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,
