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Wonderful to Relate. Rachel Koopmans
Читать онлайн.Название Wonderful to Relate
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780812206999
Автор произведения Rachel Koopmans
Жанр Языкознание
Серия The Middle Ages Series
Издательство Ingram
In assessing why Lantfred created this collection, it is especially important to consider what the text reveals about Lantfred’s own engagement with Swithun’s cult. Lantfred appears to have been genuinely amazed by the magnitude of the cult he witnessed at the Old Minster. “No one person could see with his own eyes, nor learn by reading aloud the holy parchment letter by letter, nor comprehend as rumour struck his stinging ears, that so many had been cured at the tomb of one saint,” he exclaims in the collection’s preface.38 To give his readers a sense of the cult’s breathtaking scale, Lantfred dedicates some chapters to describing how large groups of people were cured: 25 people healed in one day, 124 cured in two weeks, and so on.39 Notably, less than a quarter of Lantfred’s stories are about Winchester citizens.40 His focus on the stories of nonresidents—people coming from Essex, Wiltshire, London, Bedfordshire, Rochester, Abingdon, Collingbourne, the Isle of Wight, “the west,” Rome, and France—demonstrated that Swithun’s cult was not just local. These nonresidents, moreover, were like Lantfred himself: they too were outsiders who had a conceived a strong devotion to this saint of Winchester.
Lantfred’s foreign origins did not prevent him from developing a personal zeal for Swithun. If anything, the cultural difference seems to have piqued Lantfred’s interest. He speaks a lot about “the English” in this text and formulates an extraordinary explanation for the strength of English saints’ cults. Lantfred explains in the preface that the miracles of Swithun and other English saints were heavenly rewards for a much earlier event, what he considered to be England’s quick conversion to Christianity. It was because the early Anglo-Saxons did not slaughter their missionaries and were devoted to the faith that “[Christ] bestowed an immense bounty on the aforesaid nation, such that it would have from its own peoples a nearly incalculable number of saints who … would be able to heal the sick people, afflicted with various illnesses, of the whole island.”41 Here and elsewhere in the text it is clear that Lantfred envisioned non-English readers of his collection. He describes, for instance, how the king had an enormous retinue with him when he traveled to an estate “as is the custom among the Anglo-Saxons,”42 and he also makes explanatory statements about English geography: “a certain powerful lady was living in another region of England which in their language is called Bedfordshire,” he writes, as well as stating that a paralyzed man “was living in a province of the English which is called Ham in their language.”43
In addition to writing this collection so that his brethren at Fleury would understand it, Lantfred told other people about Swithun’s cult in his homeland of Frankia. He devotes one of the later chapters of the collection to the story of a “priest from England named Lantfred,” who was traveling in France when a nobleman sent him messengers asking for advice. It was not unusual for writers of the time to speak of themselves in the third person in this manner—this traveling priest was clearly Lantfred himself. The messenger explained to Lantfred that his friend’s wife was very ill. Lantfred writes that he replied, “‘As you well know, I have not studied the practice of medicine from an early age. Nevertheless, I shall give you some excellent advice … arrange for [a candle] to burn this coming night … in honour of the kindly bishop through whom God is performing many miracles among the English.”44 The friend had a wax candle made, and Lantfred carved a supplicating poem to Swithun onto it, a poem he includes in his account of this miracle. It worked: the noblewoman was well again the next day.
This story illuminates the depth of Lantfred’s enthusiasm for Swithun; it is also interesting for its biographical detail about Lantfred’s study of “the practice of medicine.” Unusually in a collection of this size and date, Lantfred does not tell a single story about monastic property, lawsuits, battles, shipwrecks, fires, or lost objects: his unwavering focus is on healing and liberation miracles, most especially healings. His keen interest in Swithun’s “medication to ailing bodies,”45 and descriptions of how the saint “confers the benefit of health on the bodies of the sick, innumerable because of their multitude,”46 may well be tied to this early personal appetite for medical learning.
When Lantfred first came to Winchester is unknown. Lapidge believes that the New Minster Foundation charter, dated to 966, may show Lantfred’s influence. Part of the document is composed in rhyming prose, a trademark of Lantfred’s Miracles and otherwise extremely unusual in tenth-century Anglo-Latin prose.47 It seems likely, as Lapidge suggests, that Lantfred was initially invited to England to help Æthelwold with his reform program.48 Fleury was a powerful and flourishing monastic center in the tenth century, and it had ties with England: Æthelwold, we know, wanted to study there, and saw it as a model for the refoundation and reformation of monastic life in England.49 In the introduction to the Regularis Concordia, Æthelwold states that he had summoned advisors from Fleury and Ghent to help him develop the monastic observances outlined in the text.50 An Englishman sent to Fleury by Æthelwold—Abbot Osgar—was known to Lantfred, and Lantfred must have known Æthelwold: toward the end of his collection, he includes a miracle story that he heard recounted by the bishop.51 Lantfred wrote the Miracles sometime after July 971. From internal evidence, it is clear that he had to have finished the text by the early 980s at the latest.52 Lantfred was also likely the author of mass-sets for the liturgical celebration of Swithun’s cult.53 We have one other piece of evidence about Lantfred’s residence in England: Lapidge has identified a letter that Lantfred wrote to Archbishop Dunstan at Canterbury thanking him for his kindness while he was England and requesting the return of books. Lantfred sent the letter from Fleury; it is dated 974 × 984.54 Lantfred’s name is found on a list commemorating the monks of the Old Minster in Winchester, but where or when he died are unknown.55
Scholars have always read Swithun’s cult within the framework of Æthelwold’s monastic reforms. Lapidge writes of Æthelwold “conceiving” the idea of Swithun’s cult and sees it as beginning on the day Æthelwold translated the relics: “the cult of St. Swithun began, at a stroke, on Saturday 15 July 971.”56 Mechthild Gretsch is more doubtful about whether Swithun’s cult was created ex nihilo, but writes, “There is little doubt, however, about what, for Æthelwold, would have mattered most in the cult of Swithun … Swithun’s ‘revelation’ confirmed to Winchester and to all England that these recent political and ecclesiastical developments had indeed been pleasing to God.”57 Robert Deshman’s reading is very similar: “Æthelwold began to promote Swithun’s previously obscure cult so that the saint’s unexpected rise to prominence and his subsequent flurry of miracles would appear as signs of heavenly approval for the bishop’s policy of monastic reform.”58
While Lantfred must have supported Æthelwold’s reform efforts, he never once suggests in the collection that Swithun’s miracles were signs of approval of Æthelwold’s policies. Lantfred addressed the collection’s prefatory letter to the monks of the Old Minster, not to Æthelwold. In the letter, he says nothing about reform. In the preface of the collection, Lantfred presents Swithun’s cult as a reward for the Anglo-Saxons’ bloodless conversion to Christianity centuries earlier; again, he says nothing about reform.59 Lantfred has so little to say about the translation performed by Æthelwold that Lapidge suspects he might not have been present for it.60 The miracle stories themselves are about healings and liberations, not reform. The overall moral Lantfred saw in Swithun’s miracles was a general one: he thought that they were meant so that “the kindly love of our Lord may be manifest to all peoples,” and “so that the stony hearts of evil men may become gentle and recover their senses, and so hasten toward heavenly joys with their good works.”61 The conclusion to the collection would seem to be an ideal place to press home a reforming message, but here again Lantfred simply