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INTRODUCTION

Whenever I read a medieval miracle collection, I am reminded of the appeal of looking at a collection of butterflies. Both kinds of collections are hard to resist, no matter how much one might disapprove, in theory, of killing butterflies, or of reveling in stories of miracles. The colors of the insects 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, but the whole collecting enterprise became more taxing, more like a bureaucratic process than a warm conversation with friends. It could well be that the writers were willing to make the effort in part because they sought some sense of control—as well as record—of the stories being told outside of their religious communities. This is the same period in which the religious establishment began to think that the laity should make annual confession of their sins to a priest, an action that is strikingly similar to the telling of personal experiences of miracles. Moreover, this concerted effort to engage with the religious experiences of the laity came before canonization procedures were instituted, and almost certainly impacted their formation. One could imagine, for instance, the pope making the miracle stories of the religious the standard for canonization and excluding those of the laity, but this is not what happened.¹⁰

The close interface between the collectors’ motivations and efforts and the oral telling of miracle stories unites these two phases of miracle collecting. The oral telling of miracle stories in this period is, of course, impossible to access directly, but it was likely an even more important historical phenomenon than the writing of the collections. The posthumous “fama” of saints was constituted by these oral stories, most of them, it appears, stories of personal and recent experience of a saint’s actions. These narratives suggested ideas and behaviors that could lead to the perception of still more miracles. As new stories multiplied, they erased the old ones from conversations, and these in turn could be replaced by still more new creations: this, I believe, was the essential process driving the growth of cults. Since written records of the stories are all we have left, it is tempting to read the writing as making or sustaining cults, but a cult did not need a text, and a text could not make a cult. Cults were orchestras of voices that could not be conducted, swarms of stories that shrank and expanded according to their own internal and often mysterious rhythms. Monks in high medieval England turned to writing as a formaldehyde that could stabilize the oral stories they most liked in a secure and unchanging format. The procedure was a stiffening and deadening one, quite the opposite of a propagandistic effort; throughout the high medieval period, English writers were engaged in imprisoning and pinning down stories, not setting them free. In the same way that one must understand the butterflies in a natural history display to be only dead and inactive representatives of a much larger whole, so we must be careful not to read the miracle stories frozen in textual collections as having had more impact than they actually had.

Between the writing and the telling of miracle stories, the telling was the dominant and autonomous discourse, likely many magnitudes larger than what we now see preserved in the texts. How this telling may have been different in different eras and regions or for different saints is all but impossible to extricate from the surviving texts. But though we never will know particulars of this conversational world, it is not wholly unfathomable. The texts contain many references to the telling of miracle stories, and oral stories and their circulation have been the subject of many studies in contemporary contexts. In Chapter 1, I propose that most of these oral stories were of the type that researchers in the social sciences term “personal stories”—stories that people told about their own experiences—and discuss the volume, longevity, and emotional intensity of such stories. In Chapter 2, I consider the dynamics of this circulating body of stories in more depth, arguing that many of the repetitive similarities between stories in different collections were not the result of writers working to set models. Rather, these similarities were already a feature of the oral stories the collectors heard. Oral miracle stories had a tremendous capacity to spread, to replicate themselves, and to spring up around a new saint: understanding these dynamics helps make sense of the functioning of medieval cults and the secondary position of miracle collectors within those cults.

In Chapter 3, I start tracing the history of English miracle collecting. I begin in the late Saxon period, and examine its sole substantial miracle collection: Lantfred of Fleury’s Translation and Miracles of Swithun, written in the 970s at Winchester. In Chapter 4, I study the early career and miracle collections written by a more famous foreign monk working in England, Goscelin of St.-Bertin, the only writer collecting miracle stories in England in the 1070s and 1080s. Both of these foreigners, I argue, thought more about their own careers and literary production in the making of these texts than local political concerns. But whereas Lantfred’s work found few imitators, Goscelin’s prolific and peripatetic labors helped spark off the new craze for miracle collecting in England. In Chapter 5, I examine the collection of the monk who appears to have been the first native English writer to imitate Goscelin: Osbern, a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, who compiled a collection of the miracles of Dunstan in the early 1090s. In Chapter 6, I map out the Anglo-Norman collecting boom of the early decades of the twelfth century and focus on a writer whose prolific output is representative of the period: Eadmer of Canterbury, Osbern’s younger colleague at Christ Church. In these chapters, I consider how oral stories of miracles may have been exchanged in the immediate aftermath of the Conquest. I argue that the work of convincing Normans of the validity and power of Anglo-Saxon saints had been completed before the burst of Anglo-Norman miracle collecting began. The collections of the period should be read within the context of the growing concern for preserving oral information in general and a fad for miracle collecting in particular. My close studies of the collections of Lantfred, Goscelin, Osbern, and Eadmer are designed to elucidate and flesh out the development of miracle collecting in this first phase of miracle collecting, to contrast the approaches of different collectors within the movement, and to demonstrate the advantages of reading miracle collections as a writer’s dialogue with a much larger oral discourse.

I devote Chapter 7 to an appraisal and chronological analysis of the many miracle collections made in England between c.1140 and c.1200, the period in which collectors began to focus on stories told by the laity. I show that the new trends in miracle collecting were well underway before the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170, but that his cult and the circulation of Benedict of Peterborough’s collection for Becket accelerated and solidified these trends among other English miracle collectors. In Chapters 8, 9, and 10, I focus on the story of miracle collecting for Becket at Christ Church. As Benedict was bringing his text to a conclusion, his colleague, William of Canterbury, was starting his own. William’s collection would not see anything like the circulation of Benedict’s, but it would be the longest compiled in medieval England. These two texts are the most impressive of all English miracle collections. In the three chapters dedicated to these texts, I situate them within their cultic and literary contexts and demonstrate how the personalities of Benedict and William shaped their strikingly different approaches to the stories they were hearing at Canterbury.

Collecting is comforting. As Susan Stewart has put it, collecting is an “objectification of desire.”¹¹ The point and pleasure of collections is that they exist, that something has been saved and made visible, with luck, permanently, out of what would otherwise have vanished. By making miracle collections, English writers in the high medieval period could assuage their anxieties about the oral discourse and feel that they were saving it, improving on it, doing it good, in fact, even as it is obvious how self-promoting their efforts could be. But the more ambitious the writers were in their dreams of stabilization, the more defeating the oral world could become. Often, for example, the future, full of miracle stories of its own, forgot, ignored, or even lost the texts the writers had sent so lovingly from the past. Even what seem to be the simplest collecting goals, such as picking out the best stories and displaying them the best way, can reveal themselves to be impossible fantasies, pulling the collector into an endless round of joyless acquisition. And the more the collectors gathered in stories, the more the fissures and the problems within them—what do these stories really mean?—stood out.

In the conclusion to the book, I outline how miracle collecting fell in popularity among English writers in the thirteenth century. The telling of miracle stories appears to have continued full force in the thirteenth century and throughout the 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.