ABSTRACT
A great distance separates Caroline Bynum's delicate excavations of medieval experiences believing in God from Charles Taylor's charming assumption that medieval belief was experience of God, but the road between them runs straight: Taylor's picture witnesses not the failure but the consequences of historical and cultural studies that treat religious belief as a black box. Despite a whole field's best efforts to make it something else, the operative picture of medieval religiousness remains much what it always was. If claiming that medieval people believed in miracles were identical to claiming that medieval people saw miracles, then in the normal course of things it should have been strictly impossible for anyone to change his mind about whether he had witnessed a miracle, at least without coming to doubt that he had really seen what he thought he had seen.
