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On the Distinction between True and False Visions
business in contrived miracles: religious paintings and statues dug
up by accident or divine command). The matter was addressed in
the Siete Partidas, the codex of canon and civil law compiled under
the direction of Alfonso the Wise, king of Castile, around 1248. In
it we can read the following:
Some men fraudulently discover or build altars in fields or in
towns, saying that there are relics of certain saints in those
places and pretending that they perform miracles, and, for
this reason, people from many places are induced to go there
as on a pilgrimage, in order to take something away from
them; and there are others who influenced by dreams or
empty phantoms which appear to them, erect altars and
pretend to discover them in the above named localities.
In listing the reasons for erroneous beliefs, Alfonso lays out a
continuum from sect, opinion, fantasy and dream to hallucination.
A kind of fantasy named antoianca is defined as follows:
Antoianca is something that stops before the eyes and then
disappears, as one sees or hears it in a trance, and so is
without substance.
A 1517 papal bull distinguishes between apparitions that appear
'in dreams or divinely'. Clearly, the secular and ecclesiastical
authorities, even in times of extreme credulity, were alert to the
possibilities of hoax and delusion.
Nevertheless, in most of medieval Europe, such apparitions
were greeted warmly by the Roman Catholic clergy, especially
because the Marian admonitions were so congenial to the
priesthood. A pathetic few 'signs' of evidence - a stone or a
footprint and never anything unfakeable - sufficed. But beginning
in the fifteenth century, around the time of the Protestant
Reformation, the attitude of the Church changed. Those who
reported an independent channel to Heaven were outflanking
the Church's chain of command up to God. Moreover, a few of
the apparitions - Jeanne d'Arc's, for example - had awkward
political or moral implications. The perils represented by
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