up past one hundred chapters; they wrote individual stories at less length and with fewer rhetorical frills; and, most strikingly, they drew many, sometimes most, of their stories from outside of their own conversational circles. They were seeking out the stories of lay strangers. Miracle stories concerning the laity had appeared in earlier collections, but they typically concerned the few dramatic healings witnessed by monks at the shrines of saints or stories told by close lay friends and relatives of monks. Now, though, collectors were listening to the stories of lay visitors to their relics and churches.
Giles Constable describes the last stage of the great monastic reforms of the twelfth century as “an intense concern with the nature of religious life and personal reform of all Christians,” a stage he dates to 1130–60.9 This is about the time that one starts to see miracle collectors focusing their attention on the stories of the laity. It is important to recognize what this involved: monks and canons listening patiently, for days, months, and sometimes years to stories about stomachaches, sexual misadventures, sick children, swollen legs, shipwrecks, and stolen coins, and then devoting resources of their scriptoria to committing these stories to parchment so that other religious men could hear and read these stories all over again. With this new attention to the stories of the laity also came new worries about truth, falsity, and the validity of the stories the monks were hearing. Many writers still took pride in the rhetorical flair they imparted to their collections, but the whole collecting enterprise became more taxing, more like a bureaucratic process than a warm conversation with friends. It could well be that the writers were willing to make the effort in part because they sought some sense of control—as well as record—of the stories being told outside of their religious communities. This is the same period in which the religious establishment began to think that the laity should make annual confession of their sins to a priest, an action that is strikingly similar to the telling of personal experiences of miracles. Moreover, this concerted effort to engage with the religious experiences of the laity came before canonization procedures were instituted, and almost certainly impacted their formation. One could imagine, for instance, the pope making the miracle stories of the religious the standard for canonization and excluding those of the laity, but this is not what happened.10
The close interface between the collectors’ motivations and efforts and the oral telling of miracle stories unites these two phases of miracle collecting. The oral telling of miracle stories in this period is, of course, impossible to access directly, but it was likely an even more important historical phenomenon than the writing of the collections. The posthumous “fama” of saints was constituted by these oral stories, most of them, it appears, stories of personal and recent experience of a saint’s actions. These narratives suggested ideas and behaviors that could lead to the perception of still more miracles. As new stories multiplied, they erased the old ones from conversations, and these in turn could be replaced by still more new creations: this, I believe, was the essential process driving the growth of cults. Since written records of the stories are all we have left, it is tempting to read the writing as making or sustaining cults, but a cult did not need a text, and a text could not make a cult. Cults were orchestras of voices that could not be conducted, swarms of stories that shrank and expanded according to their own internal and often mysterious rhythms. Monks in high medieval England turned to writing as a formaldehyde that could stabilize the oral stories they most liked in a secure and unchanging format. The procedure was a stiffening and deadening one, quite the opposite of a propagandistic effort; throughout the high medieval period, English writers were engaged in imprisoning and pinning down stories, not setting them free. In the same way that one must understand the butterflies in a natural history display to be only dead and inactive representatives of a much larger whole, so we must be careful not to read the miracle stories frozen in textual collections as having had more impact than they actually had.
Between the writing and the telling of miracle stories, the telling was the dominant and autonomous discourse, likely many magnitudes larger than what we now see preserved in the texts. How this telling may have been different in different eras and regions or for different saints is all but impossible to extricate from the surviving texts. But though we never will know particulars of this conversational world, it is not wholly unfathomable. The texts contain many references to the telling of miracle stories, and oral stories and their circulation have been the subject of many studies in contemporary contexts. In Chapter 1, I propose that most of these oral stories were of the type that researchers in the social sciences term “personal stories”—stories that people told about their own experiences—and discuss the volume, longevity, and emotional intensity of such stories. In Chapter 2, I consider the dynamics of this circulating body of stories in more depth, arguing that many of the repetitive similarities between stories in different collections were not the result of writers working to set models. Rather, these similarities were already a feature of the oral stories the collectors heard. Oral miracle stories had a tremendous capacity to spread, to replicate themselves, and to spring up around a new saint: understanding these dynamics helps make sense of the functioning of medieval cults and the secondary position of miracle collectors within those cults.
In Chapter 3, I start tracing the history of English miracle collecting. I begin in the late Saxon period, and examine its sole substantial miracle collection: Lantfred of Fleury’s Translation and Miracles of Swithun, written in the 970s at Winchester. In Chapter 4, I study the early career and miracle collections written by a more famous foreign monk working in England, Goscelin of St.-Bertin, the only writer collecting miracle stories in England in the 1070s and 1080s. Both of these foreigners, I argue, thought more about their own careers and literary production in the making of these texts than local political concerns. But whereas Lantfred’s work found few imitators, Goscelin’s prolific and peripatetic labors helped spark off the new craze for miracle collecting in England. In Chapter 5, I examine the collection of the monk who appears to have been the first native English writer to imitate Goscelin: Osbern, a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, who compiled a collection of the miracles of Dunstan in the early 1090s. In Chapter 6, I map out the Anglo-Norman collecting boom of the early decades of the twelfth century and focus on a writer whose prolific output is representative of the period: Eadmer of Canterbury, Osbern’s younger colleague at Christ Church. In these chapters, I consider how oral stories of miracles may have been exchanged in the immediate aftermath of the Conquest. I argue that the work of convincing Normans of the validity and power of Anglo-Saxon saints had been completed before the burst of Anglo-Norman miracle collecting began. The collections of the period should be read within the context of the growing concern for preserving oral information in general and a fad for miracle collecting in particular. My close studies of the collections of Lantfred, Goscelin, Osbern, and Eadmer are designed to elucidate and flesh out the development of miracle collecting in this first phase of miracle collecting, to contrast the approaches of different collectors within the movement, and to demonstrate the advantages of reading miracle collections as a writer’s dialogue with a much larger oral discourse.
I devote Chapter 7 to an appraisal and chronological analysis of the many miracle collections made in England between c.1140 and c.1200, the period in which collectors began to focus on stories told by the laity. I show that the new trends in miracle collecting were well underway before the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170, but that his cult and the circulation of Benedict of Peterborough’s collection for Becket accelerated and solidified these trends among other English miracle collectors. In Chapters 8, 9, and 10, I focus on the story of miracle collecting for Becket at Christ Church. As Benedict was bringing his text to a conclusion, his colleague, William of Canterbury, was starting his own. William’s collection would not see anything like the circulation of Benedict’s, but it would be the longest compiled in medieval England.
