The history of infertility is a rapidly growing field but the relationship between infertility and religion remains under-studied. This article investigates the ways in which religious writers in the European Middle Ages thought about infertility, focusing (in keeping with the theme of ‘margins and peripheries’) on how far these sources presented reproductive disorders as leading people to be marginalized or stigmatized. It examines several key sources discussed by earlier scholars before moving on to a detailed analysis of late medieval English retellings of the story of the birth of the Virgin Mary, who was born to her parents in old age. The article argues that there is some evidence that infertility could be viewed as a source of stigma and infertile people as marginalized. However, the narratives of the birth of the Virgin offered a more inclusive view, and were modified by different authors to reflect different experiences of infertility.

One of the ways in which medieval Christians thought about the links between this life and the afterlife was by telling ghost stories – a topic which has attracted the attention of several historians. In these stories, a dead person often appears to a living relative or friend and asks them to give alms or to perform other good works on their behalf, in order to speed up their passage to heaven. The dead person usually appears spontaneously, although sometimes this occurs after relatives have said prayers for them. This paper, however, will examine a group of stories about less spontaneous apparitions. These are stories in which two people agree that whichever of them dies first will come back and tell the other about the afterlife. They have sometimes been mentioned in studies of medieval ghost stories, but they have not been examined in their own right.

One of the places in which medieval churchmen tackled questions of discipline and diversity was in their writing on magic. Magic appeared in many different kinds of ecclesiastical writing, including canon law, theology, and the records and manuals of the inquisition. Some of these sources have been well studied; in particular, historians have often attempted to trace the medieval origins of the early modern witch-hunts in theology and inquisition records. However, many other texts have received little attention, among them the pastoral manuals written from the thirteenth century onwards, which instructed priests on how to preach and hear confessions. In contrast to academic theology and inquisitors’ manuals, which catered for specialist readers, pastoral manuals were aimed at any Latin-literate cleric, perhaps especially at students in England’s secular and religious schools. Because they reflect what this wider audience might be expected to encounter, they offer a broader perspective than do the specialist texts on why medieval people employed diverse ritual practices, and why churchmen labelled some of these practices as ‘magic’ and sought to discipline them.

With these words, the thirteenth-century Dominican friar Stephen of Bourbon recalled how in a village in the Auvergne he had found a group of women venerating a dog as a saint. He then went on to describe how he had preached against the cult and persuaded the local lord to demolish the dog’s woodland shrine. Thanks to a detailed study by Jean-Claude Schmitt, this encounter between educated friar and unorthodox peasants has become a famous example of interaction between elite and popular religion in the Middle Ages. But it is only one of many such encounters that Stephen describes under the heading of ‘Superstitio’, or Superstition. Part of the interest of these tales for the modern reader is that they provide a window on to some of the unorthodox religious practices of the Middle Ages. Even more interesting, however, is the way in which Stephen links these practices to a clear but flexible idea of the relationship between elite and popular religion.