Wonderful to Relate. Rachel Koopmans

the more they were reshaped and reinvented in all the ways familiar to anyone who has played the game of whispering a story around a circle and hearing what the last person in line has to say. People could also, of course, simply invent stories about other people along the lines of old ones. The best storytellers were likely more guilty of this than anyone else. Miracle collectors, well aware of these problems, were often careful to get stories from their creators whenever possible.

      Considering the power of these shaping processes from the moment of story creation on, we need to be cautious about drawing conclusions from miracle collections about the kinds of threats faced by medieval people. Miracle collections do not mirror all of the dangers or diseases of the medieval world, just the ones that the saints were thought to help with. Counting up the numbers of stories in collections in an attempt to rank the relative importance of this hazard or that illness invites serious miscalculation. At best, such counting across collections provides us with a very rough sense of how many miracle stories of a certain type were in circulation, quite different from what people found to be most or least troublesome in their lives.

      We must also be careful when evaluating the ways in which types of miracle stories are connected with types of people or social groupings. These connections do not allow us to tap into raw human experience. A poor woman, for example, did not necessarily voice the most significant aspects of her life in a miracle story. Nor did a rich monk. Even before a collector determined how to shape the stories he heard, those stories were already shaped by the kinds of problems preferred by the miracle plotline, by other stories in circulation, by social expectations about the types of stories individuals should create, and by the motivations and personalities of the tellers and retellers of the stories.

      Equally perilous is the temptation to use written miracle collections as a means to rank the relative strength of cults. One must always keep in mind that only a tiny percentage of the many stories created and exchanged in the oral world in the medieval period were ever collected in texts. These written texts give us only a snapshot of the kinds of stories being told about a certain saint at a certain time, and they are blurry snapshots at that. It would be nice to assume that most collections were compiled when a cult was at its all-time height, but we cannot. Cults went through short-and long-term fluctuations, and where a collection was compiled along a cult’s trajectory is often difficult to gauge. Moreover, while there must have been differences in the relative numbers of stories about particular saints at any given time, we cannot suppose that these differences are clearly reflected in our texts. Because one collection has twenty-five chapters and another has fifty, for instance, does not necessarily or even probably mean that the second saint’s cult was twice as big. The scale of production of stories in the oral world outrun the handwriting speed of the most energetic collectors. Twenty-five, fifty, one hundred—the number of chapters in a collection was determined by the collector, not the absolute scale of cults, in which a hundred stories in circulation was no great feat. We cannot assume that the surviving texts provide us with anything like an even sample.

      Nor can we assume that the most important stories or the most important cults at a given time found a collector. When utilizing the miracle collection as a historical source, it is important to recognize that miracle collecting itself was a faddish activity. Whether a story was redacted in text depended more on the popularity of miracle collecting at the time and the willingness of a well-placed individual to work than the significance of a story or the power of a cult. Miracle collecting waxed and waned in tune to its own rhythms and the enthusiasms of individuals. In the same way that there was nothing raw or impersonal about the stories the collectors used to make their texts, so the collectors were not raw or impersonal instruments. In the chapters to follow we will see just how distinct the individual collecting motivations and methods of collectors could be, even when the collectors in question were working at the same time and collecting the stories of the same saint.

      Still, what other people were doing mattered too. Just as the knight of Thanet’s decision to appeal to Dunstan was almost certainly influenced by his conversations with Osbern, so Osbern’s decision to write a miracle collection was almost certainly influenced by the fact that a man named Goscelin of St.-Bertin was collecting miracle stories at the monastery of St. Augustine’s less than a mile away. It is to the miracle collectors of England, and the reasons why they wanted to “produce in letters” what had already been produced in speech, that we will now turn.

      CHAPTER THREE

      A Drop from the Ocean’s Waters: Lantfred of Fleury and the Cult of Swithun at Winchester

      No hagiography of any kind was written in England between 800 and 950. Bede had composed numerous hagiographical texts in the early eighth century, including a particularly influential account of the life and posthumous miracles of Cuthbert (d. 689), but the Viking invasions destroyed many monasteries in England and brought this literary tradition to a standstill. When the political situation had finally stabilized somewhat in the second half of the tenth century, there was a renewal and reform of monastic life in England. With this came a “mini-revival,” in Rosalind Love’s words, of hagiographic composition.¹ In the late tenth and early eleventh century, new and often quite substantial Latin vitae were composed for Wilfrid, Ouen, Edmund, Dunstan, Oswald, Æthelwold, Ecgwine, and others; vitae were also written in Old English in this period.² Late Saxon monks translated saints’ relics, built special apses, crypts, and chapels to house these relics, and lavished precious metals on saints’ shrines. They compiled lists of the resting places of saints—lists that were necessary because they had moved so many of them. They celebrated saints in liturgies and litanies and cherished their presence in their monasteries and churches.³ What late Saxon monks rarely did, however, was to collect stories of saints’ miracles.

      Anglo-Normans would scold their forbearers for negligence on just this point. They looked in vain at the close of late Saxon vitae for stories of miracles and complained about the lacunae they found there: the first miracle collections for Wilfrid, Ouen, Edmund, Oswald, and Dunstan would be written by Anglo-Normans, not Anglo-Saxons. The modern scholar searching for evidence of late Saxon miracle collecting is also in for a frustrating time. Antonia Gransden has identified two stories about the miracles of Edmund that appear to have been written by an author named Ælfwine in the early eleventh century: these stories are known only from their incorporation in a larger Anglo-Norman collection.⁴ Rosalind Love, too, has found evidence of pre-Conquest miracle stories being utilized by a post-Conquest author. In this case, a cleric named Ælfhelm seems to have written a collection of Æthelthryth’s miracles that was rewritten by an anonymous early twelfth-century author.⁵ Neither of these pre-Conquest collections appears to have been very substantial in their original form. In terms of surviving texts, we have a little vita about Neot, likely composed in the mid-eleventh century, that includes a couple stories of healing as part of the text’s account of the building of a church for Neot in Cambridgeshire.⁶ Wulfstan of Winchester’s Life of Æthelwold, composed at the end of the tenth century, closes with five stories of recent miracles, while Byrhtferth of Ramsey’s Life of Ecgwine, composed in the early eleventh century, ends with four posthumous miracle stories of a distinctively folkloric flavor.⁷ There is also the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, a curious text of anonymous authorship. The composition of the Historia has been placed anywhere from the tenth to the early twelfth century. The Historia appears to have been compiled mostly or even wholly out of previously written texts: it reads principally as a list of donations granted to or stolen from Cuthbert’s community by a procession of early Anglo-Saxon nobles who are rewarded or punished by Cuthbert accordingly.⁸

      Evidence of miracle collecting in Old English is even more faint. One surviving composition that could perhaps be thought of as a collection is the little text known as the Vision of Leofric. Though it does not concern any specific saint, it contains stories such as earl Leofric’s experience of seeing a marvelous light shine out in Canterbury cathedral. The Vision of Leofric is probably a post-Conquest composition, but there may have been pre-Conquest texts like it.⁹ Goscelin of St.-Bertin says he used an account