meaning of personal stories as they were being told.
To gain a full picture of the telling of these stories, we also have to account for the reaction of listeners. The relationship between teller and audience in the telling of a personal story is a particularly active one. An encouraging question, a comment, a grimace, or a glance away—all these can invigorate, redirect, or halt the telling of a personal story. Personal stories exist in the moment, rarely if ever told the same way twice. Tellers adjust them, sometimes radically, depending on who is listening and how they respond. Osbern gives us a taste of the kind of conversational give and take that most personal stories involve, but again there is so much that we don’t know. Was Osbern rapt during the whole of the knight’s story? How might the knight of Thanet have told his story later or to another companion? Since the meaning of personal stories is so deeply embedded in personalities, relationships, and oral performance, even the most carefully composed texts will fail to convey their complexity.55 Osbern’s textual rendering inevitably deadens and radically simplifies the knight’s story. Still, the power of the personal story is such that even in this severely muted form the reader can feel its pull. Reading this story invites a sense of intimacy with the knight beyond what one would feel, for instance, from reading a charter issued by him.
It also invites a sense of intimacy with the saint at the center of the story. A triumph over an enemy is a common narrative trajectory for a personal story. What makes the knight’s victory in his lawsuit a miracle story is the credit he gives to Dunstan for his success. The knight could have claimed that it was Osbern’s help, or his own skill or luck, that achieved that result. Instead, he links his prayer, his dream, and his success together: Dunstan won the case for him. Dunstan, though dead, becomes the actor at the center of the story, as real a persona as the knight himself. Today, miracles tend to be envisioned in theoretical and nonfigurative terms: a miracle is a breaking of the laws of nature. Most stories in miracle collections have a much more particularized flavor. Dunstan was here. Dunstan helped me. That’s why I won my lawsuit, why I felt better after being sick, why my daughter was saved after falling into the river. Saints might not always be seen or sensed, but they live out posthumous lives in which they continue to care about the people on earth. Rather than reading the knight’s story expecting a lawbreaking event, we should instead read it as a narrative, a story created by the knight to describe how his life and the posthumous life of Dunstan became intertwined.56 It remains very much a personal story. In fact, if anything it is a double personal story, about the knight’s and Dunstan’s personal histories. The knight’s story tells about them both; it packs a double punch. We can term the result a personal miracle story.57
Personal stories define and empower a teller’s sense of identity; personal miracle stories do so as well, indeed even more so. At first, this may seem counterintuitive: the knight certainly now cannot claim the glory of triumphing over the abbot of St. Augustine’s. But this story claims something even better: Dunstan acted for me. This saint, living in heaven, was willing to help me, to enter into my concerns, to respond to my prayer with amazing speed and efficacy. Miracle collectors used exceptionally emotive and powerful language to describe their subject matter. Strikes of lightning were a favorite analogy: saints were said to “flash,” “gleam,” or “shine out” in miracles after their death.58 Somewhat similar effects are evident in modern personal stories recounting the visit of a celebrity—the touch of Princess Diana or an encounter with Michael Jackson. The famed presence enlarges rather than diminishes the creator of the story in the striking blend of abject self-importance that such stories convey.
We cannot know now, of course, what the knight’s story about Dunstan’s aid might have done for his self-image, or how many more times he told it or to whom. There was a reason besides his own self-image that the knight might well have decided to tell his story more than once. He pales and groans at the beginning with good reason. Dunstan would act, but he was not going to speak for himself. In this way, he was like any dead friend. If the knight did not tell the story, Dunstan’s actions would not be known by others. The knight has to tell the story for the silent Dunstan as much as for himself. Osbern had probably heard stories, perhaps many stories, of the knight’s personal experience before this walk on the beach. Listening to this particular story, Osbern gets a double benefit: he finds out not just about the knight’s recent actions, but about Dunstan’s too. Osbern knew the stories from Dunstan’s lifetime long ago better than most. What the knight’s story offered was a sense of Dunstan’s current life, a glimpse of what Dunstan was doing and how he was acting in Osbern’s own present. Precious, thrilling, joyous information, that, even if it was not always easy to interpret. Did Dunstan’s speed in answering the knight’s prayer have something to do with the way the knight worded his request? Did Dunstan’s physical appearance in the dream—a handsome man holding a lamp—have deeper significance? Did Dunstan hold a grudge against the abbot of St. Augustine’s?
Such uncertainties, typical of personal miracle stories, did not usually blunt listeners’ desire for these stories. Unlike the well-worn miracles of a saint’s life, these personal miracles were fresh and new, and their exchange offered an even greater emotional zing than did most personal stories. Knowing more about Dunstan, Osbern can feel more personally attached to him. In the discussion of a mutually beloved divine self, the knight and Osbern can delight in each other’s company even more. Not only that, but the knight’s story suggested possibilities in case Osbern were ever in need of divine aid himself. Personal miracle stories were full of clues for how to get a saint on one’s side. Indeed, a miracle story like the knight’s, though less sensational than a story of sunbeams acting as clotheslines or oars sprouting and flowering, had much more immediate relevance to those listeners hoping for divine help with their own personal problems.
Osbern found the knight’s story so stirring that he immediately retold it himself to new listeners, “those who were present.” Personal stories tend to be retold only among people who have an interest in the creator. Outside of the creator’s familiar circle, interest in his or her stories usually drops dramatically. The difference with the personal miracle story is that there is a second, much wider circle in which the story can circulate: all those who desire news of the saint. Such mobility exacted a cost. When Osbern retold the knight’s story, it lived in Osbern’s face and gestures, in Osbern’s breath and voice. Osbern chose when and where and to whom and at what length he wanted to tell the story. He decided how to introduce and conclude the story, how to mediate every aspect of it. The question is not whether the outlines of the knight’s original story were blurred and deformed, but to what degree. The further a story traveled, the more these effects were compounded. Moreover, if “those present” on the beach did not know the knight, much of the resonance of the story would be lost. The personal miracle story would have been most potent and affecting when told by its creator to close friends, people who could fully appreciate both the personal and the divine ramifications of the story.
The personal miracle story, then, was generally more intense, more desirable, more mobile, and more long-lived than the ordinary personal story, but in its essential characteristics it remained a personal story. Though these stories interested people outside of personal circles and could travel through multiple tellers, they originated in stories people told about themselves. When reading miracle collections, we must keep those individuals before us. They were all as real as the knight of Thanet, and their stories all had a multiplicity of personal resonances and meanings that we will never recover.
Conversations and the Making of Cults
Medieval cults tend to be thought of in terms of their visible manifestations and remains: the relics, the churches, the rituals, the tombs, the pilgrims’ badges, the stained glass, and the texts, the texts most especially.59 Since texts tell us so much about the cults and largely define our own thinking about them, it is easy to slip into thinking that they define cults themselves. But what actually makes a medieval cult? What was its animating essence? In the high medieval period, we should not look to texts in languages most could not read in a scattering of handwritten manuscripts most did not own. We should not even look to liturgies, pilgrimages,
