LAUSR

Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of miracle accounts were recorded in the Middle Ages, and recent generations of scholars have analysed them to illuminate the social realities of the medieval cult of the saints. Another approach is to explore these accounts as narratives, and this article suggests three ways of doing this: by placing them on a scale between the more literary, which are intended to celebrate the saint generally, and the more determinedly probative or forensic, which are concerned to demonstrate the veracity of the miracle by formal means, such as the naming of witnesses; by looking at the narrative motifs which recur in miracle accounts; and by subjecting such accounts to close readings of the kind employed when analysing fiction.