The close interface between the collectors’ motivations and efforts and the oral telling of miracle stories unites these two phases of miracle collecting. The oral telling of miracle stories in this period is, of course, impossible to access directly, but it was likely an even more important historical phenomenon than the writing of the collections. The posthumous “fama” of saints was constituted by these oral stories, most of them, it appears, stories of personal and recent experience of a saint’s actions. These narratives suggested ideas and behaviors that could lead to the perception of still more miracles. As new stories multiplied, they erased the old ones from conversations, and these in turn could be replaced by still more new creations: this, I believe, was the essential process driving the growth of cults. Since written records of the stories are all we have left, it is tempting to read the writing as making or sustaining cults, but a cult did not need a text, and a text could not make a cult. Cults were orchestras of voices that could not be conducted, swarms of stories that shrank and expanded according to their own internal and often mysterious rhythms. Monks in high medieval England turned to writing as a formaldehyde that could stabilize the oral stories they most liked in a secure and unchanging format. The procedure was a stiffening and deadening one, quite the opposite of a propagandistic effort; throughout the high medieval period, English writers were engaged in imprisoning and pinning down stories, not setting them free. In the same way that one must understand the butterflies in a natural history display to be only dead and inactive representatives of a much larger whole, so we must be careful not to read the miracle stories frozen in textual collections as having had more impact than they actually had.
Between the writing and the telling of miracle stories, the telling was the dominant and autonomous discourse, likely many magnitudes larger than what we now see preserved in the texts. How this telling may have been different in different eras and regions or for different saints is all but impossible to extricate from the surviving texts. But though we never will know particulars of this conversational world, it is not wholly unfathomable. The texts contain many references to the telling of miracle stories, and oral stories and their circulation have been the subject of many studies in contemporary contexts. In Chapter 1, I propose that most of these oral stories were of the type that researchers in the social sciences term “personal stories”—stories that people told about their own experiences—and discuss the volume, longevity, and emotional intensity of such stories. In Chapter 2, I consider the dynamics of this circulating body of stories in more depth, arguing that many of the repetitive similarities between stories in different collections were not the result of writers working to set models. Rather, these similarities were already a feature of the oral stories the collectors heard. Oral miracle stories had a tremendous capacity to spread, to replicate themselves, and to spring up around a new saint: understanding these dynamics helps make sense of the functioning of medieval cults and the secondary position of miracle collectors within those cults.
In Chapter 3, I start tracing the history of English miracle collecting. I begin in the late Saxon period, and examine its sole substantial miracle collection: Lantfred of Fleury’s Translation and Miracles of Swithun, written in the 970s at Winchester. In Chapter 4, I study the early career and miracle collections written by a more famous foreign monk working in England, Goscelin of St.-Bertin, the only writer collecting miracle stories in England in the 1070s and 1080s. Both of these foreigners, I argue, thought more about their own careers and literary production in the making of these texts than local political concerns. But whereas Lantfred’s work found few imitators, Goscelin’s prolific and peripatetic labors helped spark off the new craze for miracle collecting in England. In Chapter 5, I examine the collection of the monk who appears to have been the first native English writer to imitate Goscelin: Osbern, a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, who compiled a collection of the miracles of Dunstan in the early 1090s. In Chapter 6, I map out the Anglo-Norman collecting boom of the early decades of the twelfth century and focus on a writer whose prolific output is representative of the period: Eadmer of Canterbury, Osbern’s younger colleague at Christ Church. In these chapters, I consider how oral stories of miracles may have been exchanged in the immediate aftermath of the Conquest. I argue that the work of convincing Normans of the validity and power of Anglo-Saxon saints had been completed before the burst of Anglo-Norman miracle collecting began. The collections of the period should be read within the context of the growing concern for preserving oral information in general and a fad for miracle collecting in particular. My close studies of the collections of Lantfred, Goscelin, Osbern, and Eadmer are designed to elucidate and flesh out the development of miracle collecting in this first phase of miracle collecting, to contrast the approaches of different collectors within the movement, and to demonstrate the advantages of reading miracle collections as a writer’s dialogue with a much larger oral discourse.
I devote Chapter 7 to an appraisal and chronological analysis of the many miracle collections made in England between c.1140 and c.1200, the period in which collectors began to focus on stories told by the laity. I show that the new trends in miracle collecting were well underway before the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170, but that his cult and the circulation of Benedict of Peterborough’s collection for Becket accelerated and solidified these trends among other English miracle collectors. In Chapters 8, 9, and 10, I focus on the story of miracle collecting for Becket at Christ Church. As Benedict was bringing his text to a conclusion, his colleague, William of Canterbury, was starting his own. William’s collection would not see anything like the circulation of Benedict’s, but it would be the longest compiled in medieval England. These two texts are the most impressive of all English miracle collections. In the three chapters dedicated to these texts, I situate them within their cultic and literary contexts and demonstrate how the personalities of Benedict and William shaped their strikingly different approaches to the stories they were hearing at Canterbury.
Collecting is comforting. As Susan Stewart has put it, collecting is an “objectification of desire.”11 The point and pleasure of collections is that they exist, that something has been saved and made visible, with luck, permanently, out of what would otherwise have vanished. By making miracle collections, English writers in the high medieval period could assuage their anxieties about the oral discourse and feel that they were saving it, improving on it, doing it good, in fact, even as it is obvious how self-promoting their efforts could be. But the more ambitious the writers were in their dreams of stabilization, the more defeating the oral world could become. Often, for example, the future, full of miracle stories of its own, forgot, ignored, or even lost the texts the writers had sent so lovingly from the past. Even what seem to be the simplest collecting goals, such as picking out the best stories and displaying them the best way, can reveal themselves to be impossible fantasies, pulling the collector into an endless round of joyless acquisition. And the more the collectors gathered in stories, the more the fissures and the problems within them—what do these stories really mean?—stood out.
In the conclusion to the book, I outline how miracle collecting fell in popularity among English writers in the thirteenth century. The telling of miracle