her to church dedications presided over by Herman, and grieved with her over Herman’s death in 1078. Sometime after this death, Goscelin came to Wilton with plans of visiting Eve as usual, and was devastated to find that she had left, forever, to take up life as a recluse in Normandy. She had not told him she was going.20
Goscelin’s charged friendship with Eve may not have lasted long, but her departure (exact date unknown, but assumed to have been c.1080) coincided with other major changes in his life. Herman’s death in 1078 left Goscelin without a patron. Osmund, the Norman chancellor of King William, was appointed as Herman’s replacement in 1078. Goscelin seems to have finished his Life of Wulfsige shortly after Herman’s death, as he dedicates the text to Osmund, speaks of Herman’s death, and describes at the text’s close how Osmund translated Wulfsige and the relics of another saint, Juthwara, to silver reliquaries.21 But if the text was read by the new bishop, it did not persuade him to retain the Flemish monk in his service. Bishop Osmund seems to have been the one who, in Goscelin’s words in the Book of Consolation, “forced [me] to wander far” because of “the envy of vipers and the cruelty of a stepfather.”22 The date of Goscelin’s departure from the region of Sherborne and Wilton is not known, but scholars have speculated that Goscelin’s passion for Eve incurred Osmund’s condemnation, and that Eve herself may have been ordered to leave Wilton rather than setting out for Normandy voluntarily.
Whatever happened, after some fifteen years in England in Herman’s service, and now probably in his early thirties, Goscelin lost his standing in the bishop’s household as well as his dear Eve, “the sweetest child of my soul.” It was at this point that texts began to pour out of him. Goscelin wrote the Book of Consolation c.1080–82. The Life and Miracles of Kenelm could not have been written before 1066: it is likely a composition of the late 1070s or early 1080s.23 Goscelin states that he began both the Life of Wulfsige and the Life and Translation of Edith while Herman was alive and with his encouragement, but he did not finish either of them until after his death: they are usually dated c.1080. In the prologue to the Life and Translation of Edith, the most ambitious work of this early hagiographic corpus, Goscelin dedicates the work to Archbishop Lanfranc and declares that “it is your part to accept the votive offerings of all those bringing gifts to the tabernacle of the Lord … I seek to offer a previous jewel.”24 By the jewel, Goscelin meant Edith herself, “famous throughout the whole land,” but Goscelin’s texts themselves bear comparisons to gems. In early Norman England, miracle collections like these were actually a good deal rarer than precious stones, and it is to those texts that I now turn.
Wulfsige, Edith, and Kenelm died in different centuries and would seem to be quite different saints, but in the 1070s all three were lodged in Benedictine monastic houses and were viewed as active miracle-working saints. Wulfsige, the most recently dead, was a bishop at Sherborne. Within a decade after his death in 1002—from what Goscelin tells us—Wulfsige had been translated to a shrine near an altar.25 Edith, an illegitimate daughter of King Edgar, was probably born in the 960s. She was enclosed at Wilton from the time she was a young girl. Wulfthryth, Edith’s mother, became abbess at Wilton, but though Edith was appointed the abbess of three nunneries, she refused these posts. She died a virgin in 984 or 987.26 Kenelm, possibly a wholly fictitious figure, was supposedly a young Mercian prince killed through the machinations of an evil sister in the early ninth century. At some unknown point, his relics were translated to Winchcombe. The place of his supposed martyrdom also served as a cult site. Kenelm was widely celebrated in Anglo-Saxon litanies by the eleventh century.27
Swithun’s healings were what fascinated Lantfred and impelled him to write his collection at Winchester. In the years he spent at Sherborne and Wilton, Goscelin probably did not see a cult of the magnitude of Swithun’s in the 970s, but Wulfsige and Edith were certainly both revered as healers. Goscelin describes how the water used to wash the relics of Wulfsige and Juthwara was “a source of healing for many sick people.”28 Monks of Sherborne, servants of the monks, and relatives of the monks were all claiming healing from this drink at the time he wrote his miracle collection.29 Edith, too, was busily curing cripples and striking off the chains of lay supplicants at her tomb.30 But, strikingly, these recent healing and liberation miracles among the laity, of such fascination for Lantfred, held little appeal for Goscelin. He tells few of these stories, and what he does tell he tends to compress.31 The more recent the story, in fact, the less Goscelin seemed to feel it needed elaboration or record. After describing, rapidly, a set of Edith’s recent miracles among the laity, he writes, “why should more of these miracles be recounted which are so well-known and frequently perceived by the eyes, that they may be known more certainly by eyewitness experience than by written testimony? There is no need to relate more of these revelations which are so frequent.”32
What Goscelin saw a need for, instead, was a written reconstruction of the whole history of a saint and his or her cult. For Goscelin, contemporary miracles were an endpoint, a way to wrap up the overall narrative rather than the center of attention. The Life and Miracles of Kenelm, the Life of Wulfsige, and the Life and Translation of Edith are balanced, carefully conceived surveys that encompass the saints’ lives, deaths, burials, translations, and past and present miracles.33 The three texts have a remarkably similar structure despite their differing titles and subjects. Of the thirty chapters in the Life and Miracles of Kenelm, Goscelin devotes six to Kenelm’s life (cc. 1–6), two to Kenelm’s death (cc. 7–8), eight to the discovery and translation of Kenelm’s relics to Winchcombe and accompanying miracles (cc. 9–17), nine to miracles “from modern times” (cc. 18–26), and the final four (short) chapters to “recent miracles” (cc. 27–30). He applied equal weight to posthumous miracles in the Life of Wulfsige. After six chapters about Wulfsige’s life (cc. 1–6), he devoted three to his death and burial (cc. 6–9), five to miracles that started twelve years after Wulfsige’s death (cc. 10–14), six to miracles from “modern times” (cc. 15–20), and then four to contemporary miracles (cc. 21–24). Though the Life and Translation of Edith is a much longer and more prettified text, Goscelin measures out Edith’s story in roughly similar proportions. After twenty-seven lengthy chapters concerning Edith’s life, death, and burial and immediate post-burial miracles, Goscelin dedicates a second book entirely to posthumous events, starting with Edith’s translation in the late tenth century (cc. 1–2), then digressing into a mini-vita and miracle collection for Wulfthryth, Edith’s mother (cc. 3–7, life and death; cc. 8–11, miracles), and finally eleven chapters concerning Edith’s miracles from the age of Cnut to the present day (cc. 12–22).34
Goscelin seems to have been quite conscientious about listing the written sources he was able to find concerning these saints—if any—in the preface or in the course of his text. These references to written sources were apparently meant to enhance the credibility of his texts, but he did not have much to report. He apparently found nothing from or about Wulfsige’s life except for two foundation charters issued in Wulfsige’s name.35 At the end the Life of Wulfsige, he mentions an account of Juthwara’s miracles that described a miracle during the time of Bishop Ælfwold (bishop of Sherborne after 1045 and until at least 1062), a text unfortunately otherwise unknown.36 For Edith, he seems to have had very little in writing. All he claimed to have was an Old English account of a miracle from the time of Abbess Brihtgifu (c.1040–65).37 The sources were a little richer for Kenelm, at least for his vita: he claims to have had a letter about Kenelm’s martyrdom (supposedly sent from heaven), some writings from a certain Wulfwine, and a song and other material in Old English.38
This fluky little handful of written sources could not have been much help in constructing the broad histories Goscelin aimed to write. His material came instead from long soaking in the conversations of the communities of Sherborne, Wilton, and Winchcombe. Goscelin writes in the preface that he had learned about Wulfsige “long ago … from the present brothers, who like thirsty sucklings eagerly drank in these stories from their predecessors.”39 Goscelin, aptly described as a thirsty suckling
