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
