Wonderful to Relate. Rachel Koopmans
told his friends about Swithun’s miracles, and enjoyed mulling over miracles with Eadsige, but written nothing. Lantfred, though, wanted to write—and, as noted above, he was thinking about Frankish readers as well as English ones. Four manuscripts of Lantfred’s collection survive. There are two early copies written at Winchester, one dated to the late tenth century, perhaps 996, the other to c.1000; there is one copy with a Fleury origin, dated c.1000–1050; and there is a copy made at Worcester between about 1050 and 1075.82 Without Lantfred’s text, it would be hard to guess at the full vibrancy of Swithun’s cult in the 970s. Apart from his collection, all we have concerning Swithun from this ten-year period is an enigmatic and unlabeled image in the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, a set of benedictions that briefly mention Swithun’s abundant miracles in the same manuscript, and recently discovered archaeological evidence indicating a rebuilding of the Old Minster around this time.83
“It was in no small measure a result of Lantfred’s eloquent advocacy of St. Swithun,” Lapidge writes, “that he quickly became established in the vanguard of Anglo-Saxon saints.”84 Surely, though, it was not Lantfred’s eloquence that placed Swithun in this vanguard, but the volatile oral spread of stories of his miracles and the making of more and more. By the time Lantfred began collecting miracle stories, Swithun’s cult had already reached far more locales outside of Winchester than his text ever would. Lantfred’s essential motive for miracle collecting—I want this cult and these stories to be remembered, “so that such great favours may not lie hidden from succeeding generations”—would be articulated again and again by later miracle collectors in England. It is a less ambitious and less political motive than scholars tend to want to read into miracle collections, but it is precisely what Lantfred’s text accomplished, both in the medieval period and up to the present day.
Lantfred’s collection, in sum, appears to be the result of a fortunate and unusual conjunction of circumstances. Here was a Frankish visitor whose home monastery was a traditional center for miracle collecting, a gifted writer coming upon a cult that astounded him, a foreigner who developed a friendship with and appreciated the stories of the prickly sacrist at Winchester. Lantfred’s initial trip to England likely had nothing to do with Swithun. We should not imagine that Lantfred’s sole business in England was miracle collecting, nor that he came to England with the intent of creating such a text. Instead, he seems to have been inspired to write by the contemporary cult, whenever he first came upon it. It was an extremely unusual project for someone residing in late tenth-century England. Lantfred’s efforts were respected, considering Wulfstan’s pains to versify the collection and Ælfric’s to abbreviate and to translate it, but his example seems to have done little to inspire more miracle collecting in England. After Lantfred finished his collection, new English cults appeared (Dunstan’s at Canterbury seems to have been particularly strong), other cults faded, and still others, including Swithun’s, rolled on, all with minimal or no written record of the miracle stories being created and exchanged.85 It would be a full century before another writer—a foreigner, again—would think it important to preserve miracle stories about English saints in texts.
CHAPTER FOUR
Fruitful in the House of the Lord: The Early Miracle Collections of Goscelin of St.-Bertin
Though they lived a century apart, the careers and interests of Goscelin of St.-Bertin (d. after 1107) and Lantfred of Fleury (fl. 970s) bear close comparison. Both were born and spent their childhoods outside of England—Lantfred in west Frankia, Goscelin in Flanders. Both were members of large and influential Benedictine abbeys in their home regions. After coming to England, both spent their time visiting and living among Benedictine monks. Both were highly accomplished writers with a particular interest in miracle stories and miracle collecting. Both wrote about English saints for whom there was little or no previous written commemoration, and both filled their miracle collections principally with in-house stories told by their Benedictine hosts. But whereas Lantfred appears to have written just one collection, Goscelin wrote many. He never seems to have gone home again after leaving St.-Bertin as an adolescent in the early 1060s. After the death of his patron in 1078, he spent much of his life moving from monastery to monastery. In the course of these travels, Goscelin produced so much hagiography that his contemporary, William of Malmesbury, wrote:“in the celebration of the English saints he was second to none since Bede.”1
Unlike Lantfred, Goscelin was determined to write accounts of the lives of saints, even in the face of a severe paucity of information. But he almost always gave equal or more room in his texts to stories of saints’ actions after their deaths. Miracle stories most captured his imagination: as Rosalind Love writes, Goscelin “is at his best and most lively as a narrator of the miraculous in the lives of ordinary mortals, of little vignettes full of circumstantial detail.”2 Hagiographic works securely attributed to Goscelin include texts about Wulfsige at Sherborne, Edith at Wilton, Kenelm at Winchcombe, Ivo at Ramsey, Hildelitha, Ethelburga, and Wulfhilda at Barking, Seaxburg, Eormenhild, and Withburh at Ely, Wærburh at Chester, and Augustine, Mildreth, and numerous early bishops (Laurence, Mellitus, Justus, etc.) at St. Augustine’s.3 Excepting only the minor saints connected to Ely and some of the lesser early bishops at St. Augustine’s, Goscelin collected posthumous miracles for all of these saints. These were not short texts. Goscelin’s account of Ivo’s miracles runs over thirty chapters. His miracle collection for Augustine stretches over fifty chapters, so long that he himself made an abbreviation of the text for easier circulation.4 In the case of Kenelm and Wulfsige, Goscelin devotes more space to the saints’ posthumous histories than their lives. Some of Goscelin’s most ambitious works were those concerning the translations of Edith, Augustine, and Mildreth; these texts too are largely made up of stories of posthumous miracles.
In the early part of his career, Goscelin was quite alone in his interest in preserving miracle stories. The few other hagiographers active in England in the first decades after the Norman Conquest cared little for miracle collecting: the anonymous authors of the Life of Edward the Confessor, the Life of Rumwold, and the Life of Erkenwald mention that their saints were performing posthumous miracles but describe none in detail.5 The lack of interest in miracle collecting is especially striking in the case of Folcard, who, like Goscelin, was a monk of St.-Bertin resident in England. Folcard wrote a Life of John of Beverley sometime in the 1060s. He states at the conclusion of the Life that “through [John’s] merits, cripples were cured, demons were banished, the blind were made to see, the deaf were made to hear,” but he did not make the effort to tell a single story.6 Miracle collecting only began to gain in popularity in England in the 1090s—in large part, as I will argue in the next chapter, because of Goscelin’s own example, reputation, and peripatetic labors.
In this chapter, I will examine Goscelin’s first three compositions concerning the lives and miracles of English saints: the Life of Wulfsige, the Life and Translation of Edith, and the Life and Miracles of Kenelm. These texts all appear to be products of the late 1070s and early 1080s.7 This early corpus is particularly revealing of Goscelin’s approach to miracle collecting, an approach that would serve as a model for the first native English collectors in addition to Goscelin’s own prolific later work. In making these texts, Goscelin listened to the same sorts of people, selected the same sorts of stories, and organized his material in very similar ways. Goscelin’s hagiographies are almost always read as serving the political interests of local monastic houses, but while the monks and nuns who told Goscelin stories about Wulfsige, Edith, and Kenelm no doubt valued his writings, these texts appear to have been stimulated and guided much more by Goscelin’s own interests, needs, and literary ambitions than by theirs. Though these texts were compiled just a decade or so after the Norman Conquest, Goscelin says nothing about this event and exhibits no concern about Norman skepticism about English saints. What worried him more, it seems, was Norman skepticism about him. The late 1070s and early 1080s were a trying time for Goscelin. His long-term patron died in 1078, he was frustrated with his own lack of literary output, he was deeply grieved by the departure of a young nun of Wilton whom he loved dearly, and he was being forced out of