Wonderful to Relate. Rachel Koopmans
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Dunstan’s aid. Almost every story in medieval miracle collections follows the same problem to solution trajectory. The reason for the solution is always the same too: some form of divine intervention. The miracle plotline—problem, divine intervention, solution—can accommodate an enormous variety of human experience, and the range of stories in miracle collections is often broader than people realize, but still, these stories all have the same basic components lined up in the same general way.13
Explaining human experience by means of a miracle was not, of course, a medieval invention. The miracle is an extremely ancient story line, present in the earliest known texts. Somebody at some point must have first had the idea of reading past experience in this way—interpreting positive change as the result of divine intervention—but this happened such a long time ago that we may consider the idea to be, in human terms, timeless. Osbern and the religious elite did not have to work to communicate the elemental miracle plotline to people like the knight of Thanet. Any member of medieval society would have known it from a young age. Indeed, it is so ubiquitous in human conversation that, to this day, even in secular societies, it seems just to be known, not heard or learned.14
The miracle plotline is an extraordinarily powerful cultural concept. The knowledge of this plotline could shape not just how a knight of Thanet might interpret his past, but also what he did in the present and what he hoped for the future. It appears that the vast majority of the miracle stories recounted in medieval collections were created by people who consciously and proactively attempted to acquire miraculous solutions to their problems and make the miracle plotline their own. Osbern’s account of the knight of Thanet’s story suggests how this works. At the outset, the knight of Thanet has a problem: the abbot of St. Augustine’s has seized his inheritance. The knight had a range of options for solving this problem, options suggested by what worked for others in similar situations. He could prepare a fine speech for his defense, bribe the abbot, hope for the best and trust in the workings of the law, and so on. As the knight tried to decide what to do, he remembered how Osbern “frequently used to extol father Dunstan…. Now, I said to myself, I have the chance to know by experience what I have heard.” Because of Osbern’s stories, the knight prayed for Dunstan’s help. If the knight had then lost his case, if this course of action had failed to resolve his problem, there would have been no miracle. But since the knight was successful, he too had a story to tell of Dunstan’s intervention. If others heard the knight’s story and decided to try out its blueprint as well, still more analogous stories could be produced.15
One can begin to see how and why personal miracle stories took on the coloring of others in circulation. The knight’s story, like those Osbern was telling him, named Dunstan as the intervening divine figure. The medieval Christian idea that dead humans of special qualities could act in the present world was conceived many centuries before the knight or Osbern was born, and it appears to have been patterned on other, earlier religious traditions.16 Still, what one might call the Christian saint metanarrative was a specific cultural conception of the miracle plotline, one that had not always been present in western Europe, much less in other societies. Throughout the medieval period this metanarrative underwent some slow shifts, but remained relatively stable overall: the intervening divine figure at the center of most medieval personal miracle stories was a saint.
Underneath the umbrella of this defining metanarrative, the discourse was in constant flux, with specific saintly figures going in and out of conversational currency at different times and places. People seeking saintly help usually had many options to choose from. The knight of Thanet need not have selected Dunstan. How about Mildred, the saint associated with Thanet who had been translated to St. Augustine’s in the early eleventh century? How about Cuthbert, Edmund, or Æthelthryth, the famed English saints? Or maybe a non-English saint, St. Denis or St. James? Or perhaps someone new, as yet untried? The strength of a saint’s cult depended on the collective weight of such individual decisions. Sometimes, as with the many thousands of people appealing to Thomas Becket in the late twelfth century, a saint new on the scene could win big in the saintly sweepstakes, his or her stories sweeping through conversational networks and drowning out those of other saints. Local favorites might be appealed to for years, the successes generating a stream of stories for decades or centuries. In other cases, a spring of stories concerning a particular saint might well up for a year or two and then disappear entirely. Some saints might be favored only in the stories of a single region while others were talked about far and wide.
All this depended on which stories were in current circulation, which stories individuals heard and chose to imitate, and which of those narrative trials were successful. A single story might open up a fountainhead of narrative creation, while other stories with seemingly equal potential might never have any progeny at all. There must have been a few people willing to try out a new possibility before anyone else did, a few unwilling to experiment at all, and a lot in the middle, like the knight of Thanet, who turned to the narratives of friends and neighbors for possible solutions. Could the knight of Thanet have suffered a failure with another saint before he tried out Osbern’s favorite? Had he ever appealed to a Christ Church saint before? Did Osbern’s stories drown out those of someone else close to the knight? As we rarely know anything about the context of such individual decisions or the constellation of circulating narratives, it is often extremely difficult to understand, from any analytical perspective, why some saints were at the center of so many miracle stories and others, seemingly as attractive, were not.
We will never be able to reconstruct all the specific ways in which the stories the knight of Thanet had heard inspired his own course of action, or the stories he told about himself, or the actions others took—much less how this worked for all the hundreds of other stories in high medieval miracle collections. Nevertheless, what is clear is that though the knight’s story was unique to him, it was blueprinted on others he had heard before. He did not invent the underlying plotline of his story or the culturally specific form of that plotline, the Christian saint metanarrative. He did not invent the idea of appealing to Dunstan as a divine figure. Nor did the blueprinting process stop there. Stories in circulation suggested not just who to ask for help, but also how that asking should be done.
Patterns of Invocations
Once the knight of Thanet decided that Dunstan was his saint of choice, he kneeled and prayed. Osbern writes that he said: “God of father Dunstan, favor my part today.” Invocations form a part of nearly all stories in high medieval miracle collections, usually appearing in the point of the story after the problem is described and before the solution takes shape. In some stories a saint is unintentionally invoked, as when a person insults a saint and provokes divine punishment. In cases in which an individual is too ill or otherwise unable to ask for help, the invocation might be done by friends or relatives. Most of the stories, though, follow a predictable pattern: the saint acts after aid is specifically requested by the person in need.
The repetitiveness of this narrative arc and the similarity of many of the invocations are another reason why accounts of personal miracles can sound so much the same. The knight was obviously not the first to think of praying for help. A verbal request is the most ancient and most widespread mode of divine invocation. Osbern and Lanfranc also chose to pray for Dunstan’s help, as did other people in the stories of Osbern’s collection, as did many other people in many other societies with many other deities. Still, there was much that was culturally specific even about prayers designed to invoke the divine: how to arrange one’s body, for example (the knight knelt), and especially what kinds of words should be said. The knight’s prayer, carefully phrased to invoke God through Dunstan rather than Dunstan himself, looks suspiciously like Osbern’s own tweaking. Was the knight really so aware that God, not Dunstan, should be considered the ultimate source for any help he received?
Perhaps he was. Perhaps those conversations with Osbern shaped the words the knight said in just this way. Whether or not, the knight must have known that he could try to get Dunstan’s attention by other means. Prayers were just one option. The knight had almost certainly heard stories in which saints were stimulated to action by a person’s contact with a relic, by entry into sanctified space, or by the presentation of a gift. These were also very old ideas, and they too took on a variety of culturally specific forms depending on the kinds of stories being exchanged in a particular time and place. Stories