Wonderful to Relate. Rachel Koopmans
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judge in Rome; Tytso, a monk in the cell of Blangy in Normandy where Anselm stayed for a time, tells about a child living in the area who was afflicted with a demon; the archbishop of Lyon, another of Anselm’s hosts, tells a story about a clerk in his church named Ademar, and so on.38
As the editors of Alexander’s text point out, “the only connection that most of the thirty-two stories have with Anselm arises from the fact that the author heard them in Anselm’s company.”39 Alexander’s collection paints a picture of archbishops, abbots, and monks gathering together not just to hear Anselm’s formal discourses but also to hear stories from each other’s stock of personal miracles, to exchange news of what the divine had done in that region or in their past experience. The stories Alexander recounts were probably told over a space of some years, but the movement in Alexander’s collection from story to unrelated story and speaker to speaker is probably quite a good portrait of the mishmash of subjects and voices in most conversations about miracles.
Interest in divine activity could and clearly often did form common ground across customary boundaries of social class, age, gender, and religious status, as one sees with the story of Godric, the pin-brooch swallower, standing before Queen Matilda. Catherine Cubitt writes that “oral stories of saintly exploits must have circulated within the intersections between lay and religious, in monastic ambits created not only by pastoral ministry but also by the ties of property ownership and tenurial relations.”40 Innumerable secondhand, many third- or even fourth-hand retellings of personal stories are visible in English miracle collections. Priests retell the stories of their parishioners, abbots of their monks, parents of their children, husbands of their wives, mistresses of their servants, innkeepers of their customers, neighbors of their neighbors, and many other permutations.41 Benedict of Peterborough relates a story about a Becket miracle that he heard from a priest who heard it from a mother who heard it from her children, and also a story he heard from a “truthful man” who heard it from a certain Gilbert who heard it from a blind man.42 One of the longest daisy chains visible in the English collections concerns a woman who worked as the governess of the children of the knight Herbert de Fourches. This woman, whose name is not recorded, had a vision of Æthelthryth in a church in the west country. Prior Osbert of Daventry heard about the vision from the woman’s companions. He retold the story of the vision to Osbert of Clare. Osbert of Clare wrote a letter about the vision and sent it to the monks of Ely. At Ely, the compiler of the Liber Eliensis preserved Osbert’s letter along with many other accounts of Æthelthryth’s miracles: this compiler was at least three stages removed from the woman’s oral description of her vision.43
Some stories were particularly volatile, reaching dozens or even hundreds of listeners besides the collectors. Eilward of Westoning’s miracle is an example of a story that moved very rapidly, like an exploding firework, into many conversational circles. In addition to the crowds of ordinary people who came to hear his story, we know that the burgesses of Bedford, the bishop of Durham, and the monks of Christ Church—and likely many others of their religious status and social rank—came to know the story of this pauper.44 We must envision many more listeners and retellings of stories than are spelled out in the miracle collections, in which stories are usually only moving toward the collectors themselves. If we could map it, the conversational web along which stories about Thomas Becket moved between Bedford and Canterbury, Canterbury and southern England, and England and the wider medieval world on the day Eilward arrived in Canterbury would probably look something similar to the lines of a telephone network. This map would be more bewildering in its complexity the closer we came to the reality of the conversational exchange of miracle stories in this period. Stories about Becket would not be the only ones moving through this network, and all the conversational lines connecting people would be in a constant state of flux.
The stories themselves would also be in a state of flux and constant turnover. In comparison to folkloric miracle stories, the elephants of the oral world—slow-moving, long-lasting, not very numerous—personal miracle stories were more like butterflies. They were everywhere; they fluttered and darted in and out of innumerable conversations; but they were also short-lived. An individual might tell some personal stories again and again throughout his or her life, but most are recounted a few times, or even just once. Some personal stories may be retold after a person’s death, but not as much, and not for long. Once those who knew the creator of the story are dead themselves, the few surviving stories usually die out too. In her study of the stories about Padre Cícero told in Brazil, Candace Slater notes that first person narratives “seldom find their way into a larger communal repertoire.”45
Novelty accounted for a large part of the appeal and rapid dispersal of the personal miracle story. Fresh new stories crowded out the old and then were crowded out in turn. When one looks at which miracle stories from Becket’s early cult were remembered and retold in later generations, one does not find Eilward of Westoning’s story, or any of the other personal stories recounted by the first collectors. They were forgotten. Strikingly, though, there was one story that was remembered: the story of the starling and the hawk. This tale, so different from the others William of Canterbury recorded, is found again in Caesarius’s Dialogus, in Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, and in other texts.46 It was a durable story—charmingly memorable—in a way that the personal stories were not.
Miracle collectors were well aware that stories had been lost, and that more stories would be lost if they did not write: preservation was, as I will discuss in the chapters below, the chief motivation for high medieval miracle collectors. In the next section, I will take a closer look at one personal story that a miracle collector decided ought to be written down and saved for future generations.
The Knight of Thanet’s Miracle Story
Medieval miracle collectors usually retold personal stories in their collections in an omniscient third person voice, the most compact means of relaying a story. Occasionally, though, a collector tried a different rhetorical tack. One of the more interesting and suggestive of these rhetorical experiments is found in Osbern of Canterbury’s collection of the miracles of Dunstan (written c. 1090).47 Toward the end of this collection, Osbern recounted a story in the form of a conversational dialogue between himself and the man claiming to have experienced a miracle, a knight of Thanet. Perhaps the setting of the conversation stuck in Osbern’s head—the knight and Osbern were walking together on a beach when the knight told him his story. Whatever the reason for the special treatment, Osbern’s account of the knight’s story provides a convenient springboard for a discussion of the complexities of the personal miracle story. Osbern did not have the benefit of the quotation mark (it had not yet been invented), but I will use it here for clarity. The chapter starts in Osbern’s own voice:
When I was on the isle of Thanet, I went walking along the seashore with a knight who had asked me there for his edification. We considered those things that were marvels of God there and drew from them material for good conversation. From there the conversation turned to father Dunstan, as every time I find occasion for speaking about him I always obtain the greatest benefit. Recalling that name, the knight paled, and breathing deeply as if in pain he said, “Oh, how ungrateful I am, I who am forgetful of his great kindnesses.”
“What is it that makes you breathe so heavily?” I said.
“Do you know,” he said, “how much the abbot of St. Augustine’s plagued me while he lived, as he wished to strip my inheritance from me?”
“I know.”
“And do you know that not only was he unable to do anything intemperate, but that it all turned out for my greater glory?”
“Nor is this unknown,” I said, “but I don’t know why you are recounting these things.”
“Know then,” said the knight, “that the night before the day set for the suit between him and me, I recalled how when I was in my house (which is nearby), you frequently used to extol father Dunstan by your accounts. Now, I said to myself, I have the chance to know by experience what I have heard, such that he might be praised. Kneeling in prayer, I said, ‘God of father Dunstan, favor my part today.’ Then giving my body to rest, I saw in my dreams the city of Canterbury,