The vast majority of stories found in high medieval miracle collections, however, have quite a different ring. William of Canterbury made up his collection almost wholly from stories like that of Eilward of Westoning—stories that living people told about their own experiences. The miracles of the man who swallowed the pin-brooch, the paralyzed man healed by Edmund, the deaf-mute and the crippled girl healed by John of Beverley—these were all stories about the self. The anonymous collector of Swithun’s miracles mainly focused on such stories too. He describes, for instance, how a priest’s servant was extremely ill and in intense pain until he was brought to Swithun’s shrine, where he recovered after thrashing about on the floor and having a terrible nosebleed, and how a deaf boy supported by the monks, so silent that he “possessed the habits and nature of a fish,” recovered his hearing and began to speak.22 In his study of the twelfth-century miracle collection of Our Lady of Rocamadour, Marcus Bull has suggested that “we should treat the majority of miracle stories as the end-product of genuine attempts to formulate explanations of real experiences.”23 Even very brief chapters from the collections, such as the following from Benedict of Peterborough’s collection for Becket, appear to echo a story of personal experience: “In the same abbey another person was extremely swollen up. To say it shortly, after he drank the martyr’s water his stomach returned to its former size.”24 As bare as it is, this account almost certainly originated in someone’s telling of an experience of illness, of drinking, and of recovery of health—a story that likely meant a good deal to the teller.
Paging through miracle collections, one finds stories of personal illness and recovery, peril and rescue, oaths forgotten and remembered, injuries and punishments, and so on and on—there are thousands of such stories in the English miracle collections alone. Researchers in folklore studies and the social sciences term these stories “personal experience narratives,” “conversational narratives,” “memorates,” or, simply, “personal stories.”25 As these researchers have shown, the borders between “memorates” and “fabulates” are porous. A personal experience narrative might evolve into a folktale-like story over time (might something like that have happened with the old woman and the wolf?), while a folktale-like story might inspire new miracle stories of personal experience (the starling story could encourage people in a dangerous situation to invoke Becket).26 Yet most medieval miracle stories can be easily placed within one camp or the other, and it is crucial not to blur the distinctions between the two too much. Folktale-like stories tend to act in certain ways, conforming around certain structures and following certain dynamics of oral production and exchange; personal stories tend to act in quite different ways.
Most medieval miracle collectors were interested in hearing and preserving personal stories. As we read their texts, we need to orient our thinking to the dynamics and characteristics of such narratives. When miracle collectors exclaim at the sheer volume of stories available to them and complain that they can not possibly tell them all, for instance, we should believe them. To take just a few examples of such complaints, at the close of his account of a man recovered from a fever, the anonymous collector of the miracles of the Hand of St. James at Reading writes, “in a similar way and by a similar remedy another knight named Ralph Gilbuin was cured of a similar disease, as also were so many others, both men and women, that I cannot cover them all in this account.”27 A collector of the miracles of St. Bartholomew in London similarly despaired at the prospect of telling all the stories of the “men of the seaports”: “very many of them are wont to visit his holy church every year with lamps and peace offerings of oblations and to tell joyfully of his many miracles worked among them.”28 The anonymous Beverley collector noted, “the passage of time would detain me for a very long time if I wished to write down every single release of prisoners through the merits of St. John.”29
Such statements about the volume of miracle stories are so prevalent, particularly in prologues of miracle collections, that they are usually taken as a rhetorical device and pious propaganda.30 But the oral form at issue here is the personal story, “the most common form of narrative the world over,” in the words of Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps.31 Charles Keil has commented that “even if we calculate just one personal experience narrative per person, the planet’s proven narrative reserves are staggering, and the folklore empire will never suffer a scarcity of resources.”32 It is quite believable that the collectors at Reading, London, and Beverley heard far too many stories about recoveries from fevers, peril at sea, and released prisoners to try to tell them all. A good comparative example is the experience of a sociologist interested in oral stories told about saints, Candace Slater, who did field research in Brazil and Spain in the 1980s. To keep her projects “manageable,” Slater decided to eliminate all narratives based on personal experience from her source base, despite the fact that these were by far the easiest stories for her to elicit. In defense of this decision, Slater notes that in fifteen years 47,079 accounts of personal miracle stories were reported to those in charge of the canonization procedure of one of her saints.33
Folkloric stories are collective, communal creations. Personal stories are different. Individuals make them about themselves, all the time—it takes no special storytelling skill to make them, nor any special permission or expertise to claim that an experience is the result of divine intervention. Oral stories do not lend themselves to quantification, but there seems little question that there would have been many more personal miracle stories than folkloric miracle stories in circulation at any given time. Some cults would have been bigger than others, of course, but when collectors say in their prologues that there were many stories they were not recounting, most of them were likely telling the plain truth. The fact that compilers of miracle collections so rarely plagiarized from others is particularly suggestive. In her study of dozens of collections from France, Patricia Morison remarks, “of many hundreds of individual miracle-stories there is hardly a single duplication.”34 The same can be said about English miracle collections. Finding material, even for the laziest collectors, never seems to have been a problem.35
We need, then, to think in terms of large quantities. We also need to think of these stories as being exchanged in the same social circles where personal stories usually circulated. That is, every social circle, including the highest. In his study of Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum, Brian Patrick McGuire writes that the General Chapter of the Cistercian order should be seen as “a great yearly exchange center for stories … it seems to have been a general practice for the assembled abbots to share with each other edifying stories concerning monks in their own houses.”36 A text that provides a particularly interesting glimpse into this high-level circulation is the Dicta Anselmi et Quaedam Miracula, a text written by the Christ Church monk Alexander of Canterbury between about 1109 and 1116.37 In the Dicta section of the text, Alexander recounts some of the formal discourses he heard Anselm give. In the second section, Quaedam Miracula, Alexander retells miracle stories, most of which appear to derive from the time Anselm was exiled from Canterbury. Baldwin, a monk who accompanied Anselm into exile, tells a story about his illness and healing by St. Peter the apostle; Hugh, the abbot of Cluny who hosted Anselm and his exiled