Wonderful to Relate. Rachel Koopmans
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a narrative, a story created by the knight to describe how his life and the posthumous life of Dunstan became intertwined.56 It remains very much a personal story. In fact, if anything it is a double personal story, about the knight’s and Dunstan’s personal histories. The knight’s story tells about them both; it packs a double punch. We can term the result a personal miracle story.57
Personal stories define and empower a teller’s sense of identity; personal miracle stories do so as well, indeed even more so. At first, this may seem counterintuitive: the knight certainly now cannot claim the glory of triumphing over the abbot of St. Augustine’s. But this story claims something even better: Dunstan acted for me. This saint, living in heaven, was willing to help me, to enter into my concerns, to respond to my prayer with amazing speed and efficacy. Miracle collectors used exceptionally emotive and powerful language to describe their subject matter. Strikes of lightning were a favorite analogy: saints were said to “flash,” “gleam,” or “shine out” in miracles after their death.58 Somewhat similar effects are evident in modern personal stories recounting the visit of a celebrity—the touch of Princess Diana or an encounter with Michael Jackson. The famed presence enlarges rather than diminishes the creator of the story in the striking blend of abject self-importance that such stories convey.
We cannot know now, of course, what the knight’s story about Dunstan’s aid might have done for his self-image, or how many more times he told it or to whom. There was a reason besides his own self-image that the knight might well have decided to tell his story more than once. He pales and groans at the beginning with good reason. Dunstan would act, but he was not going to speak for himself. In this way, he was like any dead friend. If the knight did not tell the story, Dunstan’s actions would not be known by others. The knight has to tell the story for the silent Dunstan as much as for himself. Osbern had probably heard stories, perhaps many stories, of the knight’s personal experience before this walk on the beach. Listening to this particular story, Osbern gets a double benefit: he finds out not just about the knight’s recent actions, but about Dunstan’s too. Osbern knew the stories from Dunstan’s lifetime long ago better than most. What the knight’s story offered was a sense of Dunstan’s current life, a glimpse of what Dunstan was doing and how he was acting in Osbern’s own present. Precious, thrilling, joyous information, that, even if it was not always easy to interpret. Did Dunstan’s speed in answering the knight’s prayer have something to do with the way the knight worded his request? Did Dunstan’s physical appearance in the dream—a handsome man holding a lamp—have deeper significance? Did Dunstan hold a grudge against the abbot of St. Augustine’s?
Such uncertainties, typical of personal miracle stories, did not usually blunt listeners’ desire for these stories. Unlike the well-worn miracles of a saint’s life, these personal miracles were fresh and new, and their exchange offered an even greater emotional zing than did most personal stories. Knowing more about Dunstan, Osbern can feel more personally attached to him. In the discussion of a mutually beloved divine self, the knight and Osbern can delight in each other’s company even more. Not only that, but the knight’s story suggested possibilities in case Osbern were ever in need of divine aid himself. Personal miracle stories were full of clues for how to get a saint on one’s side. Indeed, a miracle story like the knight’s, though less sensational than a story of sunbeams acting as clotheslines or oars sprouting and flowering, had much more immediate relevance to those listeners hoping for divine help with their own personal problems.
Osbern found the knight’s story so stirring that he immediately retold it himself to new listeners, “those who were present.” Personal stories tend to be retold only among people who have an interest in the creator. Outside of the creator’s familiar circle, interest in his or her stories usually drops dramatically. The difference with the personal miracle story is that there is a second, much wider circle in which the story can circulate: all those who desire news of the saint. Such mobility exacted a cost. When Osbern retold the knight’s story, it lived in Osbern’s face and gestures, in Osbern’s breath and voice. Osbern chose when and where and to whom and at what length he wanted to tell the story. He decided how to introduce and conclude the story, how to mediate every aspect of it. The question is not whether the outlines of the knight’s original story were blurred and deformed, but to what degree. The further a story traveled, the more these effects were compounded. Moreover, if “those present” on the beach did not know the knight, much of the resonance of the story would be lost. The personal miracle story would have been most potent and affecting when told by its creator to close friends, people who could fully appreciate both the personal and the divine ramifications of the story.
The personal miracle story, then, was generally more intense, more desirable, more mobile, and more long-lived than the ordinary personal story, but in its essential characteristics it remained a personal story. Though these stories interested people outside of personal circles and could travel through multiple tellers, they originated in stories people told about themselves. When reading miracle collections, we must keep those individuals before us. They were all as real as the knight of Thanet, and their stories all had a multiplicity of personal resonances and meanings that we will never recover.
Conversations and the Making of Cults
Medieval cults tend to be thought of in terms of their visible manifestations and remains: the relics, the churches, the rituals, the tombs, the pilgrims’ badges, the stained glass, and the texts, the texts most especially.59 Since texts tell us so much about the cults and largely define our own thinking about them, it is easy to slip into thinking that they define cults themselves. But what actually makes a medieval cult? What was its animating essence? In the high medieval period, we should not look to texts in languages most could not read in a scattering of handwritten manuscripts most did not own. We should not even look to liturgies, pilgrimages, or rituals, as these could be carried out when the saints themselves seemed dead and inactive. I believe that what most defined cult, what made people, literate and illiterate alike, think of a cult as living and active, were personal stories of a saint’s intervention. These stories were the warm, pulsing evidence that a saint lived now, acted now, and was worthy of past and future veneration. The creation and circulation of these stories required no money, no pen or parchment, no building, not even the presence of a physical relic, but simply a person seeing a saint’s actions in his or her own life and telling other people about it.
Cult is the knight of Thanet, Osbern, and “those present” talking on a beach about Dunstan’s recent actions. Cult is Eilward of Westoning telling his story about Becket’s healing powers to the crowds in Bedford and along the road to Canterbury. Cult is not, at least not so essentially, Osbern or Benedict writing accounts of these stories later in their cloister. What happened on the beach, what happened along that road, and what happened in far more conversations than these collectors could hear or hope to recount, were the important things. Compared to the tangible texts, these innumerable lost conversations can seem wispy, even untrustworthy, something we might term mere “rumor.” But we should not be blinded to what the oral creation and circulation of personal miracle stories possessed: the easy, all but effortless ability to spread word, to leapfrog social barriers, to create a sense of warm camaraderie, and to energize the veneration of saints. When he created his story about Dunstan, the knight joined or strengthened his association with the larger group of people who saw Dunstan as a saint. Osbern, listening, added another story to his personal store and refreshed his own sense of belonging. Retelling the knight’s story to “those present,” Osbern may have created a sense of cultic association or interest in a group of people who had never heard of Dunstan before. Scholars have argued for the important role of the miracle as a social bond in the medieval period, but it was actually the telling of stories, and not miracles per se, that acted as the bonding device.60 People felt part of the familiar circle of a saint in the way one feels part of anyone’s familiar circle, by sharing, knowing, and especially creating stories about them. Becket became England’s most famous saint through the exchange of stories: these conversations were the generators of cultic communities, groups of people feeling a strong attachment to a saint and believing in his or her power in the world.
Julia Smith has written that “oral traditions of posthumous miracles were more important than written accounts in sustaining a cult.”61