The blood of Thomas, earl of Lancaster, executed in March 1322 under King Edward II, was central to his representation as a political martyr. In this paper I shall discuss the miraculous flow of blood from Lancaster’s tomb, which occurred on two occasions, and shall suggest two interpretations, symbolic and political, of the meaning of these miracles.

Sister Liesbeth of Heenvliet (d. 1450) was a scion of a high ranking noble family in the county of Holland. Her parents had named her after Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, from whom they were descended. Liesbeth was born blind. Her mother did not dare to inform the child’s father, Johan of Heenvliet. Instead, she appealed to God and His Mother. Contrary to what she should have done, she did not vow her daughter to God’s service. Despite her mother’s laxity, Liesbeth’s eyes healed completely. She grew into a beautiful and most intelligent girl – a further sign that God and the Virgin had extended their mercy to her.

Cataclysms of nature and apocalyptic beliefs have always gone hand in hand. While Christians have had no monopoly on such beliefs, expectations of this kind have been an important part of the Western religious tradition both in Christian Europe and in the ‘millennial New World’, the latter a time and place of heightened eschatological anticipation. One of the ‘best-sellers’ among Christians in medieval Europe was The Fifteen Signs before Doomsday, a work that detailed the cataclysms which would occur before the end. But in another region of the world – a new world replete with frequent seismic and volcanic activity – it became even more so a type of prophecy that would captivate the religious imagination of colonizers and missionaries.

To speak of miracles in post-Reformation England may seem like something of an oxymoron. The sense of internal contradiction in my title springs from the fact that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant ministers consistently maintained that this category of extraordinary events had long since ceased. They did not deny that supernatural acts of this kind had taken place in biblical times. As set down in the books of the Old Testament, God had vouchsafed many wonders to His chosen people, the Hebrews, including the parting of the Red Sea, the raining of manna from heaven, and the metamorphosis of Aaron’s rod into a serpent. Equally, the New Testament recorded the prodigious feats performed by Christ and his apostles to convince the disbelieving Gentiles and Jews: from the raising of Lazarus and the transformation of water into wine at the marriage at Cana to curing lepers of their sores and restoring sight to the blind, not to mention the great mysteries of the Incarnation and Resurrection. But dozens of sermons and tracts reiterated the precept that God no longer worked wonders above, beyond, or against the settled order and instinct of nature – the standard definition of miracle inherited from the scholastic writings of St Thomas Aquinas. Such special dispensations were the ‘seales and testimonials’ of the Gospel. They had been necessary to sow the first seeds of the faith, to plant the new religion centring on the redemption of mankind by Jesus of Nazareth. But this gift, stressed John Calvin and his disciples, was only of ‘temporary duration’. Miracles were the swaddling bands of the primitive Church, the mother’s milk on which it had been initially weaned. Once the Lord had begun to feed His people on the meat of the Word, he expected them to believe the truth as preached and revealed in Scripture rather than wait for astonishing visible spectacles to be sent down from heaven. Although there was some uncertainty about exactly when such wonders had come to an end, Protestant divines were in general agreement that, as a species, miracles were now extinct. Christians could and should not expect to see such occurrences in the course of their lifetimes.

On New Year’s Day, 1578, Sir John Langley, a wealthy alderman of the City of London, lay dying. Present at his deathbed were three of the most eminent preachers in the capital: Robert Crowley, who held four London livings, Alexander Nowell, the dean of St Paul’s cathedral and John Foxe, the martyrologist. As Langley’s life ebbed away, Foxe went up to the dying man and ‘used both godly councell unto him and some devote prayers’. Since Langley could no longer speak, Foxe urged him to signify his belief in Christ by holding up his hands:

On September 11, 2001, a small church next to Ground Zero survived almost unharmed, adjacent to the place where the famous Twin Towers had once stood. Journalists who reported the disaster and who saw the location of this little church talked of a miracle. This was the only word available to them in order to explain what seemed to be inexplicable otherwise. But in our secularized age, in none of the reports which I have read was a connection made between the possible causes of the catastrophe of 9/11 and the possible meaning of the survival of the little church which was called a ‘miracle’. People in early modern Germany would have been able to draw such connections, and this is the topic of my essay. In recent years, some historians have discovered the crucial role of catastrophes in pre-modern times. As they point out, catastrophes changed people’s lives drastically and in unforeseen ways. This was also true for early modern Europe and in particular for early modern Germany. With two exceptions, however, the importance of religion in coming to terms with the consequences of catastrophes has not been discussed. Moreover, in these studies miracles were not mentioned, even though the belief in miracles is a significant element of almost every account concerning a catastrophe.

George Fox, chief among the founders of Quakerism, died in 1691, leaving a huge mass of papers for publication together with funds to support the project. In the event, some of his papers were never published and were lost, and little was known about them until the discovery in 1932 of an annotated list of all Fox’s papers, which had been compiled in the 1690s, and which included references to two unknown books, a ‘Book of Miracles’ and a ‘Book of Examples of God’s Judgements on Evildoers’. The finder was Henry J. Cadbury (1883–1974), who is best known in non-Quaker circles as a New Testament scholar, and the skills he needed for the analysis of New Testament documents were invaluable in handling the Fox corpus. He was able to gain an idea of the contents of these lost books, particularly the ‘Book of Miracles’, and his partial reconstruction of it, published in 1948 with a comprehensive introduction, is still an important source for any study of the miraculous element in early Quakerism.

On Wednesday 1 June 1692, a young man, about fifteen years of age, went to his bed. He had no sooner lain down than he heard ‘a Hand sweeping on the wall’. Then it came ‘with a rushing noise on his beds-head’ and ‘stroaked him over the face twice very gently’. Opening his eyes he saw before him ‘an apparition of a woman cloathed in black apparel’. Following this eerie encounter, other members of the family claimed to have seen the apparition ‘in the same room with a lighted candle’. Perplexed by these unexplained visits the mistress of this ‘Civiliz’d Family’ wrote to the editors of the bi-weekly periodical the Athenian Mercury desiring to know ‘what should be the occasion of the disturbance’ and ‘whether it be advisable to ask the question of the apparition’. Samuel Wesley (father of John), Church of England minister and co-editor of the Athenian Mercury, advised the woman to have a chat with the ghost, to find out its purpose and to discover how it might be satisfied.

A Headline in the Daily Telegraph once read: ‘Vicar is “act of God” victim’. The article explained:

On Whitsunday, I went to bed weak in body, but happy in mind. In my sleep, I dreamed that I heard a band of Angels singing around me in a most delightful manner. On this I awoke with my heart full of love, and quite transported. O if a blind world did but feel what I then did, how would They also love and adore the God of their salvation! How would they run in the way of Wisdom, and partake of the felicities of thy chosen!

The role of the Magic Methodists and their leader James Crawford at the beginning of Primitive Methodism has been widely debated. As a group noted for signs, wonders and miracles, they helped to provide the necessary experience and enthusiasm for a new revivalist movement. In the image of a poor agricultural labourer, Crawfoot represented a rustic and earthy beginning for a denomination that prided itself on its success amongst the poor. However, as a man ‘unpolished by learning and refinement… strangely odd and uncouth in argument’, he was a controversial figure. To successive generations of Primitive Methodists Crawfoot with his associated supernaturalism was an embarrassment.

When Samuel Taylor Coleridge read Edward Irving’s sermon in 1825 on the apostolic missionary ideal, he was disappointed that Irving had not met at the outset what would be the main objection of his more cautious antagonists. The absence in modern times of the miraculous gifts of the apostolic missionaries was a problem that, Coleridge felt, hung

The phenomenon of speaking in tongues was manifested at All Saints’ Parish Church, Monkwearmouth, Sunderland, during the autumn of 1907. This outbreak rapidly became the object of criticism and opposition from a variety of sources, but one of the most vehement, if unexpected, emanated from an organization known as the Pentecostal League of Prayer. This non-denominational body had been established by Reader Harris Q. C. in 1891, and integral to its aims was the promotion of ‘Holiness’ teaching which advocated an experience of sanctification distinct from, and subsequent to, conversion. A network of branches had been established across England, and the Revd Alexander A. Boddy, vicar of All Saints’, had been actively involved in its Sunderland branch prior to 1907. Harris, who was in Sunderland at the time of this new departure in All Saints’, objected to the identification of the ‘gift of tongues’ with what he perceived to be genuine Pentecostal experience. One of the principal ironies of the situation is that his opposition was promulgated in the Pentecostal League’s periodical Tongues of Fire. It is contested that this local controversy represents not only a curious chapter in the history of Protestant polemics against the miraculous, but that it embodied broader ramifications than might first appear, not least in the impetus generated toward the establishment of distinctive Pentecostal identity and orthodoxy.

Since in this essay I make the word Pentecostal do a lot of work, I too think it is only fair to pay it extra. I use the term to refer to a religious movement that emerged from the vast and amorphous radical evangelical subculture in the United States in the sunset years of the nineteenth century. Like other radical evangelicals, Pentecostals fervently anticipated the Lord’s imminent return, affirmed the miraculous healing of the body, and believed that the conversion experience should lead to another life-transforming event known as the baptism of the Holy Ghost. Unlike other radical evangelicals, however, Pentecostals also insisted that the baptism experience always manifested itself by speaking in ‘unknown tongues’.

In their interactions with the soldiers during the First World War the British military chaplains were afforded the opportunity to see the Christian body in microcosm. The chaplains’ frontline experiences shaped their positions on popular religion and the sincerity of Christian belief and practice amongst Britain’s youth. A comparative assessment of clerical responses to soldiers’ claims of the miraculous not only demonstrates a critical divide in clerical understanding of the supernatural – a divide which is more appropriately separated along theological rather than denominational lines. It also indicates that many of the differences between Catholic and Protestant evaluations of popular religion were, fundamentally, differences of clerical perception rather than popular practice and belief.

Dallimore’s healing-evangelism ministry was in its heyday in 1932. Originally from Britain, Dallimore had spent periods of time in relative obscurity in New Zealand, Alaska and Canada, prior to returning to New Zealand in 1927. His life journey included involvement in Baptist, Anglican and Methodist churches, but by the time he returned to New Zealand Dallimore had embraced a Pentecostal-style healing ministry.

This paper will suggest how the recounting of miracles (the first textual, the other filmic) was designed to support a particular ideology of Spanishness during the twentieth century. Both miracles here analysed were presented as having taken place during the late eleventh or early twelfth century, a key moment in the history of Spain, a point at which its Christian kingdoms began successfully to challenge the dominance of the Muslim states of Al-Andalus.