Matthew M. Mesley and Louise E. Wilson (eds), Contextualizing Miracles in the Christian West, 1100-1500 (Oxford: The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 2014), pp. 231, £20.00, paperback, ISBN: 978-0-907570-32-5.

Miracles have been a perennial source of interest to medieval historians, and in recent years the level of interest has only increased as scholars from a growing range of disciplines have discovered the value of miracle stories as a source for their studies. This diversity of interest is reflected in this volume (developed from a conference held in Cambridge in 2011), which includes historical, literary and anthropological approaches to the study of medieval miracles. Matthew Mesley's lucid introduction provides a useful summary of, and context to, the volume's contents; he also makes some interesting points about the wider field of miracle studies. In the opening essay, 'Peter Brown and Victor Turner: anthropological approaches to Latin miracle narratives in the medieval West', Anne Bailey demonstrates the influence of anthropology on recent historians of medieval miracles, and argues for the continued value of such approaches. She suggests that structuralism and ritual theory have particular value for those seeking to analyse miracle narratives, providing new ways to think about textual functions, the relationship between fact and fiction, and the ways in which historians unconsciously shape their own understanding of the past. There follows an impressive pair of essays focusing on twelfth-century England. Simon Yarrow's 'Miracles, belief and Christian materiality: relic'ing in twelfth-century miracle narratives' highlights the dangers of analysing such texts; in particular, he criticises the still-lingering tendency to view miracles as evidence of a two-tier (elite versus popular) religious culture. It would be better, he argues, to refocus our attention on the material objects of cults and to reconstruct medieval religious belief in terms of its materiality. Whilst this is not an entirely novel notion, it is convincingly presented, and Yarrow supports his theory of 'relic'ing' with an impressive range of examples from twelfth-century texts. Kati Ihnat's discussion of 'Marian miracles and Marian liturgies in the Benedictine tradition of post-Conquest England' is another highlight of the collection. Demonstrating the prominence of the liturgy in early Marian miracles, and arguing for the centrality of miracles in Marian devotion in post-Conquest England, she makes a strong case for the necessity of studying the relationship between liturgical practices and miracle collections. From the perspective of a medical historian, it is the second half of the volume which contains the most interesting essays. Louise Wilson's 'Conceptions of the miraculous: natural philosophy and medical knowledge in the thirteenth-century miracula of St Edmund of Abingdon' draws its evidence …