Wonderful to Relate. Rachel Koopmans
miracles among the laity, of such fascination for Lantfred, held little appeal for Goscelin. He tells few of these stories, and what he does tell he tends to compress.31 The more recent the story, in fact, the less Goscelin seemed to feel it needed elaboration or record. After describing, rapidly, a set of Edith’s recent miracles among the laity, he writes, “why should more of these miracles be recounted which are so well-known and frequently perceived by the eyes, that they may be known more certainly by eyewitness experience than by written testimony? There is no need to relate more of these revelations which are so frequent.”32
What Goscelin saw a need for, instead, was a written reconstruction of the whole history of a saint and his or her cult. For Goscelin, contemporary miracles were an endpoint, a way to wrap up the overall narrative rather than the center of attention. The Life and Miracles of Kenelm, the Life of Wulfsige, and the Life and Translation of Edith are balanced, carefully conceived surveys that encompass the saints’ lives, deaths, burials, translations, and past and present miracles.33 The three texts have a remarkably similar structure despite their differing titles and subjects. Of the thirty chapters in the Life and Miracles of Kenelm, Goscelin devotes six to Kenelm’s life (cc. 1–6), two to Kenelm’s death (cc. 7–8), eight to the discovery and translation of Kenelm’s relics to Winchcombe and accompanying miracles (cc. 9–17), nine to miracles “from modern times” (cc. 18–26), and the final four (short) chapters to “recent miracles” (cc. 27–30). He applied equal weight to posthumous miracles in the Life of Wulfsige. After six chapters about Wulfsige’s life (cc. 1–6), he devoted three to his death and burial (cc. 6–9), five to miracles that started twelve years after Wulfsige’s death (cc. 10–14), six to miracles from “modern times” (cc. 15–20), and then four to contemporary miracles (cc. 21–24). Though the Life and Translation of Edith is a much longer and more prettified text, Goscelin measures out Edith’s story in roughly similar proportions. After twenty-seven lengthy chapters concerning Edith’s life, death, and burial and immediate post-burial miracles, Goscelin dedicates a second book entirely to posthumous events, starting with Edith’s translation in the late tenth century (cc. 1–2), then digressing into a mini-vita and miracle collection for Wulfthryth, Edith’s mother (cc. 3–7, life and death; cc. 8–11, miracles), and finally eleven chapters concerning Edith’s miracles from the age of Cnut to the present day (cc. 12–22).34
Goscelin seems to have been quite conscientious about listing the written sources he was able to find concerning these saints—if any—in the preface or in the course of his text. These references to written sources were apparently meant to enhance the credibility of his texts, but he did not have much to report. He apparently found nothing from or about Wulfsige’s life except for two foundation charters issued in Wulfsige’s name.35 At the end the Life of Wulfsige, he mentions an account of Juthwara’s miracles that described a miracle during the time of Bishop Ælfwold (bishop of Sherborne after 1045 and until at least 1062), a text unfortunately otherwise unknown.36 For Edith, he seems to have had very little in writing. All he claimed to have was an Old English account of a miracle from the time of Abbess Brihtgifu (c.1040–65).37 The sources were a little richer for Kenelm, at least for his vita: he claims to have had a letter about Kenelm’s martyrdom (supposedly sent from heaven), some writings from a certain Wulfwine, and a song and other material in Old English.38
This fluky little handful of written sources could not have been much help in constructing the broad histories Goscelin aimed to write. His material came instead from long soaking in the conversations of the communities of Sherborne, Wilton, and Winchcombe. Goscelin writes in the preface that he had learned about Wulfsige “long ago … from the present brothers, who like thirsty sucklings eagerly drank in these stories from their predecessors.”39 Goscelin, aptly described as a thirsty suckling himself, could have been listening to stories from the Sherborne monks for fifteen or more years before he completed this text. At Wilton, Goscelin heard stories about Edith from the abbess and the nuns, both “the things which they saw with their own eyes,” and “those things which they heard from the venerable senior nuns, who both saw the holy virgin herself and devotedly obeyed her.”40 Goscelin does not provide such a direct statement about hearing stories from the brothers at Winchcombe, but many of the stories he tells about Kenelm show clear signs of having come from them: in a chapter about Kenelm healing a mute man, for instance, Goscelin describes how the man was “restored to speech in the sight of the aforenamed abbot and the brothers and the assembled crowds.”41
Thus, though Goscelin did not dig into contemporary cults the way Lantfred had, his texts are still almost wholly comprised of stories being told at the time. No single informant stands out in any of Goscelin’s texts the way Eadsige does in Lantfred’s, but there was a type of conversation partner he sought out: elderly monks and nuns, people who could explain why things looked the way they did in their churches and tell stories about the miracles that had happened in their youth, people who were in a chain of testimony stretching back, in the case of Wulfsige and Edith, even to the living presence of the saints themselves. Goscelin talks about hearing the stories of Ælfmær, for instance, a monk who he says “was with [Wulfsige] himself not only during his life but also as he lay dying.”42 Counting from the time Wulfsige died and when Goscelin arrived in England, Ælfmær must have been in his seventies, at least, when the young Goscelin first met him. Bishop Herman, Goscelin’s own elderly patron, was a source for a story about one of Edith’s miracles.43 In the Translation of Edith, Goscelin describes a miracle of Wulfthryth experienced by “a sister, who is still alive under the nursing of the younger nuns”; he also discusses the story of a nun who was healed by Edith in her infancy and was “still surviving” in Goscelin’s day.44 Queen Eadgyth, one of Goscelin’s conversation partners for the composition of the Life and Miracles of Kenelm, must also have been elderly by the time he spoke to her. She died in 1075.45 Goscelin did interact with younger people. In his Translation of Edith, for instance, he writes about a nun named Ealdgyth, “still in the springtime of her youth,” who was “grumbling to us” about the loss of some possessions of the nunnery.46 There was also, of course, Eve, though with her Goscelin seems to have done more talking than listening. In general, though, Goscelin seems to have sought out old stories from older informants when he was collecting stories for his texts.
From his conversation partners at Sherborne, Wilton, and Winchcombe, Goscelin heard hand-me-down stories about the saints’ lives, deaths, and burials. He heard and recorded stories of all sorts of miracles—about fetters bursting and the healing of many kinds of illnesses, but also stories about lawsuits, property, and punishments for those who failed to observe feast days; stories about translations, kingly gifts, and patronage; stories that explained how certain objects came to be hanging up near shrines; stories about former abbots, recently dead monks, fellow nuns, relatives outside of the monastery, and lay visitors from near at hand and far away. Notably, Goscelin does not appear to have tried to track down or speak to any lay supplicants. Almost all of the miracles involving the laity in Goscelin’s texts closely involve someone in the monastic house, such as the affecting story of how Abbot Godwin of Winchcombe rubbed wax into the sores of a man whose stomach had been tightly bound in chains, a story that was still remembered twenty-odd years later when Goscelin came to Winchcombe.47 Some of the miracles about lay people in these three texts concern blood relatives of the monks and nuns, such as the story of the evildoings of a certain Brihtric, the kinsman of a nun at Wilton; the cure of crippled man “connected by kinship” to the abbess of Wilton; and the mother of a monk at Sherborne cured by the water of Wulfsige and Juthwara.48
To all appearances, Goscelin did his story collecting in-house. That, and Goscelin’s decision not to bother much with the swirl of current cults, made his collecting task easier, in certain ways, than Lantfred’s. But Goscelin was determined, in a way Lantfred was not, to arrange the stories he heard into a chronology. Whereas Lantfred had not worried about chronology after the first three chapters of his collection, Goscelin wanted to put the stories remembered and treasured by the monks or nuns about their saints in their proper order. This was difficult. Goscelin might ask, for instance, whether anyone knew the story behind the distaff and spindles hanging up over Wulfsige’s shrine.49