Wonderful to Relate - Rachel Koopmans The Middle Ages Series

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can be so startling, and their shapes so arresting, that it is easy to feel captured and chloroformed yourself, mesmerized by the variety of the display. There is a pleasure too in contemplating the ordering of the specimens: the straight rows, the squared and spread wings, the labels pasted under each one. The stories in medieval miracle collections line up like this as well. Caught in the nets of writers, spaced out and ordered, the stories neatly march along in chapter after chapter, some of them presenting such unexpected contours and coloring that you can feel your eyes widening in surprise.

      The zeal of the writers who made such collections seems as wondrous today as the stories of miracles. Collections of saints’ miracles fill the volumes of our editions of medieval sources in the same way butterfly collections of the early Victorian era clog the storerooms of our natural history museums. A few collections were highly formalized, the same stories reappearing in different guises again and again, but most collections of miracles contain no such plagiarism. Their narratives, often collected by a single enthusiastic writer, were derived not from other texts but from the swarm of stories in current oral circulation. Conversation about miracles sent writers to their desks when little else seemed worthy of written record. Some medieval collectors amassed hundreds of stories, creating textual giants that dwarfed even the longest of saints’ lives.1

      R. W. Southern considered the “writing of marvels,” especially the English creation of the first versions of the “Miracles of the Virgin,” to be one of the most significant achievements of the twelfth-century renaissance in England.2 Other historians have noted in passing that twelfth-century writers in England and elsewhere made many miracle collections, but the extent of that production has not been quantified.3 By my count, writers living in England between 1080 and 1220 compiled at least seventy-five collections of saints’ posthumous miracles.4 Anglo-Saxon writers were largely uninterested in miracle collecting. It was in the late eleventh century, some decades after the Norman Conquest, that a miracle-collecting mania began to spread. In the course of the twelfth century and into the early thirteenth century, writers collected the miracles of famous Anglo-Saxon saints such as Cuthbert, Edmund, Swithun, and Æthelthryth, of lesser-known Anglo-Saxons such as Oswine, Ithamar, Frideswide, and Wenefred, of new saints like William of Norwich, Thomas Becket, and Gilbert of Sempringham, and also of bits of foreign saints housed in England: the miracles of the finger of St. Germanus (at Selby), the altar of St. Bartholomew (in London), and the hand of St. James (at Reading) became the focus of collectors in this period. After this outpouring of texts concerning every manner of saint, the collecting mania evaporated almost as quickly as it had begun. By the mid-thirteenth century, miracle collecting had again become a sporadic and occasional pursuit.

      In this book, I examine the miracle-collecting craze of high medieval England. I sketch out the parameters of the oral world from which the collectors drew their stories of divine intervention, chart the literary arc of miracle collecting from the late tenth to the early thirteenth century, and study the works of six influential collectors within this larger history. English miracle collections were written in the same monastic contexts and frequently by the same authors who produced the other Latin prose texts of the period. In terms of number of authors, miracle collecting was actually a more important and mainstream literary activity in England than the writing of chronicles.5 The creation of miracle collections is usually thought to have been driven by the local pressures of cults and the immediate political needs of monastic communities.6 Except in studies of pilgrims, disease, illness, and the like, it has been rare for miracle collections to be considered as a body.7 But the stark rise and fall of miracle collecting in high medieval England demonstrates that we need to think in terms of broader patterns of production, to read individual collections within these broader patterns, to weigh the influence of specific authors, to formulate explanations for peaks and troughs in the popularity of miracle collecting, and to recognize the miracle collection for what it was: a defining genre and major literary phenomenon of the long twelfth century.

      This book is set apart from other studies of medieval miracle collections in its attention to the creation and circulation of oral stories and in its construction of a detailed chronological account—in essence, a literary history—of English miracle collecting. A comprehensive survey of medieval miracle collecting would span the entire European continent and many centuries, and it remains to be seen how representative English miracle collecting might be.8 When the whole story is told, it may well be that miracle collecting in England stands at the head of twelfth-century developments. During this period, English miracle collectors produced two texts of wide European influence: the “Miracles of the Virgin,” a text that was hugely popular throughout the late medieval period, and Benedict of Peterborough’s miracle collection for Thomas Becket, the most widely circulated shrine collection of the age. My account of the sweep of English miracle collecting in this book is intended to provide a basic framework for the study of these and other English miracle collections. My chief goal, however, is to demonstrate that miracle collections can tell us about more than saints, pilgrims, and local politics. They are also essential sources for our understanding of orality, literacy, and the much heightened concern for written record in the high medieval period; for genre formation, literary Latin, individual rhetorical ambitions, and transformations in learned monastic culture; and for a new and more intimate type of interaction between the religious and laity in the late twelfth century, interactions that foreshadowed major developments within medieval society.

      In the course of the book, I isolate and discuss two main phases in the surge of popularity of miracle collecting in England, phases running roughly from c.1080–1140 and c.1140–1200. In the first phase, collectors tended to compose medium-sized texts, in the range of ten to thirty chapters, tell miracle stories with some pretensions at rhetorical prowess, and preserve stories that were being talked about in monastic circles. In many of the prologues of these texts, English miracle collectors mourn the loss of stories from the past and state their determination to save miracles known in their day in written record. The late eleventh and early twelfth centuries saw a pan-European movement to commit orally transmitted truths, customs, and stories to writing. English monks became markedly concerned with their past and with history-writing in this period, perhaps even more so than in other regions because of the great political rupture of the Norman Conquest. As the new thinking about written record worked its way through European culture, some English monks began to think the miracles of their saints ought to be written. It was an idea that spread from house to house, moving in much the same way that schemes for grand relic translation ceremonies and the rebuilding of churches and cathedrals spread through the small social world of English Benedictine monasticism in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries.

      In the second phase, roughly c.1140–1200, many of the same trends continue, and one can find collections that look much like their counterparts from the earlier period. But many collections began to take on a new form. Collectors now created longer texts, some of them running up past one hundred chapters; they wrote individual stories at less length and with fewer rhetorical frills; and, most strikingly, they drew many, sometimes most, of their stories from outside of their own conversational circles. They were seeking out the stories of lay strangers. Miracle stories concerning the laity had appeared in earlier collections, but they typically concerned the few dramatic healings witnessed by monks at the shrines of saints or stories told by close lay friends and relatives of monks. Now, though, collectors were listening to the stories of lay visitors to their relics and churches.

      Giles Constable describes the last stage of the great monastic reforms of the twelfth century as “an intense concern with the nature of religious life and personal reform of all Christians,” a stage he dates to 1130–60.9 This is about the time that one starts to see miracle collectors focusing their attention on the stories of the laity. It is important to recognize what this involved: monks and canons listening patiently, for days, months, and sometimes years to stories about stomachaches, sexual misadventures, sick children, swollen legs, shipwrecks, and stolen coins, and then devoting resources of their scriptoria to committing these stories to parchment so that other religious men could hear and read these stories all over again. With this new attention to the stories of the laity also came new worries about truth, falsity, and the validity of the stories the monks were hearing. Many writers still took pride in the rhetorical flair they imparted to their collections,

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