The medieval cult of saints is often presented as being generated, led, and controlled by the religious aristocrats of the society. Bishops and abbots are envisioned as making cults at tombs for their own self-promotion and interest, with pilgrims responding to the call, experiencing miracles, and depositing their coins.62 But while the religious elite could tell miracle stories and hope to create their own stories of divine intervention—as Osbern did—their exalted status availed them little in the midst of the ever-shifting body of voices and stories that made up a living cult. Working in an age before print and significant levels of literacy, much less television or other powerful communicative tools, the religious elite had extremely limited means of directing the spread of these stories or how they were told. Nor could they generate cults at will. Miracle collections often represent attempts to radically simplify the discourse, to make it sound as though a “we,” the religious, have a “them,” ordinary people, in harness, but while miracle collectors found these sorts of representations satisfying we must not mistake them for the whole reality. The powers inherent in moving miracle stories, some of the most forceful narratives people make, were multidimensional and directional. Moreover, much as we might envision medieval people making up miracles for themselves out of the contingency of their experience, those experiences were still as unpredictable as ours, with no way for them to presage what the divine would or would not do, no matter what they hoped or desired.
Before turning in earnest to the collectors who decided to take some of these oral stories and turn them into texts, in the next chapter I will examine another fundamental feature of this oral world: the ways in which personal miracle stories could be and often were patterned after each other. It would seem that the presence and knowledge of other people’s stories would have little effect on anyone’s own creation. Certainly, all these oral creations were unique: the knight of Thanet’s story, as we have seen, was very much his own. Nevertheless, the production of personal miracle stories was not completely free-form. Those other stories mattered. The flow of conversation had direction, moving in certain channels and not others, constraining individual voices even as it was made up and directed by them.
CHAPTER TWO
To Experience What I Have Heard: Plotlines and Patterning of Oral Miracle Stories
Readers have long been struck by the similarities of stories preserved in miracle collections. The late Victorian editors of the miracle collection of William of Norwich, for instance, commented that “even in their nauseous details [William’s miracles] all have a strong family likeness to one another.”1 Scholars today use less florid language but often make the same observation, describing medieval miracle collections as “extraordinarily repetitive,” “stereotyped,” “highly conventionalized,” and “schematized and topoiridden.”2 The types or clusters of certain kinds of stories in miracle collections have especially attracted attention. It is a rare collection that does not include a story about a blind person gaining sight or a paralyzed person regaining movement. Nor can one read many collections without running across stories about liberated prisoners, sailors spared from shipwreck, lepers being healed, evil people being punished, and so on.3
Medievalists have formulated an explanation for this clustering, an explanation that itself seems to be repeated and rehearsed in analysis after analysis. The idea is that early Christian and early medieval miracle collections were normative for the genre. These early texts set up the topoi or types of stories that later collectors would work to include and imitate in their own creations. Hedwig Röckelien argues, for instance, that the miracle narratives in Augustine’s City of God “already contain the most important of the motifs and types that are to be found in the later miracle stories in stereotypical repetition.”4 Marcus Bull speaks of an “unofficial but widely recognized typological ‘canon’” that “governed the selection and presentation of mainstream miracles.” He notes that “in addition to biblical precedents, early writers such as St. Augustine, Sulpicius Severus, Pope Gregory the Great, Gregory of Tours and Bede had cumulatively created a body of language and imagery that was highly influential.”5 The writing of miracle collections is often described as a kind of clash, with the accounts of pilgrims colliding with and being transformed by the typological preoccupations and didactic goals of the writers. Thomas Head speaks of two movements in the writing process: “from the folkloric culture of the layman to the clerical culture of the monk, and from the reality of the event to the topoi of the text.”6 Gabriella Signori expressively refers to this as a “cooking” process in a “miracle kitchen,” in which the “raw” oral account is “cooked” to the clerical norms of the writer.7
In its extreme forms, this assumption that miracle collectors were working to topoi can lead to the suggestion that certain stories in collections were invented altogether. This argument has been applied to the cluster of stories concerning lawsuits in Osbern of Canterbury’s collection of the miracles of Dunstan, written in the early 1090s. The knight of Thanet’s story, discussed at length in Chapter 1, is one of three stories of legal disputes in Osbern’s collection. The other two concern Archbishop Lanfranc’s dispute with Odo of Bayeux (William the Conqueror’s half-brother), and Osbern’s own dispute with unnamed opponents.8 In all three stories, the men pray to Dunstan to help, have an encouraging vision, and win their legal case. Jay Rubenstein uses the similarities between these stories to dismiss the one about Lanfranc. He argues that the stories about Osbern and about the knight of Thanet demonstrate that “the triumph of a saint in a legal proceeding is a topos of the Dunstan cult.”9 He then suggests that “Osbern knew of Dunstan’s association with miraculous legal interventions and wished to connect the saint with the most famous legal victory in the life of the incomparabilis Lanfranc.” So, then, Osbern had no “factual basis” for the story: it “most likely … originated in Osbern’s imagination.”10
It could be that Osbern imagined Lanfranc’s resort to Dunstan. Shelving the story about Lanfranc as the repetition of a “topos,” though, as if the fact that this story sounds similar to others automatically makes it less credible, is problematic. In general, topoi arguments have not served the study of miracle collections well. Vitae writers, particularly in the early medieval period, often did imitate each other’s work very closely, and this has attuned scholars to be highly sensitive to the ways hagiographers could model their texts on others. Miracle collectors did, of course, “cook” their books, choosing the stories they wanted and writing them as they pleased, even inventing stories if they really thought it necessary. But the stories they heard were not raw. Narrative imitation occurs on an oral level, too, and the personal miracle stories the collectors heard were already modeled after and shaped by others in oral circulation.
In this chapter, I will suggest that most of the clustering of similar stories now to be seen in miracle collections resulted from oral rather than textual processes. People aimed, as Osbern’s knight of Thanet put it, “to know by experience what I have heard”: they wanted to live out for themselves the miracle stories they knew.11 Circulating stories functioned as blueprints for the active creation and telling of new ones, a process that tended to create clusters of like-sounding narratives. While we cannot reenter that original oral world in any detail, thinking about oral patterning and the power of plotlines helps make sense of many of the similarities one sees in medieval miracle collections.12 I will begin with the conception and communication of the miracle plotline itself.
The Miracle Plotline and Patterns of the Divine
One reason the stories in miracle collections sound so similar is that they constantly repeat a single plotline. The knight, Osbern, and Lanfranc