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Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England

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Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England Wonderful to Relate ................. 17798$ $$FM 09-13-10 08:49:20 PS PAGE i THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor Edward Peters, Founding Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher. ................. 17798$ $$FM 09-13-10 08:49:20 PS PAGE ii Wonderful to Relate Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England Rachel Koopmans university of pennsylvania press philadelphia oxford ................. 17798$ $$FM 09-13-10 08:49:20 PS PAGE iii Copyright ᭧ 2011 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10987654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Koopmans, Rachel. Wonderful to relate : miracle stories and miracle collecting in high medieval England / Rachel Koopmans. p. cm. — (The Middle Ages series) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4279-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. English literature—Middle English, 1100–1500—History and criticism. 2. Literary form—History—To 1500. 3. Monastic and religious life—England—History Middle Ages, 600–1500. 4. Literature and society—England— History—To 1500. 5. Christian saints—England— Biography. 6. Miracles. I. Title. PR255.K66 2010 820.9—dc22 2010016970 ................. 17798$ $$FM 09-13-10 08:49:21 PS PAGE iv o my parents, herwin and aren oopmans ................. 17798$ $$FM 09-13-10 08:49:21 PS PAGE v ................. 17798$ $$FM 09-13-10 08:49:21 PS PAGE vi contents List of Illustrations ix Introduction 1 1. Narrating the Saint’s Works: Conversations, Personal Stories, and the Making of Cults 9 2. To Experience What I Have Heard: Plotlines and Patterning of Oral Miracle Stories 28 3. A Drop from the Ocean’s Waters: Lantfred of Fleury and the Cult of Swithun at Winchester 47 4. Fruitful in the House of the Lord: The Early Miracle Collections of Goscelin of St.-Bertin 60 5. They Ought to be Written: Osbern of Canterbury and the First English Miracle Collectors 79 6. Obvious Material for Writing: Eadmer of Canterbury and the Miracle-Collecting Boom 92 7. What the People Bring: Miracle Collecting in the Mid- to Late Twelfth Century 112 8. Most Blessed Martyr: Thomas Becket’s Murder and the Christ Church Collections 139 9. I Take Up the Burden: Benedict of Peterborough’s Examination of Becket’s Miracles 159 ................. 17798$ CNTS 10-14-10 12:06:58 PS PAGE vii viii contents 10. Choose What You Will: William of Canterbury and the Heavenly Doctor 181 Conclusion: The End of Miracle Collecting 201 Appendix 1: Manuscripts of the Christ Church Miracle Collections for Thomas Becket 211 Appendix 2: The Construction of Benedict of Peterborough’s Miracula S. Thomae 215 Appendix 3: The Construction of William of Canterbury’s Miracula S. Thomae 221 List of Abbreviations 225 Notes 229 Selected Bibliography 297 Index 321 Acknowledgments 335 ................. 17798$ CNTS 10-14-10 12:06:58 PS PAGE viii illustrations 1. Eilward of Westoning tells his story 10 2. Miracle collecting c.1075–c.1100 78 3. Miracle collecting c.1100–c.1140 96 4. Insane man cured at Becket’s tomb 110 5. Miracle collecting c.1140–c.1200 113 6. Spread of Benedict’s miracle collection for Becket 130 7. References to Becket miracula manuscripts 131 8. Dating of Benedict’s and William’s miracle collections 140 9. Canterbury cathedral and the murder of Thomas Becket 143 10. ‘‘Parallel miracles’’ in the Christ Church collections 150 11. Monk swabs a blind woman’s eyes 163 12. Ill boy kisses Becket’s tomb 164 13. Doctors examine leprous monk 189 ................. 17798$ ILLU 09-13-10 08:49:27 PS PAGE ix ................. 17798$ ILLU 09-13-10 08:49:27 PS PAGE x introduction Whenever I read a medieval miracle collection, I am reminded of the appeal of looking at a collection of butterflies. Both kinds of collections are hard to resist, no matter how much one might disapprove, in theory, of killing but- terflies, or of reveling in stories of miracles. The colors of the insects can be so startling, and their shapes so arresting, that it is easy to feel captured and chloroformed yourself, mesmerized by the variety of the display. There is a pleasure too in contemplating the ordering of the specimens: the straight rows, the squared and spread wings, the labels pasted under each one. The stories in medieval miracle collections line up like this as well. Caught in the nets of writers, spaced out and ordered, the stories neatly march along in chapter after chapter, some of them presenting such unexpected contours and coloring that you can feel your eyes widening in surprise. The zeal of the writers who made such collections seems as wondrous today as the stories of miracles. Collections of saints’ miracles fill the volumes of our editions of medieval sources in the same way butterfly collections of the early Victorian era clog the storerooms of our natural history museums. A few collections were highly formalized, the same stories reappearing in different guises again and again, but most collections of miracles contain no such plagiarism. Their narratives, often collected by a single enthusiastic writer, were derived not from other texts but from the swarm of stories in current oral circulation. Conversation about miracles sent writers to their desks when little else seemed worthy of written record. Some medieval collec- tors amassed hundreds of stories, creating textual giants that dwarfed even the longest of saints’ lives.1 R. W. Southern considered the ‘‘writing of marvels,’’ especially the En- glish creation of the first versions of the ‘‘Miracles of the Virgin,’’ to be one of the most significant achievements of the twelfth-century renaissance in England.2 Other historians have noted in passing that twelfth-century writers in England and elsewhere made many miracle collections, but the extent of ................. 17798$ INTR 09-13-10 08:49:31 PS PAGE 1 2introduction that production has not been quantified.3 By my count, writers living in England between 1080 and 1220 compiled at least seventy-five collections of saints’ posthumous miracles.4 Anglo-Saxon writers were largely uninterested in miracle collecting. It was in the late eleventh century, some decades after the Norman Conquest, that a miracle-collecting mania began to spread. In the course of the twelfth century and into the early thirteenth century, writers collected the miracles of famous Anglo-Saxon saints such as Cuthbert, Edmund, Swithun, and Æthelthryth, of lesser-known Anglo-Saxons such as Oswine, Ithamar, Frideswide, and Wenefred, of new saints like William of Norwich, Thomas Becket, and Gilbert of Sempringham, and also of bits of foreign saints housed in England: the miracles of the finger of St. Germanus (at Selby), the altar of St. Bartholomew (in London), and the hand of St. James (at Reading) became the focus of collectors in this period. After this outpouring of texts concerning every manner of saint, the collecting mania evaporated almost as quickly as it had begun. By the mid-thirteenth century, miracle collecting had again become a sporadic and occasional pursuit. In this book, I examine the miracle-collecting craze of high medieval England. I sketch out the parameters of the oral world from which the collec- tors drew their stories of divine intervention, chart the literary arc of miracle collecting from the late tenth to the early thirteenth century, and study the works of six influential collectors within this larger history. English miracle collections were written in the same monastic contexts and frequently by the same authors who produced the other Latin prose texts of the period. In terms of number of authors, miracle collecting was actually a more important and mainstream literary activity in England than the writing of chronicles.5 The creation of miracle collections is usually thought to have been driven by the local pressures of cults and the immediate political needs of monastic communities.6 Except in studies of pilgrims, disease, illness, and the like, it has been rare for miracle collections to be considered as a body.7 But the stark rise and fall of miracle collecting in high medieval England demonstrates that we need to think in terms of broader patterns of production, to read individ- ual collections within these broader patterns, to weigh the influence of spe- cific authors, to formulate explanations for peaks and troughs in the popularity of miracle collecting, and to recognize the miracle collection for what it was: a defining genre and major literary phenomenon of the long twelfth century. This book is set apart from other studies of medieval miracle collections in its attention to the creation and circulation of oral stories and in its con- ................. 17798$ INTR 09-13-10 08:49:32 PS PAGE 2 introduction 3 struction of a detailed chronological account—in essence, a literary his- tory—of English miracle collecting. A comprehensive survey of medieval miracle collecting would span the entire European continent and many cen- turies, and it remains to be seen how representative English miracle collecting might be.8 When the whole story is told, it may well be that miracle collecting in England stands at the head of twelfth-century developments. During this period, English miracle collectors produced two texts of wide European in- fluence: the ‘‘Miracles of the Virgin,’’ a text that was hugely popular through- out the late medieval period, and Benedict of Peterborough’s miracle collection for Thomas Becket, the most widely circulated shrine collection of the age.
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