Wonderful to Relate. Rachel Koopmans
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were, if you heard a poor woman tell a miracle story about herself, it would be about a healing; if you heard a wealthy religious man, it would not. It may well be that poor women became ill more frequently than wealthy and well-fed religious men, but that does not account for such a stark skewing of the percentages. To explain these differences, it is best to think first about issues of storytelling and authority. A healing almost always involves visual signs. Other people are aware when you get sick and when you get well: even if you want to, it is not easy to hide the evidence of illness. A vision, on the other hand, usually leaves no visible traces, nor is it a shared experience. You could have a vision every night and no one would be the wiser. Convincing listeners that you had a vision is significantly more difficult than convincing them you’ve been sick and healed. In the case of the knight of Thanet’s story, a listener would simply have to trust that the knight was not lying about his state of mind, his prayer, or his dream: there is nothing that he can point to in order to buttress his story. Fortunately for the knight, he was not in great need of a buttress. The knight’s social position as a high status male spoke for him, filling in and overriding any doubtful gaps.
Because of famous female visionaries like Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and Catherine of Siena, it can be hard to imagine that women had more difficulty than men telling personal stories of visions in the medieval climate, but miracle collections strongly suggest that this was so. Hildegard, Julian, and Catherine were exceptional. Poor women probably had as many dreams or experiences that they took as visions as anyone else in medieval society, but the general rule was they would have a harder time getting their stories of visions believed, particularly if they were talking to an elite man. Rules could be bent. William of Canterbury, for instance, tells a story about a young woman named Adelicia whose dreams he interpreted as visions even though her own parents viewed them as mere illusions.46 For some, stories of visions could work to subvert and even overturn normal social and religious hierarchies: a laywoman named Godelief, for instance, claimed to have had visions from Thomas Becket that directed her to expose the faults of other people in her village.47 But, in general, one’s gender, social status, and religious status had an influence on what one could or could not easily say. Even though he retold Godelief’s stories in his collection, William expressed hesitancy about them.48 For every Adelicia who kept telling her stories despite her parents’ disapproval, there must have been other women who kept silent, lacking the brazenness needed to break free of the heavy crust of social expectations.
Self-censorship probably had as large a role as any external reproof in the social stratification of stories. Benedict writes about a layman named Adam who twice saw and heard a man speaking to him in his sleep but twice dismissed it all as a mere dream. It was only when a priest gave him the go-ahead that Adam felt comfortable interpreting his dreams as a vision.49 Self-censorship could work for those higher up as well. Osbern tells a story about a rich man named Ceowulf who, although he was very ill, did not want to go to Dunstan’s memorial because he felt embarrassed at the prospect of the “company of the poor.” Finally Ceowulf swallows his pride, goes, and is healed, but afterward, when his friends comment how wonderful it is that God helps the powerful as well as the poor, Ceowulf replies: “Do you count me among the poor, since you say I was healed among them? It is not so, since although Dunstan was not there, he touched me.”50
At the end of the story Ceowulf is punished for his pride. Still, this story helps to explain why the stories in miracle collections connected to high status men are less likely to be stories of healing. Recoveries from desperate illness always made good stories, and one certainly finds such stories about elite men in miracle collections—Osbern describes, for instance, how Archbishop Lanfranc was saved from a serious illness by Dunstan.51 But social factors pressed people into the creation of certain types of stories. It is not just that the elites, unlike the poor, were able to afford medical care and did not resort to the saints as soon or as often. This mattered, but running parallel was also an aversion to the “company of the poor,” a desire to have a story to tell with more cachet, more suited to one’s class, more like those one heard one’s fellows telling: stories of lawsuits won, enemies punished, visions seen, even hawks recovered.
The precise factors acting on individuals shifted depending on particular social constellations, circumstances, personalities, and audiences. It is now extremely difficult to see how this operated in all but the most general terms.52 Nevertheless, such factors must have worked not just in the types of stories people created but also in how they told their stories. There were all sorts of ways to make a story a little more flashy, to claim a bit more or tell it at more length, or to downgrade it, claiming less or leaving out parts that were more risky. The kind of adjustments people might make to their stories is suggested by an emendation Benedict made to the story of John, a servant, who fell into the Tweed River. Benedict writes that John, as he made for the shore, “thought that he was walking” on the water, but, in actuality, he was just swimming” [ambulare se aestimans, super aquas natabat].53 How many other lower-class laymen might have saved Benedict the trouble of such a narrative demotion—and saved themselves from sneering or incredulous looks and questions—by toning and cutting down their stories themselves? How often did the collectors reject stories altogether that did not seem to them to befit the social position of their tellers?
Medieval miracle stories are often seen as the particular province of “the people,” especially peasants or the poor. Sometimes this sense of miracles being the religious expression of the lowest classes is taken to such an extent it seems as if being literate or wealthy must have put one at a disadvantage for creating miracle stories. But while the literate and the wealthy tended to tell different kinds of miracle stories about themselves than the poor, they certainly told them, and when they told them to a collector, they probably got to talk at more length than the poor. Of course, there could be exceptions. Benedict decided to give the story told by Eilward, the pauper who could see again after his judicial blinding, the longest treatment in his collection. In Eilward’s case, a fantastic story that excited Benedict and the other monks at Christ Church to no end, the normal rules were reversed. But, in general, those with more social authority were freer to tell lengthy, detailed, and vision-filled stories about themselves.
Conversational Currents and Cautions
The patterning processes discussed here are some of the key ways in which stories already in circulation and social conditions could shape the creation of new personal stories. When these factors worked together, they could create sets of strikingly similar narratives. The knight, Osbern, and Lanfranc all think to ask for help with their legal dispute from Dunstan and to invoke his aid with a prayer. Who did this first is now impossible to tell, but the conversational links between these three men almost certainly had an impact on the types of stories they individually produced. No doubt, too, it was not just the content of these stories but in the ways that they were told that the connections between these three men had an effect. In the same way that different peer groups, regions, or families have distinct ways of telling stories, so there must have been distinct patterns of vocabulary, speech rhythms, and imagery in the telling of miracle stories in different medieval communities, patterns also in a constant state of change as small innovations were picked up and imitated by others. The interaction likely between the knight, Osbern, and Lanfranc was at work on many different levels and between many different people in the oral world as a whole. Taken together, these currents of conversation made up a vast, dynamic, and multifaceted sea of narrative exchange that, though now essentially unmappable, deeply shaped how people created their own stories of divine intervention. Each person told his or her own story, but they all were patterned, some more, some less, on the stories already in circulation.
The oral realm of story creation and circulation must, then, constantly be considered when miracle collections are subjected to analysis. In this chapter I have surveyed how the stories in current circulation shaped how people created new ones: we must also consider, of course, what was likely to happen to a story as it was picked up and retold by new speakers. As they moved away from their creators, the sharp individual edges of stories were likely to be smoothed away, making stories sound even more similar to each other.54 As memories became fuzzy, stories might well morph together or become more fantastic