Wonderful to Relate. Rachel Koopmans
late medieval period. Chaucer’s description of his pilgrims traveling to Canterbury to seek the saint “that hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke,” is just one of the many indications that cults themselves did not change greatly in form from the high to the late medieval period. But however wonderful these new miracle stories might have been, few late medieval monks or canons were struck by a desire to relate them in writing. We are left with efforts of their high medieval brethren. Their collections have been praised and explored as “remarkably rich portrayals of English society in the twelfth century,”12 but they testify most of all to a passion for collecting miracle stories that lasted well over a century, a passion that caught up both monks and miracle stories in ways not seen before or since.
CHAPTER ONE
Narrating the Saint’s Works: Conversations, Personal Stories, and the Making of Cults
In the early 1170s, a judge in Bedford sentenced Eilward of Westoning to blinding and castration for petty thievery. Eilward, a pauper, was duly blinded—a jailor stabbed his eyes with a knife—and castrated. Some days later, however, after asking Thomas Becket for help, Eilward discovered that he could see again. Benedict of Peterborough, one of the two monks at Canterbury who recorded this story in a miracle collection, describes how people came to see Eilward in Bedford and hear his tale: “Word of this went out among the vicinity, and the new thing attracted no small multitude of people.”1 As Eilward traveled to Canterbury to give thanks at Becket’s tomb, he told his story to crowds along the road, a scene later pictured in an early thirteenth-century glass panel in Canterbury Cathedral (Figure 1). The original inscription to this panel read, “The people stand by as he narrates the mighty works of the saint” (ASTAT NARRANTI POPULUS MAGNALIA SANCTI).2 Eilward’s story caused such a buzz and was picked up and retold so often that it beat him to Canterbury. The Christ Church monks, Benedict comments, had heard about Eilward’s miracle from many others before he arrived.3
While the extent of the oral circulation of Eilward’s story was clearly extraordinary, the references to conversation, speech, and oral storytelling in the written accounts of his miracle are not. Medieval miracle collections are full of such references: as John McNamara has pointed out, the analysis of hagiographic texts often “reveals surprising amounts of information about the tellings of these legends in their own contexts.”4 Simon Yarrow writes of how “miracle collections are packed with people in conversation,” and he does not exaggerate.5 For example, in a collection of the miracles of Modwenna, Geoffrey of Burton describes how Abbot Nigel brought a certain Godric, who had accidentally swallowed a pin-brooch and nearly died as a result, to Queen Matilda, “who loved to hear about the miracles of the saints. He showed the man to her and told the story of what had happened to him, also recounting many other occasions on which the virgin Modwenna had declared through miracles that she was in heaven with the Lord.”6 In his collection of the miracles of Edmund of Bury, Osbert of Clare recounts how a paralyzed man healed by Edmund told his story to Tolinus, the sacrist of Bury, who told Abbot Baldwin, who called all the monks together, along with some lay people, and had the healed man stand in the middle of them and retell his story.7 An anonymous clerk of Beverley, whose collection of the miracles of John of Beverley is particularly rich with oral references, concludes a story about a deaf-mute by describing how “as a schoolboy I saw this elderly man … and I knew him very well … with the younger boys sitting or standing around, he used to tell how the Lord, through St. John, gave hearing and speech to him.”8 This same clerk recounts in another chapter how his parents “asked me if I knew the crippled girl who was accustomed to go begging from door to door. When I replied that I did not know her at all, they were amazed at this when she [and her miracle] were very well known by very many men and women.”9
Figure 1. Eilward of Westoning tells his story. Canterbury Cathedral, Trinity Chapel Ambulatory Window n.III (16). Author’s photograph used with the kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral.
In this chapter and the next, I consider the dimensions and dynamics of what R. W. Southern dubbed the “chattering atmosphere” behind the texts of miracle collections.10 Though questions about orality have engaged scholars of the medieval past for some time, little close attention has thus far been focused on the oral creation and circulation of miracle stories. As Catherine Cubitt has noted, “historians have tended to focus upon questions of orality and literacy in governmental administration and legal dealings, while amongst literary scholars, the most pressing questions have concerned the composition of Old English poetry and the nature of heroic verse.”11 Most studies of oral storytelling in a hagiographic context, including Cubitt’s own, are focused on stories with folkloric motifs: a holy man throwing a key in a river only to recover it later in the stomach of a fish, for instance, or a wolf guarding the decapitated head of a holy king, rather than a story like that of Eilward of Westoning’s healing.12 Brian Patrick McGuire, who has examined the “oral sources” of Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum, a mammoth early thirteenth-century miracle collection, is one of the few to attempt to say something specific about the speakers behind collections of posthumous miracles. McGuire catalogues the different types of people who told Caesarius miracle stories, finding that he heard stories from Cistercian monks from his own house, Cistercian monks from other houses, abbots, Benedictine monks, laybrothers, secular canons, priests, nuns, and the laity.13 McGuire demonstrates in the course of this study, moreover, that Caesarius derived 95 percent of his stories from oral sources, as opposed to just 5 percent from written sources.14 The two massive Christ Church collections for Thomas Becket, the closest comparative example to the Dialogus among the collections produced in high medieval England, show very similar proportions of oral vs. written sources, about 94 to 6 percent.15 Most shorter collections show no evidence of the use of written sources whatsoever. The stories in the collections of Geoffrey of Burton, Osbert of Clare, and the anonymous clerk at Beverley mentioned above appear to have been derived 100 percent from oral sources.16
It is, of course, impossible to extract the original oral stories from the written collections, but this should not deter us from exploring and taking account of the many references to speech and conversation in the texts. Research concerning “conversational stories” and “conversational analysis” has burgeoned in recent years in sociology, linguistics, and other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. This work provides a very valuable resource for historians interested in texts like miracle collections, and I draw on it frequently in this chapter and the next.17 In the first part of this chapter, I suggest that the principal oral narrative form behind posthumous miracle collections was what researchers term the “personal story.” This identification is important because it can help us block out basic answers to questions such as how many stories might have been available to collectors, who would have created and told such stories, and how long such stories likely remained in oral circulation. In the second part of the chapter, I take something of a social scientist approach myself, and focus my attention on one particularly illuminating story—the miracle of a knight of Thanet as retold by Osbern of Canterbury in a collection composed in the early 1090s. I use this narrative as a means to draw out the essential dynamics of personal miracle stories and to consider what kinds of things were likely lost in Osbern’s textual rendering of his conversation with the knight. Though most particulars about the oral creation and exchange of the stories preserved in medieval miracle collections are forever beyond our grasp, it is vital to keep in mind the original complexity and emotional force of these stories—otherwise, we can never come to grips with what it meant to be a medieval miracle collector. At the close of the chapter, I argue that these conversational narratives were the lifeblood of cults.
The Volume, Tellers, and Longevity of Personal Miracle Stories
When reflecting on the oral exchange of miracle stories, medievalists tend to think first in