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.
CHAPTER THREE
A Drop from the Ocean’s Waters: Lantfred of Fleury and the Cult of Swithun at Winchester
