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CHAPTER TWO

To Experience What I Have Heard: Plotlines and Patterning of Oral Miracle Stories

Readers have long been struck by the similarities of stories preserved in miracle collections. The late Victorian editors of the miracle collection of William of Norwich, for instance, commented that “even in their nauseous details [William’s miracles] all have a strong family likeness to one another.”¹ Scholars today use less florid language but often make the same observation, describing medieval miracle collections as “extraordinarily repetitive,” “stereotyped,” “highly conventionalized,” and “schematized and topoiridden.”² The types or clusters of certain kinds of stories in miracle collections have especially attracted attention. It is a rare collection that does not include a story about a blind person gaining sight or a paralyzed person regaining movement. Nor can one read many collections without running across stories about liberated prisoners, sailors spared from shipwreck, lepers being healed, evil people being punished, and so on.³

Medievalists have formulated an explanation for this clustering, an explanation that itself seems to be repeated and rehearsed in analysis after analysis. The idea is that early Christian and early medieval miracle collections were normative for the genre. These early texts set up the topoi or types of stories that later collectors would work to include and imitate in their own creations. Hedwig Röckelien argues, for instance, that the miracle narratives in Augustine’s City of God “already contain the most important of the motifs and types that are to be found in the later miracle stories in stereotypical repetition.”⁴ Marcus Bull speaks of an “unofficial but widely recognized typological ‘canon’” that “governed the selection and presentation of mainstream miracles.” He notes that “in addition to biblical precedents, early writers such as St. Augustine, Sulpicius Severus, Pope Gregory the Great, Gregory of Tours and Bede had cumulatively created a body of language and imagery that was highly influential.”⁵ The writing of miracle collections is often described as a kind of clash, with the accounts of pilgrims colliding with and being transformed by the typological preoccupations and didactic goals of the writers. Thomas Head speaks of two movements in the writing process: “from the folkloric culture of the layman to the clerical culture of the monk, and from the reality of the event to the topoi of the text.”⁶ Gabriella Signori expressively refers to this as a “cooking” process in a “miracle kitchen,” in which the “raw” oral account is “cooked” to the clerical norms of the writer.⁷

In its extreme forms, this assumption that miracle collectors were working to topoi can lead to the suggestion that certain stories in collections were invented altogether. This argument has been applied to the cluster of stories concerning lawsuits in Osbern of Canterbury’s collection of the miracles of Dunstan, written in the early 1090s. The knight of Thanet’s story, discussed at length in Chapter 1, is one of three stories of legal disputes in Osbern’s collection. The other two concern Archbishop Lanfranc’s dispute with Odo of Bayeux (William the Conqueror’s half-brother), and Osbern’s own dispute with unnamed opponents.⁸ In all three stories, the men pray to Dunstan to help, have an encouraging vision, and win their legal case. Jay Rubenstein uses the similarities between these stories to dismiss the one about Lanfranc. He argues that the stories about Osbern and about the knight of Thanet demonstrate that “the triumph of a saint in a legal proceeding is a topos of the Dunstan cult.”⁹ He then suggests that “Osbern knew of Dunstan’s association with miraculous legal interventions and wished to connect the saint with the most famous legal victory in the life of the incomparabilis Lanfranc.” So, then, Osbern had no “factual basis” for the story: it “most likely … originated in Osbern’s imagination.”¹⁰

It could be that Osbern imagined Lanfranc’s resort to Dunstan. Shelving the story about Lanfranc as the repetition of a “topos,” though, as if the fact that this story sounds similar to others automatically makes it less credible, is problematic. In general, topoi arguments have not served the study of miracle collections well. Vitae writers, particularly in the early medieval period, often did imitate each other’s work very closely, and this has attuned scholars to be highly sensitive to the ways hagiographers could model their texts on others. Miracle collectors did, of course, “cook” their books, choosing the stories they wanted and writing them as they pleased, even inventing stories if they really thought it necessary. But the stories they heard were not raw. Narrative imitation occurs on an oral level, too, and the personal miracle stories the collectors heard were already modeled after and shaped by others in oral circulation.

In this chapter, I will suggest that most of the clustering of similar stories now to be seen in miracle collections resulted from oral rather than textual processes. People aimed, as Osbern’s knight of Thanet put it, “to know by experience what I have heard”: they wanted to live out for themselves the miracle stories they knew.¹¹ Circulating stories functioned as blueprints for the active creation and telling of new ones, a process that tended to create clusters of like-sounding narratives. While we cannot reenter that original oral world in any detail, thinking about oral patterning and the power of plotlines helps make sense of many of the similarities one sees in medieval miracle collections.¹² I will begin with the conception and communication of the miracle plotline itself.

The Miracle Plotline and Patterns of the Divine

One reason the stories in miracle collections sound so similar is that they constantly repeat a single plotline. The knight, Osbern, and Lanfranc all start off in trouble and end up victorious because of Dunstan’s aid. Almost every story in medieval miracle collections follows the same problem to solution trajectory. The reason for the solution is always the same too: some form of divine intervention. The miracle plotline—problem, divine intervention, solution—can accommodate an enormous variety of human experience, and the range of stories in miracle collections is often broader than people realize, but still, these stories all have the same basic components lined up in the same general way.¹³

Explaining human experience by means of a miracle was not, of course, a medieval invention. The miracle is an extremely ancient story line, present in the earliest known texts. Somebody at some point must have first had the idea of reading past experience in this way—interpreting positive change as the result of divine intervention—but this happened such a long time ago that we may consider the idea to be, in human terms, timeless. Osbern and the religious elite did not have to work to communicate the elemental miracle plotline to people like the knight of Thanet. Any member of medieval society would have known it from a young age. Indeed, it is so ubiquitous in human conversation that, to this day, even in secular societies, it seems just to be known, not heard or learned.¹⁴

The miracle plotline is an extraordinarily powerful cultural concept. The knowledge of this plotline could shape not just how a knight of Thanet might interpret his past, but also what he did in the present and what he hoped for the future. It appears that the vast majority of the miracle stories recounted in medieval collections were created by people who consciously and proactively attempted to acquire miraculous solutions to their problems and make the miracle plotline their own. Osbern’s account of the knight of Thanet’s story suggests how this works. At the outset, the knight of Thanet has a problem: the abbot of St. Augustine’s has seized his inheritance. The knight had a range of options for solving this problem, options suggested by what worked for others in similar situations. He could prepare a fine speech for his defense, bribe the abbot, hope for the best and trust in the workings of the law, and so on. As the knight tried to decide what to do, he remembered how Osbern “frequently used to extol father Dunstan…. Now, I said to myself, I have the chance to know by experience what I have heard.” Because of Osbern’s stories, the knight prayed for Dunstan’s help. If the knight had then lost his case, if this course of action had failed to resolve his problem, there would have been no miracle. But since the knight was successful, he too had a story to tell of Dunstan’s intervention. If others heard the knight’s story and decided to try out its blueprint as well, still more analogous stories could be produced.¹⁵

One can begin to see how and why personal miracle stories took on the coloring of others in circulation. The knight’s story, like those Osbern was telling him, named Dunstan as the intervening divine figure. The medieval Christian idea that dead humans of special qualities could act in the present world was conceived many centuries before the knight or Osbern was born, and it appears to have been patterned on other, earlier religious traditions.¹⁶ Still, what one might call the Christian saint metanarrative was a specific cultural conception of the miracle plotline, one that had not always been present in western Europe, much less in other societies. Throughout the medieval period this metanarrative underwent some slow shifts, but remained relatively stable overall: the intervening divine figure at the center of most medieval personal miracle stories was a saint.

Underneath the umbrella of this defining metanarrative, the discourse was in constant flux, with specific saintly figures going in and out of conversational currency at different times and places. People seeking saintly help usually had many options to choose from. The knight of Thanet need not have selected Dunstan. How about Mildred, the saint associated with Thanet who had been translated to St. Augustine’s in the early eleventh century? How about Cuthbert, Edmund, or Æthelthryth, the famed English saints? Or maybe a non-English saint, St. Denis or St. James? Or perhaps someone new, as yet untried? The strength of a saint’s cult depended on the collective weight of such individual decisions. Sometimes, as with the many thousands of people appealing to Thomas Becket in the late twelfth century, a saint new on the scene could win big in the saintly sweepstakes, his or her stories sweeping through conversational networks and drowning out those of other saints. Local favorites might be appealed to for years, the successes generating a stream of stories for decades or centuries. In other cases, a spring of stories concerning a particular saint might well up for a year or two and then disappear entirely. Some saints might be favored only in the stories of a single region while others were talked about far and wide.

All this depended on which stories were in current circulation, which stories individuals heard and chose to imitate, and which of those narrative trials were successful. A single story might open up a fountainhead of narrative creation, while other stories with seemingly equal potential might never have any progeny at all. There must have been a few people willing to try out a new possibility before anyone else did, a few unwilling to experiment at all, and a lot in the middle, like the knight of Thanet, who turned to the narratives of friends and neighbors for possible solutions. Could the knight of Thanet have suffered a failure with another saint before he tried out Osbern’s favorite? Had he ever appealed to a Christ Church saint before? Did Osbern’s stories drown out those of someone else close to the knight? As we rarely know anything about the context of such individual decisions or the constellation of circulating narratives, it is often extremely difficult to understand, from any analytical perspective, why some saints were at the center of so many miracle stories and others, seemingly as attractive, were not.

We will never be able to reconstruct all the specific ways in which the stories the knight of Thanet had heard inspired his own course of action, or the stories he told about himself, or the actions others took—much less how this worked for all the hundreds of other stories in high medieval miracle collections. Nevertheless, what is clear is that though the knight’s story was unique to him, it was blueprinted on others he had heard before. He did not invent the underlying plotline of his story or the culturally specific form of that plotline, the Christian saint metanarrative. He did not invent the idea of appealing to Dunstan as a divine figure. Nor did the blueprinting process stop there. Stories in circulation suggested not just who to ask for help, but also how that asking should be done.

Patterns of Invocations

Once the knight of Thanet decided that Dunstan was his saint of choice, he kneeled and prayed. Osbern writes that he said: “God of father Dunstan, favor my part today.” Invocations form a part of nearly all stories in high medieval miracle collections, usually appearing in the point of the story after the problem is described and before the solution takes shape. In some stories a saint is unintentionally invoked, as when a person insults a saint and provokes divine punishment. In cases in which an individual is too ill or otherwise unable to ask for help, the invocation might be done by friends or relatives. Most of the stories, though, follow a predictable pattern: the saint acts after aid is specifically requested by the person in need.

The repetitiveness of this narrative arc and the similarity of many of the invocations are another reason why accounts of personal miracles can sound so much the same. The knight was obviously not the first to think of praying for help. A verbal request is the most ancient and most widespread mode of divine invocation. Osbern and Lanfranc also chose to pray for Dunstan’s help, as did other people in the stories of Osbern’s collection, as did many other people in many other societies with many other deities. Still, there was much that was culturally specific even about prayers designed to invoke the divine: how to arrange one’s body, for example (the knight knelt), and especially what kinds of words should be said. The knight’s prayer, carefully phrased to invoke God through Dunstan rather than Dunstan himself, looks suspiciously like Osbern’s own tweaking. Was the knight really so aware that God, not Dunstan, should be considered the ultimate source for any help he received?

Perhaps he was. Perhaps those conversations with Osbern shaped the words the knight said in just this way. Whether or not, the knight must have known that he could try to get Dunstan’s attention by other means. Prayers were just one option. The knight had almost certainly heard stories in which saints were stimulated to action by a person’s contact with a relic, by entry into sanctified space, or by the presentation of a gift. These were also very old ideas, and they too took on a variety of culturally specific forms depending on the kinds of stories being exchanged in a particular time and place. Stories in the Becket collections, for instance, describe people invoking Becket’s aid by bending a coin over an ill person or by taking measurements of a person’s body and making a candle to the length. The Becket collectors mention these gift-giving practices without comment, as if they had always been used to invoke saintly aid in Canterbury, but coin bending is not mentioned in stories collected by Osbern or other Anglo-Norman collectors. It is possible that they were not part of their conversational milieu.¹⁷

Someone must have had the initial idea of bending a coin over an ill person, just as someone had to have been the first to think of asking the dead Dunstan for help. How a new cluster of stories started to coalesce is not usually easy to perceive in our sources, but Benedict of Peterborough’s collection provides a remarkable glimpse into the first clustering of stories describing the use of the “Canterbury Water,” or just the “Water”: a mixture of water and Thomas Becket’s blood people drank in hopes of healing.¹⁸ When Becket was murdered in December 1170, he lay for some time on the floor of the cathedral in his own blood. People from Canterbury dipped bits of cloth and clothing into this blood. Later, when the monks came to tend to Becket’s body, they gathered the remaining blood, apparently into some kind of vessel. Drinking water that had come in contact with a saint’s relic or tomb was a time-honored practice.¹⁹ But drinking blood was different. As Benedict later commented, the monks were fearful of endorsing this idea, “and with no wonder, for it was an unusual thing for people to drink human blood.”²⁰ The monks later diluted the blood partly to prolong its use but also, in Benedict’s words, “lest the taste or color of blood produce horror in the drinker.”²¹ A bigger problem than the disgust factor, though, was how drinking Becket’s blood mirrored the Eucharistic ritual. When Christ’s blood was drunk in liturgical celebrations, was it right to experiment with drinking Becket’s blood?

A Canterbury citizen was probably the first person who decided that it was. At the close of his vita for Becket, William FitzStephen writes that some hours after the murder a Canterbury man, who had acquired a cloth stained with Becket’s blood, washed the cloth, gave the water to his paralyzed wife to drink, and cured her.²² Whether or not FitzStephen got this right, it does seem highly likely that it was a Canterbury citizen who took this first step rather than the Christ Church monks themselves. But though the monks did not start the practice, they did have to decide for themselves whether they would participate. When people like Atheldrida, a Canterbury woman suffering from fevers, “asked the custodian monk of the tomb if she might drink of the martyr’s blood,”²³ what would they do? “This was not begun without great fear,” Benedict writes after telling of William of London’s cure, the blood miracle he claims to have been the first, “but seeing that it gave profit to the ill, our fear receded, little by little, and security came.”²⁴ Later Benedict again comments on the nervous tension this “experiment” [experimentum] produced: “although many had already experienced the efficacy of this medication, yet it was not given without fear to those seeking it.”²⁵

What eventually overcame all objections was that drinking Becket’s blood so often worked. “O marvelous water,” Benedict exclaims, “that not only quenches the thirst of drinkers, but also extinguishes pain! O marvelous water, that not only extinguishes pain, but also reduces swellings!”²⁶ Set as the invocation in untold numbers of stories, stories told and repeated in many different places, the use of the water was solidly established. In fact, in the second miracle collection for Thomas Becket, started by William of Canterbury in 1172, drinking the water is already mentioned as casually as any other invocation method, such as bending a coin, with no discussion of its development. William’s only comment concerns his awe at the fact that Thomas’s blood was a safer option than the Eucharist: you could eat and drink the Eucharist to your damnation, but even Becket’s enemies could seek healing through his blood.²⁷

The success of the blood and water mixture appears to have drowned out other incipient invocation strategies. In the early days of Becket’s cult in Exeter, a man had a vision in which he was told how to cure an outbreak of disease: boiled eggs were to be cut into quarters, Thomas’s name written on them, and then eaten.²⁸ Perhaps this inventive and apparently effective invocation practice was continued in the region, but it is never heard of again. In another story, told by Benedict, a London priest named Roger became ill with a fever, but did not have the water, nor the means to travel to Canterbury. Roger came up with the idea of sleeping in a place where he heard Thomas had once slept, and after he woke up healed, he had another idea. He collected some of the dust from that place, mixed it with water, and when he gave this mixture to others to drink (no doubt with a telling of his story), “he gave happiness to many ill people.”²⁹ Yet although Roger’s idea was an initial success, nothing more is heard about drinking dust-laden water in the rest of the Becket collections. Benedict decided to recount Roger’s narrative, he says, because it shows “how much virtue must be in his blood, when the dust from his bed is able to do such things.”³⁰

Once stories about drinking the water had ballooned to such a degree that they overrode all objections, what made them frightening at the beginning—their overtones of Eucharistic sacrifice—were their biggest asset, the blood overwhelming mere dust, and the narrative line linking into other strong currents at large in medieval culture.³¹ The proactive experimenting process that initiated these stories continued. In addition to drinking the water, people found successful resolutions when they tried sprinkling it on swellings or bathing suffering limbs with it. One woman even poured some of the water into a beer mash in the hopes of making it ferment. From the story, it worked wonderfully well.³²

In this manner, then, variations on the theme “I drank the water and Becket healed me” materialized and were repeated in many hundreds, even thousands, of personal stories circulating in the late twelfth century. New invocation strategies that appeared to work well could reproduce themselves in other stories as quickly as fruit flies, both within and across cults. Other new invocation strategies, such as quartering eggs, could die off entirely if conditions were not right for their increase. Invocation practices would have risen and fallen in conversational popularity in the same vacillating and often inexplicable manner as one sees with the figures of saints. Invocation strategies tied to specific saints, such as the Canterbury water and Becket, would rise and fall in rhythm with the saint’s own popularity, but most strategies, such as coin bending, or drinking something that had come in contact with a saint’s relics, did not depend for their continuance on a specific cult.

Success counted the most. Stories circulated, people based their attempts to resolve their own problems on what they had heard, successful experiments created new stories that reinvigorated the conversation, leading to more imitation and experimentation and still more new stories. This continuous process produced stories that could sound strikingly the same, even in terms of the types of problems being solved.

Patterns of Problems

In the abstract, one could ask a saint for help with anything. The variety of problems discussed in medieval miracle collections is often impressive. Unfermenting beer, a lost cheese, a dead goose, a cancerous toe: Becket helped with all these difficulties, and more. Still, when the stories in collections are totted up and categorized, it is clear that they do not represent the whole spectrum of human problems in equal proportions. In almost all rankings of the stories in medieval miracle collections, for instance, cures of blindness and of paralysis lead the lists.³³ Blindness and paralysis were no doubt more common then than they are today, but I doubt that these were the top two afflictions suffered by medieval people or that they appear in large numbers because the collectors were imitating exemplars. Rather, the high numbers are best understood as reflecting, though not with any precision, how often these particular problems were offered up for saintly aid and how frequently a solution was forthcoming.

Blindness and paralysis are problems very well suited for the miracle plotline. Both are severe and debilitating problems that, even for those not suffering them, induce a horrified awe: the lightless eyes, the groping hands, the useless limb, the frozen tongue. As appalling as they are, though, neither condition is usually fatal in itself, leaving a sufferer time to seek solutions. The causes of blindness and paralysis, as we now know, are manifold, including nutritional deficiencies, disease, shock, mental illness, and multiple kinds of trauma. We tend to think of them as permanent, lifelong conditions, but the experience can often be temporary, leaving room for hopeful experiments and dramatic recoveries.³⁴ For those who did experience a recovery from blindness or paralysis after invoking a saint, it must have been an exhilarating event. From darkness to light, from powerlessness to movement—the restoration of light and life would have been as amazing as the loss was terrifying. Here are stories to tell and to celebrate! Notably, too, blindness and paralysis are perhaps the easiest ailments to fake.³⁵ This potential for fakery must have driven up the numbers of these stories, but cannot alone account for such persistent clustering of blindness and paralysis stories in miracle collections. I suspect that most of the blindness and paralysis stories the collectors heard were heartfelt accounts of recoveries from frightening and incapacitating difficulties.

Looking closely at the other types of stories that cluster in miracle collections, it is striking how many of them are severe problems that have the potential for abrupt reversal. Drownings, for instance, are very well represented. The limp body drawn from the water: here again is a spectacular problem and, here again, if water is expelled from the lungs soon enough, there is a chance for quick and total recovery. What a great story. In fact, if you forgot to say a prayer or promise a gift in all the excitement, you might well think a saint must have helped anyway, so dramatic is that experience. It is also instructive to note what one does not find in collections. Some medieval people must have suffered serious burns, for example. There are numerous stories in miracle collections about fires dying out or fires moving in a different direction or fires not injuring a particular object, but I have seen none about burned people recovering from their injuries. Quick and total recovery from a bad burn does not happen today, and it apparently did not happen then either.

Ships about to sink, people chained and languishing in prison, the mad raving and thrashing, the sick in awful pain or delirious from fever: these are more of the daunting scenarios that are frequently described in miracle collections. The chief reason we see so many of these types of stories is that certain problems lent themselves to the perception of divine aid. Only a percentage of those asking for help would have recovered, of course, but these processes worked to create large clusters of like stories.

Once these clusters reached a certain density, moreover, another self-reinforcing cycle would have been activated. Large numbers of stories gave a reassuring cultural sanction to the appeal to divine aid for particular problems. If a woman who had heard many stories of blind people being miraculously healed became blind herself, she might well seek divine aid as her first course of action. She might even find it difficult to envision any another solution for her problem. As Elaine Showalter has noted in a similar context, “the human imagination is not infinite … we all live out the social stories of our time.”³⁶ In a conversational culture saturated with stories of blind people healed by saints, the majority of people becoming blind will seek such healing themselves, making it likely that a significant number of new stories will be produced along the same lines.³⁷

The numbers of stories concerning certain types of problems would have waxed and waned in different cultural circumstances and in different conversational circles. Not every society exploits all the possibilities afforded by the miracle plotline. One scenario likely to result in abrupt reversals but rarely encountered in medieval miracle collections is the person in desperate need of money or material help. Contemporary American religious culture produces masses of stories involving this scenario, and masses of books and speakers encouraging the creation of more. The bestseller The Prayer of Jabez, for instance, urges its readers to pray daily for God to “bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory.”³⁸ While there are clusters of stories concerning money in the Becket collections, they have a very different flavor. Benedict, for instance, tells a story about a shoemaker named Curbaran who finds a precious gold coin with Becket’s help. Curbaran, though, had not been praying for money. He had been praying daily for Becket’s soul (a mistake, Benedict comments, but never mind), and as a reward for his devotion Becket appeared to him in a vision and directed him to the hidden coin.³⁹ Even this is unusual: in most of the money miracles in the Becket collections, money is given to Thomas, not received from him.⁴⁰ There is simply not the proactive seeking after money or material objects familiar from today’s miracle stories. Medieval saints cure blindness, divert fires, revive the drowned, punish enemies, and so on. They rarely provide windfalls, apparently because they were not often asked for them.

Large clusters of stories about particular problems formed in part because certain problems were more likely to result in satisfying narratives than others, in part because people tend to imitate rather than innovate, and in part because of what people think to ask for at particular times. Nevertheless, in any categorization of stories in miracle collections, there is inevitably a sizable “other” category. If enough people kept knocking at the door of miraculous aid, even the most unlikely and difficult problems might be solved. In the early years of the Becket cult, it would appear that a significant proportion of all the many problems people experienced in England and in France were offered up to Becket for help. In these circumstances, numerous stories appeared of blind eyes seeing again, swellings reducing, scaly skin clearing, pregnant women surviving difficult childbirths—all the usual problems that suit the miracle plotline. But there were a few other highly unusual, lucky strikes too. There was the man digging into a hill who was buried alive, called for Becket’s aid, and survived in an air pocket until others heard him calling and dug him out; the man shot through the neck with an arrow who asked for Becket’s aid and recovered; and the man who had his eyes sliced by the judge’s knife, and yet, some days later after committing himself to Becket’s care, found he could see with one of them again.⁴¹ The collectors and people at the time were well aware that these stories were out of the ordinary run of miracles, and they were greatly celebrated.⁴²

Becket, invoked by thousands, got credit for more outlying stories than most, but in every collection there are stories that do not fit any of the usual clusters. Even stories concerning the most typical problems, moreover, were told by individuals who experienced unique circumstances and created stories that, for all their similar strands, were still unique. No matter how many stories of the blind seeing you might have heard, if your closest friend became blind and then could see again after a pilgrimage, the story would have a deep impact. The sameness that can be wearying when reading many miracle collections with their flattened and abbreviated accounts would have been much less pronounced in the oral climate in which each story was told by an individual and grew out of a unique personality. Osbern, the knight of Thanet, and Lanfranc all told stories about lawsuits, prayers, and Dunstan’s aid, but if we could hear them tell their stories, there surely would be no mistaking whose story was whose. What we might notice, though, was that the kinds of stories to be heard from men of such high status tended to be different, generally speaking, from those told by people lower in the social scale. An important kind of patterning and grouping of oral miracle stories was caused by social stratification. Status influenced how a person told a story, how listeners reacted to it, and what kind of story he or she was likely to produce.

Social Status and Patterns of Story Creation

Scholars have often pointed out that issues of social status must have come into play as wealthy monastic writers listened to the stories of illiterate peasants and decided how or whether to recount their stories, but few have considered how extensively social status could impact the making of stories in the first place.⁴³ Certain kinds of people tend to be associated with certain kinds of stories in medieval miracle collections. In his analysis of over 150 French collections from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Pierre-André Sigal uncovered some striking correlations. Women of the “popular classes” almost all told healing miracles: 90.1 percent of their stories concerned their bodies. Men of the popular classes told fewer healing miracles: 70.7 percent of their stories concerned healings, still a majority, but notably less than women of their same status. The percentage of healing miracles falls precipitously with the stories of the religious. Only 22.8 percent of their stories concerned their bodies. What they were talking about instead were their dreams: a whopping 44.6 percent, nearly half of their stories, concerned visions. In contrast, a tiny percentage, just 1.2 percent, of the popular classes told vision narratives.⁴⁴ What Sigal found is not unusual: similar proportions to these are evident in other categorizations of stories in medieval miracle collections.⁴⁵

Chances were, if you heard a poor woman tell a miracle story about herself, it would be about a healing; if you heard a wealthy religious man, it would not. It may well be that poor women became ill more frequently than wealthy and well-fed religious men, but that does not account for such a stark skewing of the percentages. To explain these differences, it is best to think first about issues of storytelling and authority. A healing almost always involves visual signs. Other people are aware when you get sick and when you get well: even if you want to, it is not easy to hide the evidence of illness. A vision, on the other hand, usually leaves no visible traces, nor is it a shared experience. You could have a vision every night and no one would be the wiser. Convincing listeners that you had a vision is significantly more difficult than convincing them you’ve been sick and healed. In the case of the knight of Thanet’s story, a listener would simply have to trust that the knight was not lying about his state of mind, his prayer, or his dream: there is nothing that he can point to in order to buttress his story. Fortunately for the knight, he was not in great need of a buttress. The knight’s social position as a high status male spoke for him, filling in and overriding any doubtful gaps.

Because of famous female visionaries like Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and Catherine of Siena, it can be hard to imagine that women had more difficulty than men telling personal stories of visions in the medieval climate, but miracle collections strongly suggest that this was so. Hildegard, Julian, and Catherine were exceptional. Poor women probably had as many dreams or experiences that they took as visions as anyone else in medieval society, but the general rule was they would have a harder time getting their stories of visions believed, particularly if they were talking to an elite man. Rules could be bent. William of Canterbury, for instance, tells a story about a young woman named Adelicia whose dreams he interpreted as visions even though her own parents viewed them as mere illusions.⁴⁶ For some, stories of visions could work to subvert and even overturn normal social and religious hierarchies: a laywoman named Godelief, for instance, claimed to have had visions from Thomas Becket that directed her to expose the faults of other people in her village.⁴⁷ But, in general, one’s gender, social status, and religious status had an influence on what one could or could not easily say. Even though he retold Godelief’s stories in his collection, William expressed hesitancy about them.⁴⁸ For every Adelicia who kept telling her stories despite her parents’ disapproval, there must have been other women who kept silent, lacking the brazenness needed to break free of the heavy crust of social expectations.

Self-censorship probably had as large a role as any external reproof in the social stratification of stories. Benedict writes about a layman named Adam who twice saw and heard a man speaking to him in his sleep but twice dismissed it all as a mere dream. It was only when a priest gave him the go-ahead that Adam felt comfortable interpreting his dreams as a vision.⁴⁹ Self-censorship could work for those higher up as well. Osbern tells a story about a rich man named Ceowulf who, although he was very ill, did not want to go to Dunstan’s memorial because he felt embarrassed at the prospect of the “company of the poor.” Finally Ceowulf swallows his pride, goes, and is healed, but afterward, when his friends comment how wonderful it is that God helps the powerful as well as the poor, Ceowulf replies: “Do you count me among the poor, since you say I was healed among them? It is not so, since although Dunstan was not there, he touched me.”⁵⁰

At the end of the story Ceowulf is punished for his pride. Still, this story helps to explain why the stories in miracle collections connected to high status men are less likely to be stories of healing. Recoveries from desperate illness always made good stories, and one certainly finds such stories about elite men in miracle collections—Osbern describes, for instance, how Archbishop Lanfranc was saved from a serious illness by Dunstan.⁵¹ But social factors pressed people into the creation of certain types of stories. It is not just that the elites, unlike the poor, were able to afford medical care and did not resort to the saints as soon or as often. This mattered, but running parallel was also an aversion to the “company of the poor,” a desire to have a story to tell with more cachet, more suited to one’s class, more like those one heard one’s fellows telling: stories of lawsuits won, enemies punished, visions seen, even hawks recovered.

The precise factors acting on individuals shifted depending on particular social constellations, circumstances, personalities, and audiences. It is now extremely difficult to see how this operated in all but the most general terms.⁵² Nevertheless, such factors must have worked not just in the types of stories people created but also in how they told their stories. There were all sorts of ways to make a story a little more flashy, to claim a bit more or tell it at more length, or to downgrade it, claiming less or leaving out parts that were more risky. The kind of adjustments people might make to their stories is suggested by an emendation Benedict made to the story of John, a servant, who fell into the Tweed River. Benedict writes that John, as he made for the shore, “thought that he was walking” on the water, but, in actuality, he was just swimming” [ambulare se aestimans, super aquas natabat].⁵³ How many other lower-class laymen might have saved Benedict the trouble of such a narrative demotion—and saved themselves from sneering or incredulous looks and questions—by toning and cutting down their stories themselves? How often did the collectors reject stories altogether that did not seem to them to befit the social position of their tellers?

Medieval miracle stories are often seen as the particular province of “the people,” especially peasants or the poor. Sometimes this sense of miracles being the religious expression of the lowest classes is taken to such an extent it seems as if being literate or wealthy must have put one at a disadvantage for creating miracle stories. But while the literate and the wealthy tended to tell different kinds of miracle stories about themselves than the poor, they certainly told them, and when they told them to a collector, they probably got to talk at more length than the poor. Of course, there could be exceptions. Benedict decided to give the story told by Eilward, the pauper who could see again after his judicial blinding, the longest treatment in his collection. In Eilward’s case, a fantastic story that excited Benedict and the other monks at Christ Church to no end, the normal rules were reversed. But, in general, those with more social authority were freer to tell lengthy, detailed, and vision-filled stories about themselves.

Conversational Currents and Cautions

The patterning processes discussed here are some of the key ways in which stories already in circulation and social conditions could shape the creation of new personal stories. When these factors worked together, they could create sets of strikingly similar narratives. The knight, Osbern, and Lanfranc all think to ask for help with their legal dispute from Dunstan and to invoke his aid with a prayer. Who did this first is now impossible to tell, but the conversational links between these three men almost certainly had an impact on the types of stories they individually produced. No doubt, too, it was not just the content of these stories but in the ways that they were told that the connections between these three men had an effect. In the same way that different peer groups, regions, or families have distinct ways of telling stories, so there must have been distinct patterns of vocabulary, speech rhythms, and imagery in the telling of miracle stories in different medieval communities, patterns also in a constant state of change as small innovations were picked up and imitated by others. The interaction likely between the knight, Osbern, and Lanfranc was at work on many different levels and between many different people in the oral world as a whole. Taken together, these currents of conversation made up a vast, dynamic, and multifaceted sea of narrative exchange that, though now essentially unmappable, deeply shaped how people created their own stories of divine intervention. Each person told his or her own story, but they all were patterned, some more, some less, on the stories already in circulation.

The oral realm of story creation and circulation must, then, constantly be considered when miracle collections are subjected to analysis. In this chapter I have surveyed how the stories in current circulation shaped how people created new ones: we must also consider, of course, what was likely to happen to a story as it was picked up and retold by new speakers. As they moved away from their creators, the sharp individual edges of stories were likely to be smoothed away, making stories sound even more similar to each other.⁵⁴ As memories became fuzzy, stories might well morph together or become more fantastic creations. The longer stories were in circulation, the more they were reshaped and reinvented in all the ways familiar to anyone who has played the game of whispering a story around a circle and hearing what the last person in line has to say. People could also, of course, simply invent stories about other people along the lines of old ones. The best storytellers were likely more guilty of this than anyone else. Miracle collectors, well aware of these problems, were often careful to get stories from their creators whenever possible.

Considering the power of these shaping processes from the moment of story creation on, we need to be cautious about drawing conclusions from miracle collections about the kinds of threats faced by medieval people. Miracle collections do not mirror all of the dangers or diseases of the medieval world, just the ones that the saints were thought to help with. Counting up the numbers of stories in collections in an attempt to rank the relative importance of this hazard or that illness invites serious miscalculation. At best, such counting across collections provides us with a very rough sense of how many miracle stories of a certain type were in circulation, quite different from what people found to be most or least troublesome in their lives.

We must also be careful when evaluating the ways in which types of miracle stories are connected with types of people or social groupings. These connections do not allow us to tap into raw human experience. A poor woman, for example, did not necessarily voice the most significant aspects of her life in a miracle story. Nor did a rich monk. Even before a collector determined how to shape the stories he heard, those stories were already shaped by the kinds of problems preferred by the miracle plotline, by other stories in circulation, by social expectations about the types of stories individuals should create, and by the motivations and personalities of the tellers and retellers of the stories.

Equally perilous is the temptation to use written miracle collections as a means to rank the relative strength of cults. One must always keep in mind that only a tiny percentage of the many stories created and exchanged in the oral world in the medieval period were ever collected in texts. These written texts give us only a snapshot of the kinds of stories being told about a certain saint at a certain time, and they are blurry snapshots at that. It would be nice to assume that most collections were compiled when a cult was at its all-time height, but we cannot. Cults went through short-and long-term fluctuations, and where a collection was compiled along a cult’s trajectory is often difficult to gauge. Moreover, while there must have been differences in the relative numbers of stories about particular saints at any given time, we cannot suppose that these differences are clearly reflected in our texts. Because one collection has twenty-five chapters and another has fifty, for instance, does not necessarily or even probably mean that the second saint’s cult was twice as big. The scale of production of stories in the oral world outrun the handwriting speed of the most energetic collectors. Twenty-five, fifty, one hundred—the number of chapters in a collection was determined by the collector, not the absolute scale of cults, in which a hundred stories in circulation was no great feat. We cannot assume that the surviving texts provide us with anything like an even sample.

Nor can we assume that the most important stories or the most important cults at a given time found a collector. When utilizing the miracle collection as a historical source, it is important to recognize that miracle collecting itself was a faddish activity. Whether a story was redacted in text depended more on the popularity of miracle collecting at the time and the willingness of a well-placed individual to work than the significance of a story or the power of a cult. Miracle collecting waxed and waned in tune to its own rhythms and the enthusiasms of individuals. In the same way that there was nothing raw or impersonal about the stories the collectors used to make their texts, so the collectors were not raw or impersonal instruments. In the chapters to follow we will see just how distinct the individual collecting motivations and methods of collectors could be, even when the collectors in question were working at the same time and collecting the stories of the same saint.

Still, what other people were doing mattered too. Just as the knight of Thanet’s decision to appeal to Dunstan was almost certainly influenced by his conversations with Osbern, so Osbern’s decision to write a miracle collection was almost certainly influenced by the fact that a man named Goscelin of St.-Bertin was collecting miracle stories at the monastery of St. Augustine’s less than a mile away. It is to the miracle collectors of England, and the reasons why they wanted to “produce in letters” what had already been produced in speech, that we will now turn.