Wonderful to Relate. Rachel Koopmans
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she was frozen to those very objects—that did not necessarily mean he knew or remembered when this happened. How could Goscelin know where to insert such a story into his overall narrative of Wulfsige’s life and afterlife?
Often, it is clear, he did not know. Stories about the life, death, and burial of a saint should obviously go in that order, but things were much more free-floating when it came to posthumous miracles. Goscelin’s strategy was to place stories within the succession of religious leaders at the local house in question or (sometimes and) within the succession of Anglo-Saxon kings. In his Life and Miracles of Kenelm, for instance, he ties posthumous miracles to the time of King Cnut, Abbot Godwin, Abbot Godric, and then to the present living abbot, whom he does not name. Goscelin structures the Translation of Edith around the regimes of Archbishop Dunstan, Abbess Wulfthryth, King Cnut, then abbesses Brihtgifu, Ælfgifu, and finally Godiva, the living abbess. The succession of bishops forms the skeletal structure of the Life of Wulfsige, although past priors and kings—Cnut again—also make appearances. Quite a few of the miracles Goscelin tells directly concern these religious leaders: Abbess Ælfgifu’s eye is healed, Bishop Ælfwold and Prior Ælfweard have visions about translating Wulfsige, the present abbot of Winchcombe takes Kenelm’s relics on a tour to Clent, Kenelm’s martyrdom site, and so on.50 Goscelin never provides dates for these abbots, abbesses, kings, or bishops, but he uses a considerable amount of parchment moving the narrative from one leader to another. Many transitions between chapters concern the death of one and the succession of the next.
Goscelin sweated over these chronological frameworks, but, as we can see now, they are riddled with error. Goscelin starts his Translation of Edith, for instance, by announcing that “thirteen years” after her death, Edith appeared in a vision to Archbishop Dunstan, “then still living,” and demanded to be translated.51 Edith died in 984 or 987. Add thirteen and that makes 997 or 1000. At this point, Dunstan had been dead himself for at least nine years: there is no way to make these numbers work. In the Life and Miracles of Kenelm, Goscelin places a miracle story in the reign of Cnut (1016–35) and the regime of Abbot Godwin (1042–53).52 In the Life of Wulfsige, Goscelin refers to a bishop of Sherborne succeeding Wulfsige that we now know not to have existed.53 Editions of Goscelin’s texts bristle with footnotes noting and attempting to rectify his blunders. “Goscelin here seems to have got into confusion over his kings of England,” writes Rosalind Love in a typical editorial comment.54
Frustrating as they are, these mistakes are some of our best clues to Goscelin’s working process. He appears to have learned about these leaders the same way he learned about the miracles: by steeping himself in house conversation, listening and asking questions. The further back he tried to go, the more he struggled and stumbled. One can imagine the nuns of Wilton telling stories in which Dunstan played a role in Edith’s translation and not realizing themselves that this was chronologically impossible. It must have been equally difficult for the monks of Winchcombe to recall whether Abbot Godwin’s tenure overlapped with Cnut’s reign or not. Old Ælfmær’s memory seems to have failed him when it came to the names of Wulfsige’s immediate successors, or maybe Goscelin did not to think to ask him about this until it was too late, or got confused about what he had said. In sum, these are the kinds of mistakes one would expect to find if someone was attempting to put chronologies together working only with passed-down oral stories and very few written texts.55
Goscelin himself saw limits to what he could do in this situation. In his Life and Miracles of Kenelm, he skips over two centuries of Kenelm’s posthumous history, leaping from the story of Kenelm’s translation to Winchcombe (which Goscelin presents as occurring very soon after Kenelm’s death in the early ninth century) to a story placed in the time of Cnut, saying, “Having recounted afresh these things of old sent from heaven, let us describe a few of the many miracles of modern times and of our own time” [ex multis moderni et nostri temporis].56 Goscelin uses the term “modern times” again in his Life of Wulfsige, here as a transition after a story about Cnut: “of his very many miracles, we here faithfully report in addition to the above those which have been wrought in modern times.”57 Though Goscelin does not explicitly mark out a transition to “modern times” in the Translation of Edith, here again, strikingly, he launches his account with three stories about Cnut and Emma.58 The reign of Cnut, about fifty years earlier, seems to have been the dividing line for Goscelin, what he considered to be the limit of living memory and after which he could start to write with confidence.
It is hard to say now whether the monks and nuns who told stories to Goscelin would also have viewed Cnut’s reign as the starting gate of the “modern,” or whether this was Goscelin’s own working shorthand. In any case, “modern” stories, the ones from about a generation ago, were his favorites. Goscelin’s texts bulge with stories from about twenty to thirty years before his time. Most of the posthumous miracle stories Goscelin tells in the Life and Miracles of Kenelm derive from the time of Abbot Godwin (1042–53).59 In the Translation of Edith, Goscelin highlights the abbacy of Brihtgifu (c.1040–65).60 In the Life of Wulfsige, Bishop Ælfwold, who held the bishopric sometime after 1045 until c.1062, is mentioned more than Goscelin’s own mentor Bishop Herman.61 The closer Goscelin got to the present, the more cursory he became. After story upon story from the time of Abbot Godwin in the Life and Miracles of Kenelm, Goscelin makes an explicit transition to “miracles recently brought about” [nuper patrata], and describes a miracle connected to Godric, abbot of Winchcombe from 1054 to 1066.62 It is a short chapter, followed by three even shorter chapters about events “last year” (likely sometime in the 1070s or early 1080s) and so the text comes to a swift close. In the Translation of Edith, Goscelin labels a miracle that happened “in the time of bishop Herman”—probably dead when Goscelin was writing—a “recent” miracle, and with that story, he ends the text.63
Stories the older monks and nuns remembered from their youth were clearly the most to Goscelin’s liking in terms of time period. In terms of type, he tells a wide range in all three of these texts—healings, releases, property disputes, feast day punishments, and so forth—but he seems to have especially liked stories that explained the existence of shrines and cultic objects. Goscelin has much more to say about relic translations than Lantfred did, even though most of the translations he describes happened before he was born.64 Structuring his texts by abbacies made tracking and inserting multiple translation stories easier, and may well have determined his decision to organize his texts this way in the first place. Goscelin was also eager to tell the stories behind objects like the distaff and spindle at Wulfsige’s shrine, the blood-stained psalter at Winchcombe, the little white pallium at Wilton, the broken chains hanging up at Edith’s shrine, Wulfsige’s staff, Edith’s pastoral ring, and where the gold came from for the shrines.65 The difficulty was knowing where to put these stories. Goscelin terms the distaff and spindle story a “modern” miracle, for instance, but does not connect it to any bishop or prior.66
Miracle stories about other local saints were also difficult to place. The standard format of a text focused unwaveringly on a single saint did not seem to reflect the conversational realities Goscelin encountered at many houses. At Wilton, Goscelin was hearing a significant number of miracle stories about Wulfthryth, Edith’s mother. At Sherborne, Wulfsige and Juthwara also seem to have been quite tightly linked together by the 1070s—Goscelin said that they shone “with twin brightness.”67 A century earlier, Lantfred may well have been hearing about miracles performed by St. Iudoc or other Winchester saints, but kept his text’s focus unwaveringly on Swithun.68 Goscelin, with his stronger interest in translations, objects, and the development of cults at these houses, found ways to slip in a few stories about Wulfthryth and Juthwara even though they fit neither the organization nor the titles of his works. He made excuses for the insertion of a mini-vita and miracle collection for Wulfthryth in his Translation of Edith: “it is right that the same page should celebrate them both together since the same church embraces them.”69 Juthwara’s story appears rather abruptly toward the end of the Life of Wulfsige, where Goscelin jumps back a bishop in order to explain when Juthwara was translated, reaches further