Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (review)

A miracle collection is different from a hagiography, though both ostensibly seek to valorize a given saint. The former does so posthumously; the latter seeks to explicate the saint’s sanctity in life. With this distinction in mind, Rachel Koopmans seeks to examine the “at least seventy-five collections of saints’ posthumous miracles” that comprised the “miracle-collecting craze of high medieval England” (2). She tasks this examination “to demonstrate that miracle collections can tell us about more than saints, pilgrims, and local politics. They are also essential sources for our understanding of orality, literacy, and the much heightened concern for written record in the high medieval period; for genre formation, literary Latin, individual rhetorical ambitions, and transformations of learned monastic culture; and for a new and more intimate type of interaction between the religious and laity in the late twelfth century, interactions that foreshadowed major developments within medieval society” (3). Naturally, these ambitions are daunting for their sheer collective magnitude (any one of the above research programs could form the basis of a monograph in its own right). Yet, Koopmans admirably executes this agenda by creating a narrative that details the rise and fall of miracle collecting and locates this story in its social, cultural, political, and religious (both experiential and institutional) context. Koopmans divides her monograph into ten chapters and a conclusion, each of which is about twenty pages in length. Though only addressed obliquely in her book, most of her arguments pertain to medieval criteria for adjudging and evaluating truth-claims. Within this over-arching object of study, Koopmans has deduced three principal criteria, namely orality (chapters 1–2), literacy (chapters 5–6), and proximity (chapters 7–10). She narrates the development of these criteria by dividing the development of the genre of miracle collection into two phases, ca. 1080–114 and ca. 1140–1200. The first phase was characterized by documents of brevity, consisting of only thirty-or-so chapters, bearing considerable pretense to rhetorical flourish, and reflecting an initially local and oral period of circulation for the individual vignettes (3–4). The second phase witnessed miracle collections ballooning in size, often consisting of well over one hundred chapters, being crafted with much less rhetorical sophistication, and being drawn from sources much further afield than the immediate canons of a given chapter (4).

In chapters 1 and 2, Koopmans considers questions of oral transmission and determines that, while it is “impossible to extract the original oral stories from the written collections” (12), nevertheless the initial character of these miracle collections was a reflection of the “chattering atmosphere” of the religious environment of post-invasion England (11). The oral substratum of these miracle collections is impossible to recover in part because of the “topoi or types of stories ... collectors would work to include and imitate in their own creations” (28). In the transition from oral to written transmission, these collections accrued motival content, and their authors consciously sought to make plain the contours of the genre itself while innovating it. In chapters 3 and 4, Koopmans applies this thesis to two case studies: Lantfred of Fleury’s (fl. 980s) collection of the miracles of St. Swithun of Winchester and Goscelin of St.-Bertin’s (fl. 1080–1100) many miracle collections. Koopmans determines that these miracle collectors were able to assemble these texts only in an atmosphere of orality (noting that both authors spent time in England, whereupon they availed themselves of accounts of episodes in oral circulation). Goscelin’s works, in particular, established a model that miracle collectors subsequently emulated. Most substantially, Goscelin provided the criteria of verisimilitude that later collectors adopted. From the 1090s on, Koopmans identifies and examines an explosion in the popularity of miracle collections produced by native English authors. Goscelin provided the formal archetype for these collections, and subsequent authors replicated his compositional structures.

Koopmans’s later chapters focus on the second phase of development wherein the size of collections...