Looking closely at the other types of stories that cluster in miracle collections, it is striking how many of them are severe problems that have the potential for abrupt reversal. Drownings, for instance, are very well represented. The limp body drawn from the water: here again is a spectacular problem and, here again, if water is expelled from the lungs soon enough, there is a chance for quick and total recovery. What a great story. In fact, if you forgot to say a prayer or promise a gift in all the excitement, you might well think a saint must have helped anyway, so dramatic is that experience. It is also instructive to note what one does not find in collections. Some medieval people must have suffered serious burns, for example. There are numerous stories in miracle collections about fires dying out or fires moving in a different direction or fires not injuring a particular object, but I have seen none about burned people recovering from their injuries. Quick and total recovery from a bad burn does not happen today, and it apparently did not happen then either.
Ships about to sink, people chained and languishing in prison, the mad raving and thrashing, the sick in awful pain or delirious from fever: these are more of the daunting scenarios that are frequently described in miracle collections. The chief reason we see so many of these types of stories is that certain problems lent themselves to the perception of divine aid. Only a percentage of those asking for help would have recovered, of course, but these processes worked to create large clusters of like stories.
Once these clusters reached a certain density, moreover, another self-reinforcing cycle would have been activated. Large numbers of stories gave a reassuring cultural sanction to the appeal to divine aid for particular problems. If a woman who had heard many stories of blind people being miraculously healed became blind herself, she might well seek divine aid as her first course of action. She might even find it difficult to envision any another solution for her problem. As Elaine Showalter has noted in a similar context, “the human imagination is not infinite … we all live out the social stories of our time.”36 In a conversational culture saturated with stories of blind people healed by saints, the majority of people becoming blind will seek such healing themselves, making it likely that a significant number of new stories will be produced along the same lines.37
The numbers of stories concerning certain types of problems would have waxed and waned in different cultural circumstances and in different conversational circles. Not every society exploits all the possibilities afforded by the miracle plotline. One scenario likely to result in abrupt reversals but rarely encountered in medieval miracle collections is the person in desperate need of money or material help. Contemporary American religious culture produces masses of stories involving this scenario, and masses of books and speakers encouraging the creation of more. The bestseller The Prayer of Jabez, for instance, urges its readers to pray daily for God to “bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory.”38 While there are clusters of stories concerning money in the Becket collections, they have a very different flavor. Benedict, for instance, tells a story about a shoemaker named Curbaran who finds a precious gold coin with Becket’s help. Curbaran, though, had not been praying for money. He had been praying daily for Becket’s soul (a mistake, Benedict comments, but never mind), and as a reward for his devotion Becket appeared to him in a vision and directed him to the hidden coin.39 Even this is unusual: in most of the money miracles in the Becket collections, money is given to Thomas, not received from him.40 There is simply not the proactive seeking after money or material objects familiar from today’s miracle stories. Medieval saints cure blindness, divert fires, revive the drowned, punish enemies, and so on. They rarely provide windfalls, apparently because they were not often asked for them.
Large clusters of stories about particular problems formed in part because certain problems were more likely to result in satisfying narratives than others, in part because people tend to imitate rather than innovate, and in part because of what people think to ask for at particular times. Nevertheless, in any categorization of stories in miracle collections, there is inevitably a sizable “other” category. If enough people kept knocking at the door of miraculous aid, even the most unlikely and difficult problems might be solved. In the early years of the Becket cult, it would appear that a significant proportion of all the many problems people experienced in England and in France were offered up to Becket for help. In these circumstances, numerous stories appeared of blind eyes seeing again, swellings reducing, scaly skin clearing, pregnant women surviving difficult childbirths—all the usual problems that suit the miracle plotline. But there were a few other highly unusual, lucky strikes too. There was the man digging into a hill who was buried alive, called for Becket’s aid, and survived in an air pocket until others heard him calling and dug him out; the man shot through the neck with an arrow who asked for Becket’s aid and recovered; and the man who had his eyes sliced by the judge’s knife, and yet, some days later after committing himself to Becket’s care, found he could see with one of them again.41 The collectors and people at the time were well aware that these stories were out of the ordinary run of miracles, and they were greatly celebrated.42
Becket, invoked by thousands, got credit for more outlying stories than most, but in every collection there are stories that do not fit any of the usual clusters. Even stories concerning the most typical problems, moreover, were told by individuals who experienced unique circumstances and created stories that, for all their similar strands, were still unique. No matter how many stories of the blind seeing you might have heard, if your closest friend became blind and then could see again after a pilgrimage, the story would have a deep impact. The sameness that can be wearying when reading many miracle collections with their flattened and abbreviated accounts would have been much less pronounced in the oral climate in which each story was told by an individual and grew out of a unique personality. Osbern, the knight of Thanet, and Lanfranc all told stories about lawsuits, prayers, and Dunstan’s aid, but if we could hear them tell their stories, there surely would be no mistaking whose story was whose. What we might notice, though, was that the kinds of stories to be heard from men of such high status tended to be different, generally speaking, from those told by people lower in the social scale. An important kind of patterning and grouping of oral miracle stories was caused by social stratification. Status influenced how a person told a story, how listeners reacted to it, and what kind of story he or she was likely to produce.
Social Status and Patterns of Story Creation
Scholars have often pointed out that issues of social status must have come into play as wealthy monastic writers listened to the stories of illiterate peasants and decided how or whether to recount their stories, but few have considered how extensively social status could impact the making of stories in the first place.43 Certain kinds of people tend to be associated with certain kinds of stories in medieval miracle collections. In his analysis of over 150 French collections from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Pierre-André Sigal uncovered some striking correlations. Women of the “popular classes” almost all told healing miracles: 90.1 percent of their stories concerned their bodies. Men of the popular classes told fewer healing miracles: 70.7 percent of their stories concerned healings, still a majority, but notably less than women of their same status. The percentage of healing miracles falls precipitously with the stories of the religious. Only 22.8 percent of their stories concerned their bodies. What they were talking about instead were their dreams: a whopping 44.6 percent, nearly half of their stories, concerned visions. In contrast, a tiny percentage, just 1.2 percent, of the popular classes told vision narratives.44 What Sigal found is not unusual: similar proportions to these are evident in other categorizations of stories in medieval miracle collections.45