﬁcations inherited from the
classical world. In twelfth-century Europe, the best-known one was
the “Ages of Man,” popularized by Isidore of Seville (C. 560–636) In
his Etymologiae, Quale, continuing the numerological approach of
his predecessors, describes six chronologically distinct phases of life.
Isidore located boyhood/girlhood ( pueritia) between the ages of
infancy (infantia) and adolescence (adolescentia). In this scheme, puer-
itia begins at age seven and ends at age fourteen, the upper limit
signifying the beginning of puberty and the age at which children
were considered young adults (adolescentia).4

For a discussion of this debate, see Bailey, “Representations of English Women and Their

3
Pilgrimages in Twelfth-Century Miracle Collections,” Assuming Gender, III (2013), 61–65.
John A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford, 1986);
4
Michael Goodich, From Birth to Old Age: The Human Life Cycle in Medieval Thought, 1250–1350
(London, 1989); Elizabeth Sears, The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations (Princeton, 1986).
Isidore of Seville (ed. Wallace M. Lindsay), Etymologiae (Oxford, 1911), IO, XI.2:1–8. For general
discussions of these life stages, see Goodich, Birth to Old Age, 85–96.

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270

| AN N E E. BAI L EY
Isidore’s division of childhood into infantia and puerita, with its
attendant terminology and respective age spans, was a popular way of
conceptualizing childhood in the twelfth century, though medieval
hagiographers did not necessarily conform to it. Infatti, the ages of
infantia and pueritia show some ﬂuidity in the miracle collections
under review. Tuttavia, for methodological consistency, the pres-
ent survey follows a standard approach, deﬁning children as individ-
uals who fall into the ﬁrst two of Isidore’s life stages, while also taking
into account that medieval girls reached the age of consent—no
longer considered children—two years before boys did. For the pur-
pose of the the present study, the term children encompasses girls
until the age of twelve and boys until the age of fourteen.5

After establishing a set of parameters for medieval childhood,
the next thing to consider is whether it is possible to identify chil-
dren in miracle stories according to this criterion. At ﬁrst glance,
the answer is “yes”: The children who fall into our infancy and child-
hood categories are easy to distinguish in the texts, either because
their ages are stated or because the standard Latin words for infant
(infans), boy ( puer), and girl ( puella) correspond to Isidore’s Ages
of Man terminology. Only on rare occasions are non-age-speciﬁc
labels—such as virgo (virgin) or ﬁlius/ﬁlia (son/daughter)—found
without further clues to an individual’s age group. For the sake of
consistency, ambiguous cases are not included in the survey.6

Identifying children in miracle accounts is, nevertheless, com-
plicated by the fact that individuals described as pueri and puellae are
also given chronological ages that range well beyond even Isidore’s
theoretical span of pueritia. Per esempio, the anonymous author of
Miracula S. Frideswidae includes a puella said to be almost sixteen
years old and another “of adult age” (aetate adulta). Since puella is
sometimes used synonymously with virgo (virgin), the word puella
may also have been used to imply a single girl of marriageable age.
Notably, the majority of chronologically older puellae lived at home
with their parents, suggesting that puella was sometimes adopted as
a generic term for unmarried females. A further complication with
medieval childhood terminology is that puer and puella occasionally

Isidore’s scheme lost some popularity in the thirteenth century to Avicenna’s four-age

5
version. Goodich, Birth to Old Age, 42, 60–61.
6 The diminutives parvulus/parvula (“little one”) or puerulus (“little boy”) are also found in
the sources.

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carry status connotations, and might be used for other dependent
adults, such as servants. Tuttavia, context usually indicates that
those described as boys and girls in the stories were juveniles.7

CHILDREN IN MIRACLE ACCOUNTS Deﬁning childhood in accord
with our infant and child criteria yields a sample of 100 children in
the ﬁfteen miracle collections under review. Although the number
of children appearing in the stories varies from collection to col-
lection, roughly one-ﬁfth of the total can be classiﬁed as children,
53 percent of them female.8

It is impossible to know how accurately this male–female ratio
reﬂects actual gendered cure-seeking patterns at medieval shrines.
We should assume that hagiographers were selective in the cases
that they chose to record and that age-related terminology often
signiﬁes guesswork based on the visual assessments of shrine regis-
trars. Nonetheless, the slight predominance of girls in the sample
does not support the popular theory that more boys than girls were
taken to medieval healing shrines due to sons receiving preferential
treatment. Parental favoritism is not an obvious feature in the pres-
ent study. Inoltre, in a rare story of gender bias, parents are said
to love a daughter more than their other children.9

Whereas the gender of a child was usually recorded in the
texts, hagiographers are often less revealing about children’s socio-
economic status. Those collections that refer to family backgrounds
usually include stories of both the very rich and the very poor (Vedere
Tables 1 E 2). At the wealthy end of the social spectrum are the

Philip, Miracula S. Frideswidae, 578, 574–575, 583; Abbot Samson, Miracula Sancti Edmundi,
7
in Thomas Arnold (ed.), Memorials of St Edmund’s Abbey (London, 1890), IO, 178–179. Vedere, for
esempio, Kim M. Phillips, “Four Virgins’ Tales: Sex and Power in Medieval Law,” in Anke
Bernau, Ruth Evans, and Sarah Salih (eds.), Medieval Virginities (Cardiff, 2003), 94–95; Cordelia
Beattie, Medieval Single Women: The Politics of Social Classiﬁcation in Late Medieval England
(Oxford, 2007), 79–83. For an example of a puella said to be “nearly an adult” ( pene adulta),
see Eadmer of Canterbury, “Vita Sancti Dunstani Archiepiscopi Cantuariensis,” in Turner and
Muir (eds. and trans.), Eadmer of Canterbury, 168–170.
8
For other statistical approaches to children in hagiographical accounts, see Isabelle Réal,
Vies des saints, vie de famille: Représentation du système de la parenté dans le Royaume mérovingien
(481–751) d’après les sources hagiographiques (Turnhout, 2001); Finucane, Rescue of the Innocents.
9 Boys were assumed to be greater social and ﬁnancial assets than daughters. See Finucane,
Rescue of the Innocents, 160–163; Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of
Childhood in History (New York, 1993), 58–59; Orme, Medieval Children, 98. Thomas of
Monmouth, Life and Miracles, 222.

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| AN N E E. BAI L EY

Tavolo 1 Child Miracle Beneﬁciaries—Medical

ILLNESS/INFIRMITY/INJURY

TOTAL NUMBER

ELITE

POOR

Crippled/deformed limbs
Blindness
Muteness
Fever
Swelling
Paralysis
Deafness
Deafness and muteness
Blindness, deafness, and muteness
Crippled/deformed limbs and muteness
Epilepsy
Leprosy
Madness
Possession
Blindness and muteness
Crippled/deformed limbs and swelling
Crippled/deformed limbs and fever
Dysentery
Choking
Gout
Internal pain and swollen hands
Back pain and swelling
Constipation
Bladder stone
Kidney pain
Headache
Accident victim (fall from horse)
Unspeciﬁed condition

21
16
8
5
4
3
3
3
2
2
2
2
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
7

2
1
1

offspring of nobles or knights, such as the nobleman’s son whose
prayer to St. William of Norwich for the cure of a sick falcon was
considered by his father to be a peculiarly “childish” ( puerilia) Rif-
quest. Children at the less privileged end of the spectrum are more
conspicuous; ten children either came from poor families or owed
their subsistence to alms. Four are shown begging for their living,
including a girl ( puella) with bent and twisted limbs who went from
door to door on her hands and knees.10

For the theme of the rich and the poor in miracle stories, see Bailey, “‘The Rich and
10
The Poor, The Lesser and The Great’: Social Representations of Female Pilgrims in Medieval
England,” Cultural and Social History, XI (2014), 9–29. Thomas of Monmouth, Life and Miracles,
258–260; Alia Miracula, 184C–D.

5
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M I R A C L E CH I L DR E N | 273

Tavolo 2 Child Miracle Beneﬁciaries—Nonmedical

MOTIVE FOR PILGRIMAGE OR REQUEST TO SAINT

TOTAL NUMBER ELITE

POOR

To accompany a pilgrim
To escape a beating
Sick falcon
Thanksgiving for a cure
Visionary quest

1
2
1
1
1

Stories of child mendicancy provide compelling, and rare, In-
sight into the lives of children abandoned or orphaned and left to
fend for themselves. One of the fullest accounts is told by William
of Malmesbury in his collection of St. Aldhelm’s miracles about a
boy of about thirteen or fourteen named Folcwine, reportedly crip-
pled from birth. Misshapen from the waist down, Folcwine—“a
bundle of hideous paralysis” (inuisi rigoris compages)—was said to
resemble a “beast” (quadrupes). The text implies that the monks of
Malmesbury Abbey provided Folcwine with food and shelter,
although the narrative also depicts him crawling around town in
search of alms. William’s story indicates that the medieval world held
conﬂicting attitudes toward crippled children, particularly beggars.
On the one hand, Folcwine was subjected to physical abuse and
accusations of deception by those suspecting that he feigned his dis-
abilities for monetary gain. On the other, William also says that
others were roused to pity at the sight of the boy “twitching in
the mire” (tabatque in caeno), coming to his aid when he became stuck
in the mud on his painful peregrinations around town.11

Many of the children featured in miracle accounts suffered as
a result of poverty and destitution. Nonetheless, as the story of
Folcwine suggests, their living conditions did not provoke reactions
from observers so much as did their medical ones, and William
tends to emphasize childlren’s bodily imperfections in the form
of observable illness or disability. Generalmente, the childhood inﬁrmi-
ties are much like those of the adults in the collections. Yet, one
notable aspect of childhood morbidity—at least in the stories that

For abandoned children in this period, see Boswell, Kindness of Strangers, 296–321; Ville
11
Vuolanto, Infant Abandonment and the Christianization of Medieval Europe, in Mustakallio and
Laes (eds.), Dark Side of Childhood, 3–19. William of Malmesbury (ed. and trans. Michael
Winterbottom), Gesta Pontiﬁcum Anglorum (Oxford, 2007), 636–640.

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| AN N E E. BAI L EY

274
indicate social status—is that anatomical abnormalities, such as de-
formed limbs and leprosy, are associated primarily with children
from poorer backgrounds (see Tables 1 E 2). Wealthier parents
might have kept their unsightly children at home, or entered them
into monasteries, but it is also possible that poverty carried effects,
such as malnutrition, that marked developing bodies in a variety of
detrimental ways.12

Humoral medicine in the Middle Ages had its own explana-
tion for anatomical defects, based on the idea that all children were
physiologically imperfect and “incomplete.” Greek medical theory,
such as that of Galen and Soranus, held that because immature bodies
were not yet properly “set,” they were “soft” and impressionable,
thus prone to accidental damage and distortion. The notion that
children had malleable bodies and spongy, “cheese-like” bones
may account for the ways in which miracle accounts describe some
children’s symptoms. Examples include one girl whose heels had
been “stuck together” (cohaerere) from birth and another whose legs
appeared to be boneless. The preponderance of children with lower-
limb deformities in the collections is in accord with contemporary
medicine’s belief that the accidental warping of soft, young bodies
particularly affected the legs and feet.13

One of the most striking aspects of childhood sickness in mir-
acle accounts is its high visibility. A large number of children seem
to have been stricken with conditions that marred their appear-
ance, and hagiographers were by no means reluctant to impart

12 The similarities between adult and childhood illness seem to be a common characteristic
in miracle collections across different times and places. Vedere, Per esempio, Laes, “Disabled
Children," 42, 55, 56. For the idea that the wealthy were less likely than the poor to seek
cures in public places, see Finucane, Miracles, 149–150; Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in
Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor (London, 2002), 52–55; for
children given to monasteries, Boswell, Kindness of Strangers, 296–321; for an example of a
rich man reluctant to seek help among the common people, Eadmer, Vita Sancti Dunstani, 164;
for an example of an unmarriageable crippled daughter entering a monastery, Arcoid, Miracula
Sancti Erkenwaldi, 160–162; for congenital and acquired deformities in Anglo-Saxon England,
Sally Crawford, Childhood in Anglo-Saxon England (Stroud, 1999), 98–101.
13 Galen, “Mixtures,” in Peter N. Singer (ed. and trans.), Selected Works (Oxford, 1997),
237. For the notion of children as incomplete, in the works of Soranus, Galen, and other
ancient Greek medical writers, Vedere, Per esempio, Danielle Gourevitch, “Comment rendre à
sa véritable nature le petit monstre human?” in P. J. van der Eijk, H. F. J. Horstmanshoff, E
P. H. Schrijvers (eds.), Ancient Medicine in Its Socio-Cultural Context (Atlanta, 1995), IO, 239–260;
for Galen, idem, “Mixtures,” 233–234; idem, “On the Causes of Disease,” in M. Grant (ed. E
trans.), Galen on Food and Diet (London, 2000), 56; idem, “The Art of Medicine,” in Selected

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the gruesome details. A case in point is William of Malmesbury’s
vivid depiction of the beast-like Folcwine twitching helplessly in
the mud. Another collection tells a similar story about an eight-
year-old girl named Agnes whose head was embedded into her
shoulder and whose hands and feet were mangled with gout ( po-
dagra). She had to rely on others to move her around and ate from
the ﬂoor like a cow ( pecus).14

Highlighting the full horror of children’s symptoms was a nar-
rative strategy aimed to provoke the reactions of contemporary
audiences in several ways. Primo, it accentuated a saint’s miracle-
working credentials. Secondo, it appealed to the emotions, particolarmente
given the victim’s ages; the pain and misery became all the more ter-
rible in being manifest in a vulnerable child.

The theme of suffering children would have been a familiar one
to contemporaries, especially in the twelfth century, which is known
as a time of increased sentimentality toward children. Herod’s
“Massacre of the Innocents” (Matt. 2:16–18) was a favorite topic of
medieval writers and illustrators; the butchered children even had
their own feast day. Inoltre, devotional trends focusing on the
humanity and suffering of Christ led to an increased representation
of Jesus as a small child. Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life and Miracles
of St William of Norwich—the biography of a twelve-year-old boy
brutally tortured and murdered—was in accord with this trend.
Modeled on the passion and cruciﬁxion of Christ, it fully exploited
the idea of the innocent child as martyr.15

Works, 379; for Soranus and other writers, Susan R. Holman, “Modelled as Wax: Formation
and Feeding of the Ancient Newborn,” Helio, XXIV (1997), 77–95, esp. 80–84; for these
ideas as reﬂected in the ancient and medieval belief in swaddling, Holman “Modelled as
Wax,” 80–83; Shahar, Childhood, 86–88. Children were said to have bones like “recently
solidiﬁed cheese.” See Galen, “Mixtures," 234. Philip (ed.), Miracula S. Frideswidae, 572–573;
Kemp (trans.), “Miracles of the Hand of St James," 11; Hildegard von Bingen (ed. P. Kaiser),
Causae et Curae (Leipzig, 1903), 110.
14 Thomas of Monmouth, Life and Miracles, 273–274.
For the theme of Herod’s massacre in medieval art, see Ilene H. Forsyth, “Children in
15
Early Medieval Art: Ninth through Twelfth Centuries,” Journal of Psychohistory, IV (1976), 34–
55; for a twelfth-century example, Jane Geddes, The St Albans Psalter: A Book for Christina of
Markyate (London, 2005), 34; for the cult of the Holy Innocents, Hayward, “Suffering and
Innocence in Latin Sermons for the Feast of the Holy Innocents, c 400–800,” in Diana Wood (ed.),
The Church and Childhood (Oxford, 1994), 67–80. Mary Martin McLaughlin, “Survivors and
Surrogates: Children and Parents from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries,” in Lloyd de
Mause (ed.), The History of Childhood (London, 1980; orig. pub. 1978), 130–136. For a contemporary
esempio, see C. H. Talbot (ed. and trans.), The Life of Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth Century Recluse

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Così, the suffering of helpless children—no doubt grounded
in reality—had a certain sentimental value for hagiographers in
twelfth-century England. Inoltre, if told to the laity, the stories
of young bodies ravaged and wasted by disease would have played
on the fears and anxieties of parents living in a society blighted by
high child mortality. Tuttavia, the concept of bodily imperfection
had another signiﬁcance in the Middle Ages that was more difﬁ-
cult to reconcile with children.

SIN AND IMPERFECTION Imperfection was an important theological
concept in the Middle Ages: the Augustinian tradition saw every-
one tainted by original sin and therefore inherently imperfect.
Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth-century abbess and theologian,
believed that the Fall was responsible for humoral imbalances that
gave rise to illness. Original sin, she claimed, was a human condi-
tion transmitted by Adam to future generations, often manifested
in disease.16

Hippocratic-Galenic medicine also advanced the theory that
disease arose from an individual’s humoral makeup (“tempera-
ment”), and that physiological ﬂaws were visibly inscribed on
the body. Hildegard, Per esempio, explained that men with phleg-
matic dispositions—frequently identiﬁable by their big eyes and
womanly faces—were particularly susceptible to sterility and mad-
ness. A poor regimen was also thought to have a detrimental physi-
cal effect: Gluttony and lust could lead to leprosy and a bad diet to
gout (gutta). Christianity, which held that sin and bodily defects
were closely related, took medieval physiognomy a step further
by imagining physical imperfection as an outer sign of spiritual,
or moral, deﬁciency. Hence, medical conditions such as leprosy
and madness—which Hidegard attributed to biology—could be
read as divine punishment for sinful activity, as well as a direct con-
sequence of original sin.17

(New York, 1997; orig. pub. 1959), 118. For William of Norwich’s cult and hagiography, see Simon
Yarrow, Saints and Their Communities: Miracle Stories in Twelfth-Century England (New York, 2006),
122–168; Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind, 68–76; M. D. Anderson, A Saint at Stake: The Strange
Death of William of Norwich, 1144 (London, 1964).
16 Hildegard, Causae et Curae, 36, 38, 143.
Ibid., 74–76, 161, 101. For the theme of divine punishment, see Wayland D. Hand,
17
“Deformity, Disease and Physical Ailment as Divine Retribution,” in Edith Ennen and Günter
Wiegelmann (eds.), Fetschrift Matthias Zender: Studien zu Volkskultur, Sprache und Landesgeschichte
(Bonn, 1972), 519–525.

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The eschatological viewpoint regarding unsightly medical con-
ditions was generally bleak; innately sinful men and women would
have to wait for the Last Judgment to achieve bodily perfection.
Augustine reassured his readers that physical defects or deformities
were absent in heaven. Come Judgment Day, mankind would be
resurrected into its pristine prelapsarian state. This eschatological
scenario ﬁnds its allegory in every miracle-healing story: Sinful
pilgrims who bring the physical manifestations of their fallen condi-
tion to a saint’s shrine become cleansed of their bodily and spiritual
imperfections. Health and salvation, which share the same Latin term
(salus), are one and the same in the narratives; hagiographers routinely
ended their stories by reassuring readers that protagonists had both
their medical and spiritual “health” restored. Each miracle story is a
symbolic re-enactment of this ﬁnal restitution—a washing away of
humankind’s fallen state through baptism—often underscored in
the texts by an exaggerated physical swing from deformity to beauty.
Così, the leprous girl said to be old and ugly before her time regains
her youth and beauty after her cure.18

The notion that humans were all predisposed to sin, Tuttavia,
did not always sit comfortably with medieval thinkers, particolarmente
with respect to children. Childhood had long been considered the
“age of innocence,” a belief endorsed by Isidore of Seville’s etymo-
logical deﬁnition of pueritia as “purity.” Given this strong religious
and popular sentiment, it is hardly surprising that innocence and
purity ﬁgure high on the list of childhood attributes in miracle
stories. William of Malmsbury labeled the crippled Folcwine “an
innocent” (innocens), and the word repeatedly appeared in other
children’s stories. Echoing the gospel allusion to little children
( parvuli) being saved because of their simplicity and innocence, one
miracle narrative even tells of a “little boy” ( puerulus) who was cured
of an inﬁrmity because of these qualities. The implication is that
innocent children were particularly worthy recipients of miracles.19

18 Augustine, De Civitate Dei (Brepols, 1955), XXII.19, 837–839. For the development of
the theme of perfection in the afterlife from ancient Greece to the time of Augustine, Vedere
Candida R. Moss, “Heavenly Healing: Eschatological Cleansing and the Resurrection of
the Dead in the Early Church,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LXXIX (2011),
991–1017. Ato of Ostia, Miracula Inventionis Beate Mylburge, 568–569.
For ancient perceptions of childhood innocence, see H. Herter, “Das Unschuldige Kind,"
19
in Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum, IV (1961), 146–162. William of Malmesbury, Gesta
Pontiﬁcum, 638; Philip (ed.), Miracula S. Frideswidae, 582.

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The troubling question of why innocent children should suf-
fer became a subject of heated debate during Augustine’s era and
thereafter. It is occasionally addressed in miracle stories, voiced, In
one instance, by distressed parents. Following the Biblical tenet
that the sins of the fathers would be passed down to their sons
(Num. 14:18; Deut. 5:9), the parents of ﬁve children all born with
speech impediments are said to have blamed their misfortunes on
inherited sin—in this case, not original sin but voluntary sins com-
mitted by the parents. Both parents took monastic vows as an act
of atonement. The narrator reporting this isolated incident, how-
ever, did not necessarily share the parents’ viewpoint. Infatti, NO
hagiographer gives congenital sin as an explanation for children’s
suffering in the miracle accounts.20

If parents were not responsible for their children’s ill health,
were the children themselves to blame? Were “innocent” children
ever thought of as sinful? The medieval world, Infatti, held a para-
doxical view of children’s nature—innocent and pure on one hand
and willful and disobedient, if not outright sinful, on the other.
This ambivalence is evident in a miracle story that shows how
the combination of childhood innocence and waywardness be-
came a recipe for disaster. A boy described as “still of immature
age” (adhuc tenebatur ætate) ﬁnds himself in trouble as a conse-
quence of devoting himself “to childish games” ( puerilibus jocis
deditus). Despite his parents’ repeated warnings about playing too
far from home, the boy wanders into a thicket in pursuit of an elusive
female playmate. The girl, Tuttavia, turns out to be a demonic
phantom, who leads him into a terrifying wood. Traumatized by
his experience, the boy loses his voice, and his parents take him to
St. John’s healing shrine at Beverley Minster for a cure.21

Disobedience is a commonly mentioned childhood attribute
in the Middle Ages, but not necessarily a sinful one. Although the
hagiographer implies that the boy’s impulsive and reckless be-
havior led to the tragedy, he does not interpret his mutism as a
punishment for sin, but more as an unfortunate, almost accidental,
by-product of boyish curiosity and naivety. Misbehavior is never
directly blamed for childhood illnesses and mishaps in the texts.

20 Hayward, “Suffering and Innocence,” 71–73; Miracula S. Æbbe, 52–54.
21
Alia Miracula, 185B–D.

For the paradoxical view of children’s nature, Vedere, Per esempio, Shahar, Childhood, 14–20.

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M I R A C L E CH I L DR E N | 279
Retribution miracles—in which speciﬁc sinful acts are punished by
death or ill health in the miracle genre—are not associated with
children in the sources under review. Adults incur saintly dis-
pleasure for a whole gamut of sins—wrath, greed, pride, lust,
and even gluttony—but not so children. Hagiographers rarely
attributed typical adult transgressions to children, and were notably
more lenient toward children than toward adults. Two stories
featuring misbehaving schoolboys illustrate the point. The Miracula
Sancti Erkenwaldi begins with the lengthy story about a boy “of a
tender age” (etatis tenere) at St. Paul’s cathedral school in London
who was in trouble for playing games instead of learning his
lessons. When he seeks refuge from the schoolmaster’s fury at
St. Erkenwald’s shrine, he miraculously discovers that he is able
to recite his lines and narrowly escapes punishment. The hagiog-
rapher, a canon at St. Pauls, is not only sympathetic toward the
boy; he also uses him as a shining example of how Christians
should avert the wrath of God.22

The second story, from Eadmer’s Miracles of St. Dunstan,
again champions “innocent” boys (innocentes) against the “unholy
wrath” (impia ira) of teachers. In this instance, St. Dunstan arranged
for teachers at the monastic school at Canterbury to fall asleep at
just the right time to enable boys to evade a whipping. As in the
previous example, the hagiographer favors a tolerant and humane
attitude toward children in the face of a less compassionate adult
world.23

These stories of children getting the better of their masters are
noteworthy both for their negative attitude toward corporal pun-
ishment and their suggestion of a subtle difference between sin and
misbehavior. Children are not portrayed as models of goodness in
the surveyed sources, but their misdemeanors tend to be excused
as natural boyhood behavior. Several modern historians argue that
these accounts were inﬂuenced by a new emphasis on intention-
ality, which engendered the idea that because those under the age
of reason were hostages to their impulses, they were incapable of
willfully committing sin. A change in the practice of confession
that occurred at this time certainly supports this view. Whereas

22 Arcoid, Miracula Sancti Erkenwaldi, 102–106.
23 Eadmer, Vita Sancti Dunstani, 170–176.

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in the early Middle Ages, children were expected to confess a small
range of age-related peccadillos, during the twelfth century, child-
hood confession began to fall out of favor. When the age of dis-
cretion more clearly separated childhood from adulthood, IL
treatment of children became increasingly different from that of
adults. By 1200, confession was expected only of adults.24

Even though the children in twelfth-century miracle stories
did not commit mortal sins, the question of how hagiographers
negotiated the troubling issue of their undeserved illness and suf-
fering still remains. The answer is that most medieval writers re-
cording miraculous events did not need to address this problem.
The emphasis in the narratives is on cures rather than causes,
and on restitution rather than on etiology. Inoltre, the religious
signiﬁcance of childhood illness was usually less in evidence than
its far-reaching social implications. A proper appreciation of the
role played by children in the texts requires closer attention to
the drama that surrounded the imperfect child.

EMOTIONAL RESPONSES TO IMPERFECT CHILDREN As we have seen,
the troubling conception, and pitiable reality, of childhood im-
perfection in miracle stories is largely mirrored by the reactions,
either commendable or reprehensible, of adult witnesses. Infatti,
the wretchedness of childhood disease is often conveyed less by
the victims themselves than by a cast of secondary characters, COME
is demonstrated by the story of a crippled boy, William of Bourne.
Debilitated by an unexplained afﬂiction, William was dismissed by
his employer and forced to return home. A year after William’s
father died, his mother married a man who regarded William as
a drain on the family’s resources, constantly berating his wife for
wasting her time with a worthless invalid. No longer welcome in
the main house, William had to sleep alone in an ancient, run-
down building. One night he dreamed that a miraculous cure
awaited him at Sempringham Priory. Yielding to his wife’s be-
seeching tears, William’s stepfather ﬁnally allowed her to take
the boy to St. Gilbert’s shrine, but only with the proviso that he
be left there, never to return home. Duly abandoned at the church

For the “doctrine of intention,” see Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual 1050–1200
24
(London, 1972), 74–75. Rob Meens, “Children and Confession in the Early Middle Ages,” in
Legna, Church and Childhood, 53–65; Orme, Medieval Children, 223.

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M I R A C L E CH I L DR E N | 281

where a benevolent canon of the Priory rescued him, William
eventually received his promised cure.25

Even though William’s role in the narrative is central, and the
story revolves around his medical condition and cure, the crippled
boy comes across in the narrative as little more than an impassive
puppet who is moved and manipulated by those around him. IL
other people in the story—the anguished mother, the cruel step-
father, and the kindly canon—are colorful individuals whose
emotions and motivations must have provoked strong reactions
in medieval audiences. In stark contrast, the author of the story
makes little attempt to solicit an empathetic response to the boy
himself. William has no voice in the narrative; we never learn
how he feels as the action unfolds around him. He is more an agent
of his mother’s anguish than a sufferer in his own right.

A number of explanations for children’s lack of self-expression
in these texts are possible; the most obvious one is that some of
these miracle beneﬁciaries were too young or inﬁrm to speak for
themselves. Another one is that because children were not con-
sidered reliable witnesses, their stories had to come from a parent’s
or caregiver’s viewpoint instead. What is certainly evident, how-
ever, is that hagiographers were little interested in children’s
perspectives.

Unsurprisingly, the emotions of parents tend to predominate
in stories of childhood sickness. “The father grieves, the mother
moans” (dolet genitor, gemit genitrix) is a typical parental response.
The intense, often emphasized, love of parents for their offspring
effectively heightens the sense of loss and tragedy that parents
felt when sons and daughters succumbed to illness or accident.
Hagiographers also make it plain that congenital defects and
chronic conditions met with equal amounts of devotion. Così,
the father and mother of a blind boy continued to love their
son “with great affection” (affectu diligebant) and “grieved for him
with intense suffering” (vehementi pro eo dolore dolebant) for the
whole ﬁve years of his life.26

Maternal feelings are particularly highlighted. When a much-
loved daughter accidently swallows a pin at a dinner party and

25 Raymonde Foreville and Gillian Keir (ed. and trans.), The Book of St Gilbert (Oxford,
1987), 328.
26 Miracula Sancta Ætheldrethe Virginis, 116; Miracula S. Swithuni, 682.

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appears to be choking to death, the narrator juxtaposes the re-
strained sorrow of the father with the impulsive, passionate reac-
tion of his wife. Some hagiographers accentuate the determined
lengths to which mothers went on behalf of their sickly offspring.
One mother is said to have carried her crippled son around many
saints’ shrines, continually weeping. Another refuses to give up
hope even after her three-year-old boy was declared dead. Ignor-
ing the funeral arrangements, she takes the boy’s lifeless body to
St. Frideswide’s shrine where he is miraculously revived. In these
stories maternal instincts are intertwined with unshakable piety
and faith, implying that women’s natural fortitude and resolution
somehow made them particularly forceful spiritual intercessors
on behalf of their sons and daughters.27

Fathers may not react quite as demonstratively as mothers in
miracle accounts, but their dedication to their children is no less
apparent. In some stories, fathers rather than mothers accompany
children to a shrine; an account related by Thomas of Monmouth
emphasizes a father’s changing emotions from grief to joy as his
son is cured. That this role is also played by a loving stepfather
(victricus) provides a more favorable picture of step-parenting than
the one in the story of William of Bourne. Reasons for the
strength of paternal love are occasionally provided. Because his
son was an only child, one father is said to have “loved him with
intense affection” (affectu predulcissimo dilegebat). Another story offers
thwarted fatherly ambition as a reason for a man’s grief. The father,
a businessman (negotiator), is described as possessing “an intense
love” (intimæ dilectionis affectu) for his son on account of the boy’s
scholarly aptitude. When the boy’s promising career is placed in
jeopardy because of a speech impediment, his father, who is “sad-
dened to the depths of his soul” (usque ad animam contristatus est),
tries all kinds of medical treatment before taking him to St. John’s
shrine at Beverley Minster for a cure.28

As we have seen, childhood imperfection often arouses com-
passion and pity in bystanders in miracle stories. Sometimes casual
observers serve as exemplars in their praiseworthy responses to sick
children. As Eadmer of Canterbury wrote about the arrival of a

27 Goscelin, Miracula S. Ivonis, lxii; Philip (ed.), Miracula S. Frideswidae, 572–574.
28 Thomas of Monmouth, Life and Miracles, 244–246; Ato of Ostia, Miracula Inventionis Beate
Mylburge, 568; Miracula S. Swithuni, 658; Ketell, Miracula Sancti Johannis, 179A–D.

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M I R A C L E CH I L DR E N | 283
hideously malformed girl at St. Dunstan’s shrine, “For those look-
ing on lovingly, she presented occasion for great compassion and
affectionate love” ( praestabat se pie intuentibus magnam materiam
compassionis et affectuosae pietatis). Notwithstanding this picture of
a society generally well disposed toward children, Tuttavia, IL
love of parents and the compassion of strangers is occasionally off-
set by acts of cruelty toward the young. The hard-hearted attitude
of William of Bourne’s stepfather, Per esempio, ﬁnds its comple-
ment in that of a stepmother in the Miracles of St James’ Hand.
“Filled with spiteful hate and indignation” toward her crippled
stepdaughter, the woman forces the girl to leave the house until she
can ﬁnd a cure for herself. A story from the Miracula S. Frideswidae
suggests that blood relatives could be equally as heartless. After suf-
fering blindness for six years, a puella named Matilda, spurned by
her friends and family, is forced into a life of begging.29

The cruelty of neighbors usually revolves around suspicions
that physically disabled children were faking their conditions.
The author of the Miracula S. Æbbe Virginis, Per esempio, lists a
range of tortures inﬂicted on mute children to force them to
talk—from hanging them by their thumbs and feet to sticking pins
or forks into their ﬂesh. In another collection, a deaf and mute boy
takes a beating after cymbal clashes around his head fail to produce
the desired response. Many of these “tests” are reminiscent of the
torments that martyrs had to endure; the “cruciﬁxion” of William
of Norwich, Per esempio, incorporates the various tortures de-
scribed in the St. Æbbe examples. William of Malmesbury, how-
ever, produced a version of this motif that is even more compelling,
owing to his personal reﬂections on what motivated the child
tormentors. In his story of the crippled Folcwine, William wonders
whether people were acting out of “malice or disbelief” when they
forcibly tried to part the boys crippled limbs, making him shriek.30
In the abundant literature about the emotional responses
to sick and disabled children in the Middle Ages, historians now
frequently employ miracle collections to refute earlier claims that
medieval society avoided deep attachments to children. One

29 Eadmer, Vita Sancti Dunstani, 170; Kemp (trans.),“Miracles of the Hand of St James,” 14–15;
Philip (ed.), Miracula S. Frideswidae, 578.
30 Miracula S. Æbbe, 44, 54; Miracula S. Swithuni, 684; Thomas of Monmouth, Life and
Miracles, 20–22; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontiﬁcum, 638.

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284

| AN N E E. BAI L EY

consequence of this scholarly preoccupation is that the narrative
function of child–adult relationships in these texts tends to receive
short shrift. But the persistent depiction of loving parents, kindly
strangers, and occasional dastardly villains reveals that hagiog-
raphers were engaged in much more than factual reporting. IL
messages about selﬂess parenting and child cruelty that run
through these stories are subtly conveyed through secondary char-
acters, who often invite the appropriate moral responses. Although
these stories certainly expressed genuine sentiments and attitudes
toward children, their distraught mothers, pitiless stepparents,
spiteful tormentors, and sympathetic bystanders also fulﬁlled a
conventional socioreligious role.31

Straddling the line between historical record and religious text,
medieval miracle narratives lend themselves particularly well to in-
terdisciplinary investigation. This article’s use of historical, medical,
and literary approaches to examine a selection of miracle stories
shows the importance of understanding the various discourses of
childhood that underlie these texts. With their emotional appeal
and potential for religious symbolism, sick and suffering children
in twelfth-century miracle narratives carry a variety of social, moral,
and spiritual messages about child welfare and the loving nature of
God. From a religious perspective, vulnerable, innocent children
redeemed from suffering become a particularly poignant symbol
of God’s grace. As one hagiographer explains in reference to a blind
three-year-old girl, “She was vexed beyond the strength appro-
priate to her tender years so that the strength of divine virtue should
shine in her” (ilico supra tenellæ ætatis vexata virtutem, ut in ea divinæ
virtutis eluceret potentia). Inoltre, children’s cures advertise the
miraculous powers of a particular saint, possibly offering hope to
parents terrorized by the ever-present fear of childhood illness.32

In addition to long-established commonplaces of hagiogra-
phy, two contemporary religious trends surface in the texts. IL
ﬁrst is a change in confessional practices. “Innocent” children under
the age of reason were increasingly unlikely to be held morally re-
sponsible for acts that were considered sinful when performed by

For the medieval-emotions theme regarding children, see Hanawalt, “Medievalists and

31
the Study of Childhood,” 453–456.
32

Philip (ed.), Miracula S. Frideswidae, 584.

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M I R A C L E CH I L DR E N | 285

consenting adults. The second change is the growing preoccupa-
tion with emotions in a devotional context, encouraging empathy
with the suffering of a newly humanized Christ, often through the
anguish of his mother. Taken together, these various themes are
reﬂected, to one extent or another, in depictions of children in
the sources under review. Not held morally or spiritually culpable
for their actions in the same way as adults, miracle children in their
innocence and suffering are—like Christ—presented as vehicles for
the sorrow and compassion of others.33

Infatti, a key aspect of the imperfect children in these stories
is that their suffering is often less important than that of those
around them; the hagiographers frequently bypass the feelings of
young victims in order to tap into a wider pool of human emo-
zioni. They portray humankind at its best and at its worst, creating
a black-and-white moral universe around the ﬁgure of a child in
the ﬁnest story-telling tradition. In William of Bourne’s story,
maternal love juxtaposes with villainous cruelty, and conﬂict sur-
rounds the issue of childhood imperfection. The resolution of
this conﬂict derives from a love far greater than that of a mother.
William’s eventual cure—at the climax of the story—represents a
moment of Christian triumph over the injustices of an inherently
imperfect world.

For examples of a mother’s empathy, see Morris, Discovery of the Individual, 139–144.

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