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

The medieval cult of saints was not, primarily, a textual phenomenon. It was the sensory experience of the supplicants, stimulated by a rich and complex material culture, that secured and sustained their veneration to the eve of (and even beyond) the Reformation. Yet the record of such experience, the tales preserved, for the most part, by the custodians of relics, shrines, and other loca sacra, did accrue a distinct textual identity, one that proved especially critical in the institutional development of the cult. Here Rachel Koopmans traces the rise of the miracle-collection genre—an uncommon conjunction of the archival and literary forms—and its role, not only in giving form and focus to emergent cults and the churches that garnered them, but also as rare, resonant point-of-contact between the clergy and the raw spirituality of their subjects. Her focus is England, where the first fully formed compendia were made shortly after the Conquest, and the collection and publication of stories gathered pace and public attention in the years between the Civil War and Magna Carta: Koopmans specifies some seventy-five discrete collections dating from 1080 to 1220. These were years of ecclesiastical renewal and religious revival, and the formation of these texts can be connected with the re-foundation of cathedral churches and premier abbeys, the propagation of new orders, and the promotion of the insular cults of William of Norwich (d. 1144), William of York (d. 1154), Gilbert of Sempringham (d. 1190), and, of course, Thomas Becket (d. 1170). This was also a period of cultural transition in which the oral modes of wider society confronted a governing class increasingly conscious of the agency of the written record. The prevailing view may be that miracle collections are indicative of a general clerical impulse to steer, if not stifle uncoordinated orality, but Koopmans suggests that they bear witness to a more evenhanded negotiation between learned and unlearned responses to intercession.

Collections from the first phase, ca. 1080–ca. 1140, vividly capture the transfer of oral reports into narratives: these were largely the stories shared by a close-knit circle of clerks, and they express a palpable sense of the new imperative to preserve them in parchment. Goscelin of St. Bertin’s remarkable records of regional saints, gathered in the half-century before 1107, presented a powerful example to the first generation of Anglo-Norman clerks. The second phase, ca. 1140–ca. 1200, a “golden age” of miracle collections in Koopmans’s chronology, witnessed a greater ambition: to reach beyond the initiate to record the experience of the populace. It would be wrong, Koopmans contends, to consider the natural dynamics of popular experience now routinely constrained by the literary formulae of the clerical redactor: the recurrence of certain structures and themes was, she suggests, inherent in the process of oral production. However, as the collections grew in scale and in the scope of their sources, they were subject to a greater burden of proof. The parallel (and patchily synoptic) compendia prepared at Canterbury in the wake of Becket’s martyrdom may represent a point of departure: while the principal objective of Benedict of Peterborough was to synthesize the popular clamor surrounding the relics, his successor, William of Canterbury, was inclined to weigh the quality of the testimony, to question the veracity of tales notwithstanding their popular credence. In the generation that followed, this tendency translated into a narrow legalism, which Koopmans sees sharply exposed in the collections made to advance the cult of St. Gilbert (canonized in 1202). The shift in tone was indicative of the ascendancy of documentary authority at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and as the moment of productive exchange between the spoken and written word passed, so, Koopmans suggests, did the age of the miracle collection.

Later medievalists may consider that Koopmans has declared the decline of the collection prematurely; indeed, despite the...