the three chapters dedicated to these texts, I situate them within their cultic and literary contexts and demonstrate how the personalities of Benedict and William shaped their strikingly different approaches to the stories they were hearing at Canterbury.
Collecting is comforting. As Susan Stewart has put it, collecting is an “objectification of desire.”11 The point and pleasure of collections is that they exist, that something has been saved and made visible, with luck, permanently, out of what would otherwise have vanished. By making miracle collections, English writers in the high medieval period could assuage their anxieties about the oral discourse and feel that they were saving it, improving on it, doing it good, in fact, even as it is obvious how self-promoting their efforts could be. But the more ambitious the writers were in their dreams of stabilization, the more defeating the oral world could become. Often, for example, the future, full of miracle stories of its own, forgot, ignored, or even lost the texts the writers had sent so lovingly from the past. Even what seem to be the simplest collecting goals, such as picking out the best stories and displaying them the best way, can reveal themselves to be impossible fantasies, pulling the collector into an endless round of joyless acquisition. And the more the collectors gathered in stories, the more the fissures and the problems within them—what do these stories really mean?—stood out.
In the conclusion to the book, I outline how miracle collecting fell in popularity among English writers in the thirteenth century. The telling of miracle stories appears to have continued full force in the thirteenth century and throughout the late medieval period. Chaucer’s description of his pilgrims traveling to Canterbury to seek the saint “that hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke,” is just one of the many indications that cults themselves did not change greatly in form from the high to the late medieval period. But however wonderful these new miracle stories might have been, few late medieval monks or canons were struck by a desire to relate them in writing. We are left with efforts of their high medieval brethren. Their collections have been praised and explored as “remarkably rich portrayals of English society in the twelfth century,”12 but they testify most of all to a passion for collecting miracle stories that lasted well over a century, a passion that caught up both monks and miracle stories in ways not seen before or since.
CHAPTER ONE
Narrating the Saint’s Works: Conversations, Personal Stories, and the Making of Cults
In the early 1170s, a judge in Bedford sentenced Eilward of Westoning to blinding and castration for petty thievery. Eilward, a pauper, was duly blinded—a jailor stabbed his eyes with a knife—and castrated. Some days later, however, after asking Thomas Becket for help, Eilward discovered that he could see again. Benedict of Peterborough, one of the two monks at Canterbury who recorded this story in a miracle collection, describes how people came to see Eilward in Bedford and hear his tale: “Word of this went out among the vicinity, and the new thing attracted no small multitude of people.”1 As Eilward traveled to Canterbury to give thanks at Becket’s tomb, he told his story to crowds along the road, a scene later pictured in an early thirteenth-century glass panel in Canterbury Cathedral (Figure 1). The original inscription to this panel read, “The people stand by as he narrates the mighty works of the saint” (ASTAT NARRANTI POPULUS MAGNALIA SANCTI).2 Eilward’s story caused such a buzz and was picked up and retold so often that it beat him to Canterbury. The Christ Church monks, Benedict comments, had heard about Eilward’s miracle from many others before he arrived.3
While the extent of the oral circulation of Eilward’s story was clearly extraordinary, the references to conversation, speech, and oral storytelling in the written accounts of his miracle are not. Medieval miracle collections are full of such references: as John McNamara has pointed out, the analysis of hagiographic texts often “reveals surprising amounts of information about the tellings of these legends in their own contexts.”4 Simon Yarrow writes of how “miracle collections are packed with people in conversation,” and he does not exaggerate.5 For example, in a collection of the miracles of Modwenna, Geoffrey of Burton describes how Abbot Nigel brought a certain Godric, who had accidentally swallowed a pin-brooch and nearly died as a result, to Queen Matilda, “who loved to hear about the miracles of the saints. He showed the man to her and told the story of what had happened to him, also recounting many other occasions on which the virgin Modwenna had declared through miracles that she was in heaven with the Lord.”6 In his collection of the miracles of Edmund of Bury, Osbert of Clare recounts how a paralyzed man healed by Edmund told his story to Tolinus, the sacrist of Bury, who told Abbot Baldwin, who called all the monks together, along with some lay people, and had the healed man stand in the middle of them and retell his story.7 An anonymous clerk of Beverley, whose collection of the miracles of John of Beverley is particularly rich with oral references, concludes a story about a deaf-mute by describing how “as a schoolboy I saw this elderly man … and I knew him very well … with the younger boys sitting or standing around, he used to tell how the Lord, through St. John, gave hearing and speech to him.”8 This same clerk recounts in another chapter how his parents “asked me if I knew the crippled girl who was accustomed to go begging from door to door. When I replied that I did not know her at all, they were amazed at this when she [and her miracle] were very well known by very many men and women.”9
Figure 1. Eilward of Westoning tells his story. Canterbury Cathedral, Trinity Chapel Ambulatory Window n.III (16). Author’s photograph used with the kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral.
In this chapter and the next, I consider the dimensions and dynamics of what R. W. Southern dubbed the “chattering atmosphere” behind the texts of miracle collections.10 Though questions about orality have engaged scholars of the medieval past for some time, little close attention has thus far been focused on the oral creation and circulation of miracle stories. As Catherine Cubitt has noted, “historians have tended to focus upon questions of orality and literacy in governmental administration and legal dealings, while amongst literary scholars, the most pressing questions have concerned the composition of Old English poetry and the nature of heroic verse.”11 Most studies of oral storytelling in a hagiographic context, including Cubitt’s own, are focused on stories with folkloric motifs: a holy man throwing a key in a river only to recover it later in the stomach of a fish, for instance, or a wolf guarding the decapitated head of a holy king, rather than a story like that of Eilward of Westoning’s healing.12 Brian Patrick McGuire, who has examined the “oral sources” of Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum, a mammoth early thirteenth-century miracle collection, is one of the few to attempt to say something specific about the speakers behind collections of posthumous miracles. McGuire catalogues the different types of people who told Caesarius miracle stories, finding that he heard stories from Cistercian monks from his own house, Cistercian monks from other houses, abbots, Benedictine monks, laybrothers, secular canons, priests, nuns, and the laity.13 McGuire demonstrates in the course of this study, moreover, that Caesarius derived 95 percent of his stories from oral sources, as opposed to just 5 percent from written sources.14 The two massive Christ Church collections for Thomas Becket, the closest comparative example to the Dialogus among the collections produced in high medieval England, show very similar proportions of oral vs. written sources, about 94 to 6 percent.15 Most shorter collections show no evidence of the use of written sources whatsoever. The stories in the collections of Geoffrey of Burton, Osbert of Clare, and the anonymous clerk at Beverley mentioned above appear to have been derived 100 percent from oral sources.16
It is, of course, impossible to extract the original oral stories from the written collections, but this should not deter us from exploring and taking account of the many references to speech and conversation
