The Rescue of the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval Miracles (review)

Those who work with sick children have often wished for miracles; some have seen them. Rescue of the Innocents is a history based on such events, from the Middle Ages. The work is part of the burgeoning field of studies on medieval childhood, germinated by the expansive seed of Philippe Ariès’s L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime. Most subsequent reports have reacted to the English translation of Ariès’s tome and its comment that “in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist,” and have helped overturn this notion. ¹ Ronald Finucane, a professor of history at Oakland University in Michigan, is an expert on saints’ lives, and he turns to these sources to elucidate the nature of medieval children and their ailments. In so doing, he adds to the evidence against the “Ariès premise.”

Professor Finucane collated material on six hundred children “rescued, cured or resuscitated . . . by the holy dead” (p. x), using details from saints’ inquests as well as record books from pilgrimage sites and healing-miracle registries. In particular, he studied eight major miracle collections: northern European saints are represented by Thomas Cantilupe, Thomas Becket, Henry VI, and Dorothy von Montau; southern, by Louis of Anjou, Clare of Montefalco, Nicholas of Tolentino, and Pope Urban V. With several lesser reports, the beneficiaries of these saintly intercessors yield 311 northern European cases and 289 southern.

Three core chapters detail the bulk of Finucane’s findings, collected into observations on birth and early infancy (to age three), family life and childhood illnesses, and childhood accidents. In the first, he describes cases of childbirth, infanticide, and early parental roles, noting the presence of “midwives” and a preferential concern for male children. The later chapters present gross epidemiologic data and specific examples of childhood diseases. The hagiographic reports are consistent with data from medieval cemeteries and contemporary evidence. Finucane sometimes suggests epidemiologic continuity with the present, as in the finding that medieval accident and drowning cases have a characteristic male predominance. His conclusions focus on parental expressions of grief, and differences between northern and southern European experiences. He argues that in the south, cases involved fewer accidents, more illnesses, and a more extended family structure than in the north.

A value of these sources is that we see not only the prototypical elite patients, but also a large number of well-detailed examples from the lower orders. These include intimate moments from seven hundred years ago, wonderfully textured with medieval quirks of memory and interpretation. One such is the case of a thirteenth-century English woman who seemed near death after enduring fifteen days of labor; she dreamed that a saintly hand touched her womb, and within the next hours she painlessly delivered her child. Thomas Beckett was thanked. Another case, that of an English drowning victim (and the lengthiest recounted), is described in the text and translated in an appendix. Overall, the details clearly show that medieval adults had a conception of childhood and cared deeply for their children.

As Professor Finucane notes, his is a complicated business. Miracle accounts are problematic sources with many layers of interpretational distortion, ranging from translation of lay testimony at the saints’ inquests to recall biases of fifteen years or more. Moreover, faced with the paucity of corroborative data, Finucane sometimes succumbs to collectivizing sources across two centuries, or to using secondary material pertaining to different countries or times from those he discusses. It is thus hard to detect local variations in his cases and conclusions (e.g., the role of midwives in the Low Countries). Furthermore, unlike his thorough understanding of the primary hagiographic literature, his access to medieval medical knowledge is largely through secondary literature (some of which has missed his eye—e.g., Temkin’s The Falling Sickness) and an occasional translated source. His presentation adds further complications, as his statistics are without standard errors or...