Of all the signs and wonders, real or imaginary, in the history of Christianity one of the most celebrated is the ‘Vision of Constantine’ – a vision or dream in which Constantine, meditating an attack on his rival Maxentius in AD 312, was instructed to entrust his fortunes to the Christian God and the sign of the cross, the experience which, supposedly, converted the emperor to the Christian faith.

In C.435 Sozomen, the fifth-century lawyer and continuator of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History, describes how probably near the end of Constantine’s reign his grandfather and his family were converted to Christianity. He attributes this to the work of the Palestinian monk, Hilarion. He writes of Alaphion, a friend of the family at that time living in Bethelia near Gaza, a pagan stronghold:

Disciples of Christ do not consider how things will proceed in the sight of judges. For thus he forewarned us, saying, ‘But when they hand you over, do not worry about how to speak or what to say; what you are to say will be given to you when the time comes; because it is not you who will be speaking; the Spirit of your Father will be speaking in you’.

Gregory the Great wrote his Dialogues between July 593 and October 594. Like most scholars of Gregory the Great, I am convinced that the Dialogues are a genuine Gregorian work and do not share Francis Clark’s opinion that the Dialogues are the rather clumsy product of a later forger. The Dialogues are an extremely complex work on holiness, a skilful pastoral pedagogy, and a programme of mission as well. They contain Gregory’s ideal of the Church which he developed during a time of crisis. Some elements may even seem to be Utopian.

This paper investigates two important themes which have not hitherto been fully appreciated: how the Anglo-Saxons, during the whole lengthy process of their reception of Christianity, interpreted the meaning of those extraordinary events commonly called miracula, and what reflection on the vernacular was carried forward by the knowledge achieved for purposes of communication. Although the question of the vocabulary of ‘miracle’ in Antiquity and early Christian times has been dealt with elsewhere, any discussion of vernacular terminology is barely discernible and scarcely ever encountered. My intention is, therefore, to consider the intentional expressive activity of the Anglo-Saxons as a reflection of meaning on their language.

There was a certain poor little crippled girl, who sat near the gate of the monastery begging alms … she committed fornication When her time came, she wrapped the child in swaddling clothes and cast it at night into a pool…. When day dawned, another woman came to draw water and seeing the corpse of the child, was struck with horror … and reproached the holy nuns … ‘Look for the one who is missing from the monastery and then you will find out who is responsible for this crime’. […] no one was absent except Agatha who … had gone with full permission….

Hagiographical narrative is often examined through the well-established text-critical principle according to which the earliest text is necessarily the most skeletal in outline, the least wondrous in plot, and therefore the most historically believable. According to this view, to the bare bones of truth, fanciful narrative and miraculous tales are added with time, as the tale grows in the telling. The development of the Legend of St Alexios has been viewed as a case in point. The idiosyncratic life-story of this fourth-century ascete has been described as evolving from a nucleus of ‘fact’, essentially coinciding with the early Syriac Life, to a romanced complexity with the Byzantine version influencing the later versions in all major romance languages. Consequently, critics have isolated and, to a large extent, derided the ‘miraculous’ element in the plot, while failing to articulate an understanding of the role of miracles in Alexios’s Life.

Robert the Monk, who was present at the Council of Clermont in 1095 and heard Urban II preach the crusade sermon, reports that when he had finished speaking all who were there shouted: ‘God wills it. God wills it’. The pope, Robert tells us, saw in this unanimity a sign of divine inspiration: ‘I tell you that God has drawn this response from you to express the feeling which he has inspired in your hearts’. Yet although Urban’s arguments and eloquence convinced his audience at Clermont, reactions to the crusade were more ambivalent among some people in the West, even among some of those who took the cross. This was a legacy of the ambiguous attitude of Western churchmen towards violence and warfare. Western society in the early medieval centuries was very violent, and, as Guy Halsall has rightly pointed out, the Church helped to determine the norms of violence which Christian society found acceptable. No doubt churchmen viewed their intervention primarily as a limitation exercise. From the later ninth century onwards, as the Carolingian Empire declined, the popes intermittently called on the warriors of the West to come to their aid. Indeed, in some ways the campaign of the Garigliano, conducted by a league of Byzantine and Lombard forces organized by Pope John X, who himself took part in the fighting, and which achieved its objective of ridding the Papal States of bands of Muslim raiders who had settled there, was like a rehearsal for the First Crusade. The Church further tried to influence the behaviour of Christian fighting men by encouraging the Truce and Peace of God movements in the early eleventh century, and in some areas the liturgical blessing of swords was introduced. Consequently, by 1095 the fighting men in Western Europe were accustomed to the Church hierarchy’s calling on them for help.

In his eyewitness account of the First Crusade, Fulcher of Chartres described the shipwreck and drowning of a boatload of crusaders who were bound for the Holy Land in 1097. After the bodies of the dead were recovered, he explained how ‘they discovered crosses evidently marked on the flesh above the shoulders’. Fulcher supposed this incident to be a miracle, ‘divinely revealed’, and that the marking was a ‘token of faith’ (pignusfidei) bestowed by God upon his servants. It was a sign to the surviving crusaders that God favoured them and would fulfil the promise he had made that ‘the just, though they shall be taken prematurely by death, shall be in peace’ (Wisd. 4, 7).

Almighty God sometimes shows his miracles not only in great things but also in minor matters, so that the faith of believers shall be more and more increased and thus it causes all creatures to break out in praise of their Creator, since he is seen to have a care with fatherly piety in all those things that are granted to human endeavour.

In medieval narrative the First Crusade and the founding of the Latin kingdom were perceived as Gesta Dei per Francos – God’s own deed. Having no doubt that the success of the First Crusade was a miracle, God’s intervention in history, the chroniclers’ rendering of events was accordingly replete with miracles, such as the discovery of the Holy Lance in Antioch and the saints’ taking an active role in the battle against Kirbogha of Mosul in 1098. Even in the more level-headed historical narratives, military success was seen as a miracle and failures were attributed to the sins of the participants who were not pure enough to merit a miracle. Thus the miraculous intervention of God in history became the logical consequence of the prowess and religious behavior of the crusaders, an almost expected outcome of natural events.

Perhaps our most learned and knowledgeable informant concerning both the heretics and their persecutors is the great inquisitor, hagiographer and Dominican historian Bernard Gui (1261–1331), who has been immortalized as the personification of evil by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose. In his manual for inquisitors, Gui issued the following caveat concerning the conduct of inquiries into heresy:

Judging by the quantity of surviving texts – whether vitae or saints’ lives, libelli miraculorum or narratives of miracles for public reading in church, lectionaries or collections of liturgical readings, inventiones and translationes or accounts of relics found and later moved to a new location, popular receptivity to signs, wonders and miracles had reached a high point by the turn of the twelfth century. Whilst ordinary laypeople remained fascinated by supernatural phenomena, intellectuals were already beginning to challenge the preternatural in a process described by Chenu as the ‘desacralizing’ of nature. In the first book of his treatise, De Sanctis et eorum pignoribus (c.1120), Guibert, Abbot of Nogent, had contrasted the credulity of the faithful towards pseudo-miracles with the growing unease experienced by many scholars at inadequate written evidence for the authentication of relics. Andrew of Saint-Victor (d.1175), in an exposition on the literal interpretation of Scripture, found himself arguing for a natural explanation of events before any recourse to the miraculous. In the School of Pastoral Theology at Paris, Master Peter the Chanter (d.1197) vehemently criticized trial by ordeal as a flagrant tempting of God whereby a supposedly miraculous intervention was allowed to intrude into the regular legalistic operation of the courts. In the years immediately following the Chanter’s death, his former students, led by Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) and like-minded clerical associates, developed a significant agenda, emphasizing rationality and record keeping to sustain the faith of the Church within a new and more firmly pastoral context.

Around 1200, the Church of St Cuthbert in Durham produced an illustrated copy of Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert. Opulently decorated with illustrations rich in colour and gold, this book crowned a century that had seen Cuthbert’s church grow in power and stability. After the seventh-century Northumbrian golden age, centuries of upheaval had characterized the Cuthbertine church: it changed immensely in location and religious observance, moving across Northumbria and adapting the community to suit difficult situations. By contrast, the twelfth century saw the building of the imposing Durham cathedral and castle, and the ornamentation of the church with many riches. The church was led by a sequence of very influential bishops and a thriving monastic community. This power and prosperity of the Durham church was marked at the start and end of the twelfth century with great manifestations of Cuthbert’s cult. An illustrated Life of Cuthbert was produced in the early years of the century; in 1104 Cuthbert’s body was translated into its current position in the cathedral and found to be just as incorrupt as it had been in 698, eleven years after his death; several hagiographical works on the cult and church were produced during this century; and its end was marked with the beautifully illustrated Bedan Life. Cult and church were intrinsically linked, and provided the basis upon which Durham’s twelfth-century power was built – a power which was to continue into the ensuing centuries.

The following is a description of a miracle attributed to the Portuguese friar-physician, Gil de Santarém (d. 1265):

In the year 1206, as Saint Francis was walking near the church of San Damiano, just outside the walls of Assisi, he was suddenly overcome by an urge to enter the dilapidated sanctuary. Upon entering, in the words of his first hagiographer,