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”
