ABSTRACT

As we have seen, despite the considerable resources of preaching, confession, scholastic theology, and the visual arts which were at the church’s disposal in its dialogue with the believers concerning the supernatural and its intervention in the natural world, doubts persisted among various opponents of the true Faith. The continuing presence of opposition to the established religious consensus in the Middle Ages is a theme that has received scant attention, despite frequent accounts of voiced skepticism about the tenets of Christian belief found in medieval hagiography.1 Although the wholesale iconoclastic destruction of sacred and devotional objects during the English Reformation was never reached in the Middle Ages, nevertheless voices of doubt about the miraculous abound.2 As Susan Reynolds has noted, ‘the miracle stories are full of scoffers’.3 She has pointed out the rise of this phenomenon after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), attributing it to the act of personal confession, which may have stimulated believers to think more deeply about their faith, thus provoking doubt. Those miracles in which a skeptic is typically punished for his or her impiety and then miraculously recovers after acts of penance, were regarded as the most effective tools in the battle against disbelief.4 As one of the witnesses at the canonization hearing of the Augustinian hermit John Buoni had said in 1252:

As a result of hearing and seeing the miracles that God performs daily through the merits and prayers of Friar John, many of them [i.e. the heretical Patarenes] who did not believe in the faith of the holy Roman church were converted to the faith.5