most defined cult, what made people, literate and illiterate alike, think of a cult as living and active, were personal stories of a saint’s intervention. These stories were the warm, pulsing evidence that a saint lived now, acted now, and was worthy of past and future veneration. The creation and circulation of these stories required no money, no pen or parchment, no building, not even the presence of a physical relic, but simply a person seeing a saint’s actions in his or her own life and telling other people about it.
Cult is the knight of Thanet, Osbern, and “those present” talking on a beach about Dunstan’s recent actions. Cult is Eilward of Westoning telling his story about Becket’s healing powers to the crowds in Bedford and along the road to Canterbury. Cult is not, at least not so essentially, Osbern or Benedict writing accounts of these stories later in their cloister. What happened on the beach, what happened along that road, and what happened in far more conversations than these collectors could hear or hope to recount, were the important things. Compared to the tangible texts, these innumerable lost conversations can seem wispy, even untrustworthy, something we might term mere “rumor.” But we should not be blinded to what the oral creation and circulation of personal miracle stories possessed: the easy, all but effortless ability to spread word, to leapfrog social barriers, to create a sense of warm camaraderie, and to energize the veneration of saints. When he created his story about Dunstan, the knight joined or strengthened his association with the larger group of people who saw Dunstan as a saint. Osbern, listening, added another story to his personal store and refreshed his own sense of belonging. Retelling the knight’s story to “those present,” Osbern may have created a sense of cultic association or interest in a group of people who had never heard of Dunstan before. Scholars have argued for the important role of the miracle as a social bond in the medieval period, but it was actually the telling of stories, and not miracles per se, that acted as the bonding device.60 People felt part of the familiar circle of a saint in the way one feels part of anyone’s familiar circle, by sharing, knowing, and especially creating stories about them. Becket became England’s most famous saint through the exchange of stories: these conversations were the generators of cultic communities, groups of people feeling a strong attachment to a saint and believing in his or her power in the world.
Julia Smith has written that “oral traditions of posthumous miracles were more important than written accounts in sustaining a cult.”61 I would go further and say that written accounts were in fact not needed at all. Cults did not need texts or their writers to form, to function, or to be terrifyingly strong. Moreover, a miracle collection, no matter how long or carefully wrought, was itself no guarantee that a cult would grow or continue. Medieval miracle collections need to be viewed as secondary manifestations of the animating discourse: they fed off the oral world far more than they ever added to it.
The medieval cult of saints is often presented as being generated, led, and controlled by the religious aristocrats of the society. Bishops and abbots are envisioned as making cults at tombs for their own self-promotion and interest, with pilgrims responding to the call, experiencing miracles, and depositing their coins.62 But while the religious elite could tell miracle stories and hope to create their own stories of divine intervention—as Osbern did—their exalted status availed them little in the midst of the ever-shifting body of voices and stories that made up a living cult. Working in an age before print and significant levels of literacy, much less television or other powerful communicative tools, the religious elite had extremely limited means of directing the spread of these stories or how they were told. Nor could they generate cults at will. Miracle collections often represent attempts to radically simplify the discourse, to make it sound as though a “we,” the religious, have a “them,” ordinary people, in harness, but while miracle collectors found these sorts of representations satisfying we must not mistake them for the whole reality. The powers inherent in moving miracle stories, some of the most forceful narratives people make, were multidimensional and directional. Moreover, much as we might envision medieval people making up miracles for themselves out of the contingency of their experience, those experiences were still as unpredictable as ours, with no way for them to presage what the divine would or would not do, no matter what they hoped or desired.
Before turning in earnest to the collectors who decided to take some of these oral stories and turn them into texts, in the next chapter I will examine another fundamental feature of this oral world: the ways in which personal miracle stories could be and often were patterned after each other. It would seem that the presence and knowledge of other people’s stories would have little effect on anyone’s own creation. Certainly, all these oral creations were unique: the knight of Thanet’s story, as we have seen, was very much his own. Nevertheless, the production of personal miracle stories was not completely free-form. Those other stories mattered. The flow of conversation had direction, moving in certain channels and not others, constraining individual voices even as it was made up and directed by them.
CHAPTER TWO
To Experience What I Have Heard: Plotlines and Patterning of Oral Miracle Stories
Readers have long been struck by the similarities of stories preserved in miracle collections. The late Victorian editors of the miracle collection of William of Norwich, for instance, commented that “even in their nauseous details [William’s miracles] all have a strong family likeness to one another.”1 Scholars today use less florid language but often make the same observation, describing medieval miracle collections as “extraordinarily repetitive,” “stereotyped,” “highly conventionalized,” and “schematized and topoiridden.”2 The types or clusters of certain kinds of stories in miracle collections have especially attracted attention. It is a rare collection that does not include a story about a blind person gaining sight or a paralyzed person regaining movement. Nor can one read many collections without running across stories about liberated prisoners, sailors spared from shipwreck, lepers being healed, evil people being punished, and so on.3
Medievalists have formulated an explanation for this clustering, an explanation that itself seems to be repeated and rehearsed in analysis after analysis. The idea is that early Christian and early medieval miracle collections were normative for the genre. These early texts set up the topoi or types of stories that later collectors would work to include and imitate in their own creations. Hedwig Röckelien argues, for instance, that the miracle narratives in Augustine’s City of God “already contain the most important of the motifs and types that are to be found in the later miracle stories in stereotypical repetition.”4 Marcus Bull speaks of an “unofficial but widely recognized typological ‘canon’” that “governed the selection and presentation of mainstream miracles.” He notes that “in addition to biblical precedents, early writers such as St. Augustine, Sulpicius Severus, Pope Gregory the Great, Gregory of Tours and Bede had cumulatively created a body of language and imagery that was highly influential.”5 The writing of miracle collections is often described as a kind of clash, with the accounts of pilgrims colliding with and being transformed by the typological preoccupations and didactic goals of the writers. Thomas Head speaks of two movements in the writing process: “from the folkloric culture of the layman to the clerical culture of the monk, and from the reality of the event to the topoi of the text.”6 Gabriella Signori expressively refers to this as a “cooking” process in a “miracle kitchen,” in which the “raw” oral account is “cooked” to the clerical norms of the writer.7
In its extreme forms, this assumption that miracle collectors were working to topoi can lead to the suggestion that certain stories in collections were invented altogether. This argument has been applied to the cluster of stories concerning lawsuits in Osbern of Canterbury’s collection of the miracles of Dunstan, written in the early 1090s. The knight of Thanet’s story, discussed at length in Chapter 1, is one of three
