So many medieval saints lives depend on the visual experience of watching the saint submit to torture, a vision that is relied upon in the textual production of truth; the miracle of the saint’s impassive reaction to torture is the proof of the sanctity as well as proof of the truth of Christianity.  These tortures scenes often also provide the iconographic shorthand for the saint. This paper proposes to consider the function of torture in hagiography in the twelfth-century Life and Passion of St. William of Norwich.  William’s vita faces a generic problem: William was a young boy purportedly ritually crucified by the Jews of Norwich.  A ritual crucifixion, however, is by definition carried out behind closed doors, thus frustrating the valuable and necessary moment of the production of visual proof depended upon by the genre of hagiography.  The text is thus forced to fall back on a variety of strategies, from death-bed confessions to peeping through keyholes.  This paper will argue that we can read this text as being implicated in a crisis in the category of proof in the twelfth century.  In its narrative insistence on the importance of proving the occurrence of an act that has not been witnessed, this text ultimately speaks to a cultural shift in the mid-twelfth century in conceptualizing the relationship between seeing and believing, between knowledge and faith.  At the same time, it eerily anticipates the moment when, after the Lateran Council of 1215, torture moves behind closed doors.