FROM THE PUBLISHER

A trickster saint whose miracles reportedly included the healing of an inguinal hernia via a hammer and anvil, Sainte Foy (Saint Faith) inspired one of the most important collections of miracle stories of the central Middle Ages. In this book, Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn explore the act of "writing faith" as performed both by the authors of these stories and by the scholars who have used them as sources for the study of medieval religion and society. Writing Faith demonstrates that clusters of miracles form sign systems, and that it is those systems of meaning or representation that can be historically located. Thus, rather than treating individual miracle stories as transparent sources of specific historical data, we can recognize representations common to groups of miracle stories as coherent historical formations. For instance, the negative characterizations of Muslims in the late miracles situate the stories' composition in the eleventh century, a period of rising hostility on the eve of the Crusades.