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

Since the publication of his Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (Totowa, N.J., 1977), Finucane has been the leading English-language scholar of medieval miracle reports. These sources record the circumstances of reputedly miraculous benefactions worked by the intercession of deceased saints and reported by their living beneficiaries at the saints’ shrines or to papal canonization commissions. Unlike many saints’ legends or preaching parables (exempla), miracle reports concern real people who lived at specific times and places and often include, as part of the narrative context, illuminating detail about their everyday lives. Thus, Finucane focuses his attention not on miracles per se, but on the social context in which they took place. Unlike Miracles and Pilgrims, which analyzed mostly English miracles from multiple perspectives, Rescue of the Innocents concentrates on children’s miracles both in northern and southern Europe and makes its chief contribution to the history of childhood.

Finucane’s sources are 600 miracle reports concerning children fourteen or younger, found in eight large compilations, four each from northern and southern Europe. Three of the northern saints are English (Thomas Cantilupe, Thomas Becket, and King Henry VI) and one Pomeranian (Dorothy of Montau); two of the southern saints were venerated in Marseilles (Bishop Louis of Toulouse and Pope Urban V) and the other two in Italy (Clare of Montefalco and Nicholas of Tolentino). Almost half of the reports (45 percent) were recorded during the fourteenth century, another 25 percent in the thirteenth, and about 15 percent each in the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Finucane recognizes the methodological perils here: “This is a small number of cases, spanning a long period, upon which to predicate firm conclusions.” Hence, he concedes that his generalizations are “highly speculative,” that his study is “exploratory,” and that his findings are “tentative” (6). Although he most often adopts a synchronic and geographically comprehensive point of view, in the conclusion he makes explicit comparisons between the 311 northern and 289 southern reports.

Between the introduction and conclusion, Finucane provides three substantive chapters on birth and early infancy, children’s illnesses, and children’s accidents. He is at his best when using the techniques of micro-history to fashion vivid narratives of specific cases illuminated by the insights of other scholars of medieval childhood. The chapter about accidents makes fruitful connections with Hanawalt’s study of English peasant families based on coroners’ reports, since miracle reports and coroners’ reports are complementary sources.¹ If an accident victim was vowed to a saint and lived, survival was a miracle; if he or she died, the coroner was called in. In either case, the subsequent investigation turned up a wealth of detail that sometimes made it into the written record, much to our benefit.

At the end, Finucane affirms three broad conclusions: first, that medieval parents cared deeply about their children (despite cases of negligence) and grieved deeply at their death; second, that “in a profoundly male dominated society, male children were valued more highly than female offspring” (161); and third, that northern and southern families were different, the southern ones more dependent on kinship to define their social networks.

If this careful and judicious book has a weakness, it is in the presentation and analysis of its numerical data. The appendix contains no tables summarizing the statistical data on which the analysis is based, and all the numbers must be gleaned from the text, sometimes by multiplying totals by percentages, making it difficult to check the author’s conclusions and consider alternative interpretations of the data. Moreover, the analysis relies exclusively on percentages; tests of statistical significance and of strength of relationship could provide clearer indications of which patterns are important and also facilitate comparisons with other, similar studies. In this regard the example provided by Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell, Saints and Society (Chicago, 1982) deserves emulation by more quantitatively inclined historians.