Tom Lynch
Dominic of Evesham records a miracle story from the mid eleventh century, approximately one hundred years before he composed his Miracula S. Ecgwini. A man from Kent who was born mute had gone on a pilgrimage to Rome in hope of a cure. He stayed there for three years, praying and waiting for the saints to aid him. One night, as he was beginning to despair, a figure dressed in white approached the man and told him to return to his country, specifically to the monastery of St Ecgwine at Evesham. The figure said that if the man went to visit Ecgwine with an offering and then prayed to the saint, he would be cured. He then left for Evesham, and with the help of God, he reached his destination. When the man arrived, the scene was one of solemn observance. It is worth quoting Dominic in full for the remainder of the story:
Therefore, all the brethren were standing in the choir, when the man arrived carrying a candle in his hand as vespers was being sung: advancing before the altar he prayed for a long time and then offered his candle. Having made this offering he again stood in prayer. Then, a wonderful and amazing thing happened! As the dumb man was standing before them all, suddenly he fell, and began to cough up a stream of blood, and, through extreme distress, thrash around in all directions on the floor. Evening prayer being over, Æfic, prior of the place at that time, came over with certain older monks to where the man was lying and coughing; they asked what was the matter, and why he was lying there in this way coughing blood. Rising in the midst of the brethren, and raising his eyes and his hands to God, his tongue was finally loosed, and he began to make his first utterance: ‘May almighty God help me as may my lord St Ecgwine, by whose merit Christ has wrought such a miracle in one so wretched as I, that I might tell you the truth.’ Starting with his prayer, he revealed the whole story in detail, as has been recounted above. When his story was ended, the brethren were overjoyed, the people were also summoned, their mouths were opened in loud praises of God, beginning with the ‘Te Deum Laudamus’; they rang the bells for a long time, extolling as sweetly as they could the miracles of God, who is God blessed above all things.1
I have chosen to begin the book with this vignette as it is representative of the subject in question, making miracles in medieval England. A person with a problem came to know of a saint, brought his problem to the saint and was cured. The story of the mute man is full of incidental details which help to show us how miracles were reported and investigated, promulgated amongst the people and celebrated on a grand scale. The narrative shows the use of material offerings, the credence given to visions and the ability of one saint to help where others had not. In addition, we have an example of the religious of a monastery performing their daily work and interacting with a particularly gruesome cure. The whole process involved the saint, the supplicant, the custodians of the shrine and the people of Evesham. In short, the whole community of the saint took part. We are presented with this unified community all contributing to the fostering of this miracle and, more generally, the cult. But there remains the potential for disruption presented by this man walking in on the monks performing vespers and then falling into a bloody seizure. Whilst the basic structure of a shrine cure was simple, a miracle story can also demonstrate the complexities and tensions underlying the cult of the saints.
The post-mortem miracles performed by the saints were central to the workings of their cults. Miracles were the main driver of pilgrimage, they provided a community with aid, they demonstrated the saint’s place amongst the elect of Heaven, they showed the saint’s will manifest on Earth and they provided an opportunity for storytelling, preaching and writing. In a sense miracles, made the cult of the saints,2 but the question remains: how were these miracles made? This book is in part an attempt to answer this question. Miracles were not just down to the saints. Miracles required a subject, a person who was directly impacted by the intercession of the saint and who usually played an active role in bringing the miracle about. In order to be recorded and disseminated, a miracle needed to be recognised as such. This responsibility fell to the custodians of a saint’s shrine or their proxies and was key to framing miracles. The custodians moderated not only the shrine but also the written record. The records of the cults which survive are selective, and composers of miracle accounts omitted much information. However, the sources include a great deal of useful material, intended and unintended by the authors.
Examining the petitioning of miracles allows us to explore the cult of the saints in medieval England not just as a means by which to enter reciprocal relationships but also as a field of contest. Cults could be essential to the survival of a religious house, but they could be disruptive to the religious life. Not everyone engaged with saints in a way which met with approval. Saints, supplicants and custodians had expectations which were not always met. In miracle stories, we get a view of these expectations in action, and these stories show us how miracles were made in the middle ages. I contend that the actions of the community of a saint were at the heart of the miracle-making process, and the most important of these actions was the petition. Petitions followed a basic structure and gave an active role to supplicants, allowing them a means to overcome life crises. In addition, a successful petition allowed a supplicant to demonstrate their close relationship to a saint and their ability to behave appropriately. Meaningful action was not limited to petitions, however. In the miracles of vengeance, it was often the misbehaviour of people which initiated the intervention of a saint. Here the perpetrators filled the role of the supplicants in a manner which fits with the structure of a miracle petition. No matter what the miracle, it seems the deliberate actions of human beings were the most common cause. Before proceeding to a summary of the chapters which make up this book, it will be useful to examine a few key concepts more closely, beginning with miracles.
Scholarly definitions of the miraculous in medieval Christianity were indebted to the work of Augustine of Hippo and his emphasis on the wonder of miracles.3 Scholastic developments in the eleventh and twelfth centuries sought to build on Augustine’s corpus and looked to define miracles as causally different from the everyday wonder of creation.4 This notion is expressed by Peter Lombard, who stated that normally things acted according to nature, based on how God had created them. Miracles were special because they acted in a manner which was beyond nature (praeter naturam) and their causes were known to God alone.5 Miracles can be found in Christian texts from the Bible onwards. The miracles of Jesus and the apostles were the model for saintly miracles, although the biblical miracles were usually performed by a living person with no reference to relics in the medieval sense.6 By the time of Swithun’s first miracles in the late tenth century, the idea that post-mortem miracles could be performed by saints in England was well established. The earliest evidence of post-mortem miracles in medieval England comes from the wave of hagiography which was composed in the first half of the eighth century. This includes the lives of Cuthbert, Guthlac and Wilfrid.7 Miracles were present in other kinds of texts from this period as well. Bede includes some fifty-one miracles in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, whilst hinting at the existence of more stories which could have been included but were not.8
What miracles meant to those who collected them is harder to uncover. There is a tendency, continuing in the tradition of Augustine, to marvel at the power of God in his saints. This is well phrased by Eadmer, who proclaimed in his miracles of Oswald, ‘How wonderful is the love of God and how wondrous his awesome power!’9 Eadmer is not alone in his amazement at the miraculous; such reactions are found throughout our period.10 Geoffrey of Burton noted that Modwenna announced her presence in Heaven through her miracles.11 Lantfred posited that the abundance of miracles solicited by Swithun was a means for God to lead those behaving inappropriately to ‘hasten towards heavenly joys with their good works’.12 For supplicants it is harder still to uncover what miracles meant. Miracles showed that the saint in question was powerful, and by extension the saint’s custodians were powerful. Miracles would have been a cause for joy or despair, depending on the nature of the intercession. Miracles may also have indicated personal moral worth, with only the just receiving intercession.13 What is clearer is what miracles did. Simply put, they solved problems which had been brought to a saint’s attention. Whilst the majority of these miracles were beneficent a significant proportion punished negative actions. Either way, the saint could do almost anything: including controlling the weather, healing the sick, protecting their supplicants from disasters, freeing prisoners, exorcising the possessed and killing perpetrators. They could also withhold miracles, send supplicants to other saints and reverse miraculous cures. All of this was within the structure of the cult of the saints. It would be helpful to explore the history and understanding of the cult of the saints before moving on.
The cult of the saints was found throughout medieval Europe, but early medieval saints were not subject to rigorous definition. Instead, these holy people existed in a vague system and were subject to vague terminology.14 The process of canonisation did not begin to be centrally controlled by the papacy until the twelfth century, so all the saints venerated in England during our period were saints primarily because of devotion accorded them rather than proclamation from Rome.15 Jones has written a list including the ‘expected components’ of the medieval cult of the saints. These expected components are ‘physical presence and perceived effect’, ‘celebration of the saint and the saint’s doings’, ‘engagement and enacted supplication’ and ‘further commemoration in the church, the wider world and society at large’.16 The most tangible result of these components was the attention paid to the bodies, tombs and shrines of the saints.17
Cults had developed by the second century at the tombs of the martyrs.18 These early tomb cults consisted mainly of the celebration of Mass on the anniversary of the martyr’s death and were necessarily small scale and clandestine prior to the Edict of Milan in 313.19 The focus on the tomb of the saint was established in Western Europe by the sixth century, based on the idea that Heaven and Earth met at the grave of a holy individual.20 This was tied to the concept of a saint as a human being, present both in their tomb and in Heaven, who could intercede with God on their devotees’ behalf and who was best reached through proximity to their earthly remains or relics associated with them.21 The conviction that saints listened to prayers, were in a special position to intercede with God and were particularly accessible at their relics ‘was one of the dominant themes’ of medieval Christianity.22
The cult of the saints was established in England following the mission of Augustine in 597. Bede portrayed the influence of the saints and the promise of miracles as integral to the conversion of King Æthelberht of Kent (c. 585–616), and relics were sent along with other religious supplies by Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) to Augustine.23 Cults to local saints began to develop in the late seventh century.24 Whilst there is hagiography and other evidence in Latin and Old English from the eighth century onwards, this study will focus on the central middle ages running from around 970 until 1170. This start date allows us to take in the results of the tenth-century monastic reforms and coincides with the first Anglo-Latin miracle collection, Lantfred’s late-tenth-century Translatio et Miracula S. Swithuni. Finishing in 1170 allows us to consider the upheavals of the Conquest and the Anarchy as well as one of the most productive periods of miracle recording before the unrivalled ‘hagiographical aftermath’ of the death, miracles and canonisation of Thomas Becket.25 Becket’s death was shortly followed by a letter from Pope Alexander III (1159–1181), which included the proclamation that saints were to be canonised only by papal authority.26 Despite the fact that saints continued to be venerated regardless of their canonisation status, 1170 stands as a watershed in the centralisation of saint making. Therefore, 1170 is a suitable end point for this study, on the eve of Becket’s murder and the changes which coincided with his death. The England in the title of this book should be self-explanatory, but it is worth noting that I have designated saints as ‘English’ if their main shrine was in England, no matter where the saint was born or spent their career. In practice this designation applies mainly to early British and Irish figures, members of the Augustinian mission and a few Continental imports.
In his foundational work on the cult of the saints in medieval England, Ronald Finucane noted that whilst people must have visited the saints for many reasons, the sources suggest that miracles were the most common motivation. Miracles begat more pilgrims and more miracles, and miracle collections are our major source on the workings of the cult of the saints.27 Miracle collections are one type of hagiography, a genre of text concerned with the life, death and miracles of the saints.28 All hagiography is based on the ‘historical claim’ that an individual existed,29 but it is not a work of history or biography in the modern sense. Hagio-graphic texts are works that are consciously, and sometimes explicitly, imitative. Earlier examples of sanctity provide ideals of behaviour that situate the subject of hagiography within the ranks of the sacred. These exemplars could include biblical figures, the Church fathers, earlier saints and Christ himself.30
Much early scholarship on hagiography focused on ‘weakly individualized’ saints in a setting where time and place were unimportant, a thin veil on which to imprint the universalising messages of the Church.31 Hagiography has been regarded as a ‘notoriously problematic’ source, which can spur attempts to separate the historical ‘fact’ from the derivative ‘fiction’. Such a separation is neither practical nor desirable, however.32 Hagiography provides us with some of the best evidence for the lives of medieval people and their relationships with the saints.33 But what can be gleaned from hagiography is driven by the concerns of the authors and their understanding of the genre, and this does not always line up with the concerns of the historian.34 Hagiographers did not pick up every miracle performed or even cover every cult which was popular at the time. Miracle collecting in medieval England was not rare, but it was still a specialist interest that ‘waxed and waned in tune to its own rhythms and the enthusiasms of individuals’.35 Despite the wealth of detail contained in the evidence, hagiography is not ‘a transparent window into the everyday life’ of supplicants and communities.36 This is partly because our authors had their own preoccupations and were participants in the cult of the saints, who sought the glorification of their saint, of the saint’s home and of their community.37 It is also partly because what is recorded is not the quotidian but the occasional in terms of major events, great ceremonial set pieces, life crises of supplicants and the miraculous responses of the saints.
All of this is not to say that hagiography should be avoided as a historical source, just that the genre conventions and editorial power employed by the authors should be considered.38 Hagiography ‘if handled with care may yield a great deal of information’.39 We have presentations by monks and clerics of how a system should work,40 what might be termed the ‘ideal types’ of the cult of the saints,41 which are useful in themselves. At the same time, there is a degree of information which comes through ‘behind the direct indications of the texts’.42 The hagiographers were not impartial observers but participants embroiled in the same cultural system as the laity and the rest of the community.43 Hagiographers chose their content, selected texts to imitate and stories to pick up or to leave unwritten, but they had to conform to social reality as well as genre expectations in order to be understood and accepted by their audience.44 Even where hagiography is explicitly imitative, it does not necessarily mean that the incidents described did not happen in some form.45 Thus, in spite of the ‘idealizing features of the genre, we can glimpse a recognizable social reality behind these miraculous cures’.46 We can examine the communities around specific cults, the practices of the participants and ‘the circumstances of a particular miracle’.47
The cult of the saints has been subject to a great deal of academic attention. Since the 1960s, there has been an increased focus on the communities of the saints rather than the saints as individuals. This is reflected in the utilisation of other forms of hagiography over vitae and a recognition of the importance of the collective records surrounding individual cults.48 One of the most influential authors in this new wave was Peter Brown.49 Brown’s work can be seen as a reaction to the sceptical view of the cult of the saints as expressed by Gibbon, who saw the rise of the cult as a feature of the decline of the Roman Empire.50 Brown brought in insights from the social sciences and made the use of hagiographical sources ‘respectable to a generation of historians’.51 Brown presented the cult of the saints as integral to late-antique and medieval Christianity, a part of the ‘religious common sense of the age’.52 Part of this ‘common sense’ was the experience of ‘new forms of the exercise of power, new bonds of human dependence, new, intimate, hopes for protection and justice in a changing world’.53 Brown looked to emphasise the function of the cult of the saints as a means of flattening out the divisions of society in a patron-client system based around ‘ties of interdependence and reciprocity’.54
Following Brown, many scholars have focused on the social and cultural history of the cult of the saints. Ronald Finucane and Pierre-André Sigal both produced wide-ranging statistical analyses of the cult of the saints in England and France, respectively.55 Both of these studies look to reveal trends from the cult of the saints by extracting data from a large amount of evidence. This leads to a focus on numbers rather than individual cults, hagiographers or miracle accounts. The work of Ridyard, Rollason and Yarrow maintains a broad scope whilst focusing more on the specifics of individual cults in England. Ridyard’s study of the royal cults of pre-Conquest England explores the development and continuity of those cults. Ridyard concludes that these cults, whilst perhaps popular, were only possible through the efforts of their custodians, particularly through the advertisement of hagiography. According to Ridyard, these cults were driven by the political and parochial concerns of the saints’ custodians and were ultimately able to survive the Conquest due to the saints’ role as monastic patrons.56 Rollason similarly privileges the role of the religious and lay elite in his study of English relic cults. He divides the cult of the saints into two stages, before and after 850, with the earlier stage dominated by the clergy and the later more open to the laity following the monastic reforms. Like Ridyard, Rollason points out the continuity of cults after the Conquest and emphasises the useful role saints could play as moral authorities and ‘undying landlords’.57 Yarrow’s work uses six cults as examples of the cult of the saints in the twelfth century. His focus is on the communal nature of the cult of the saints, the forms of behaviour and the ‘ritual significance’ of a cure.58 More recently there has been a turn in studies to focus on the development, recitation and recording of miracle stories, as presented by Koopmans.59 Here the stories told by supplicants are presented as the central feature of the cult of the saints, a great foundation of ‘personal stories’ from which hagiographers took a selection to record.60 Whilst this focus maintains the important position of the custodians of a saint, it also allows for any supplicant to contribute to the cult of a saint and its interpretation.
Like Brown and many other historians of the cult of the saints, I have taken influence from the social sciences. My understanding of reciprocity and social relations is based upon the work of Mauss as well as that of his critics, particularly Graeber.61 The work of Mauss is behind my conception of education and change in a social system, too, and so is the work of Bourdieu.62 In terms of the shrine as a liminal space which is presented as harmonious, I heavily reference Turner.63 In addition, I have incorporated a selection of ethnographic studies which critique Turner’s view for a more nuanced approach to the supposed social cohesion of shrines. My comprehension of structure, contingency and agency is indebted to the writing of Sahlins on the interaction between European explorers and the peoples of the Pacific Islands.64 Sahlins’ conception of the ‘structure of the conjuncture’, the interaction between social structures and events,65 has been helpful in shaping my ideas about the flexibility of the cult of the saints and the agency of its participants. These ethnographic and theoretical studies help to show the possibilities for how the cult of the saints could function in practice, how a cult might be understood by its participants and how social structures and the actions of people are informed by one another.
This book takes inspiration from all of the previously mentioned authors and many others on the subject of the cult of the saints. Three main points differentiate this book from previous work in the field. Firstly, my time frame and selection of texts: no major study I have read takes into account the primary sources that I do here, including all the English-miracle collections produced from 970 to 1170.66 I believe that examining multiple cults across two centuries allows us to look for more examples of how the cult of the saints worked. This involves the examination of a great deal of primary source material, but my goal is to be representative rather than exhaustive.67 All aspects of miracle stories can be potentially useful, and I do not attempt only to extract data for statistical analysis or to separate ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’.
Secondly, I have chosen to examine three elements in the miracle-making process: beneficent miracles, miracles of vengeance and thanksgiving. Most studies revolve around the beneficent miracles, using punitive material selectively if at all. Thanksgiving is sometimes mentioned, but again this is usually in the context of beneficent miracles. I have also considered miracles performed away from the main shrine of the saint. These miracles raise questions about the tension between specificity and universality in the cult of the saints but are often passed over in favour of shrine cures. Likewise I have included miracles which concern all manner of crises, not just illness, injury and possession. In order to more fully represent the special role of the custodians of the saints, I have attached an appendix on the English saints in the liturgy.68 This allows me to touch upon the liturgy throughout without moving away from the focus on making miracles.
Thirdly, I centre this study on the agency and actions of the people involved in the cult of the saints. This communal aspect of the cult of the saints includes the supplicants, the custodians and the saints. The saint was the wellspring of miracles and a person who had to be kept happy in order for the cult to succeed. Saints were thought to be aware of the actions taken by and against the members of their community and could react accordingly. Custodians kept the holy places of a saint, they observed the liturgical components of the cult and they commissioned or composed the hagiography and other relevant texts. These guardians sought to represent, defend and maintain an idealised form of the cult of the saints. Supplicants exerted a great deal of energy in prayers, praise and thanksgiving to the saints. Indeed, it is my contention that the petitionary process, the ways in which supplicants solicited miracles from the saints, was at the heart of the cult of the saints. All sections of the community of a saint and even external threats to that community had agency. No one was forced to engage a saint, although they could sometimes be persuaded. The cult of the saints in medieval England was about this choice over how to engage such powerful people in human relationships. How you acted mattered a great deal.
The first chapter concerns miracle collections – their authors, audience and the recording of them. The miracle collections and other hagiography shed light on the cult of the saints, the lives of its participants and Christianity in England more generally. As a part of this chapter, we will consider the authors of the hagiography, their backgrounds, their methods and their motivations for miracle collecting. The hagiographers were involved in the cults they represented; they took part in miracle stories, argued over their saints and wrote down their patrons’ deeds against oblivion. Their narratives were the preferred version of events addressing the interests of the saints and their custodians.
The second chapter is on the saints’ shrines: their development and location and how they were founded, moved and contested. A majority of miracles were effected at the shrines of the saints, and this detail seems to have focused the attentions of hagiographers and pilgrims. People visited the shrines for a great many reasons, which could lead to problems of overcrowding and access, and all manner of supplicants came in search of the miraculous. These same people flocked to witness and take part in the movement of relics, whether permanently in translations or temporarily in processions. Just as supplicants competed for access to shrines, so, too, did different communities compete over the relics of the saints when they were translated. In the end, the tacit approval of the saint would be known by their acceptance of their resting place. At these resting places, people could meet with the saints and personally interact with them.
Chapter three concerns the petitioning of the saints for miraculous aid. Whilst there is a bias towards shrine petitions, we will also examine petitions at alternative locations, petitions using relics and petitions at a distance. All petitions follow a basic structure in spite of how or where they were carried out. Various forms of elaboration could be included in a petition, such as vigils, prostration and physical interaction with the shrine. However, in its most simple form, a petition consisted of a person who knew of a saint asking that saint for help with a problem. These problems were often illness or injury but could include all manner of other issues. The petition allowed a supplicant to perform their misfortune, to show the saint and the community both that they were in crisis and that they knew how to deal appropriately with that crisis. No matter how grave the problem, there was a practical step that a devotee of a saint could take to help themself.
Following the discussion of beneficent miracles is a chapter on punitive miracles. This fourth chapter focuses on inappropriate behaviour and its consequences. Throughout the period, saints reacted to slights against their communities and cults with miracles of vengeance. Such miracles include psychological and physical assaults by the saints, which could then be the catalyst for the redemption of the perpetrators. Saints took part in legal disputes, punished thieves, made sure their people were secure and protected themselves from mockery and mistreatment. Miracles of vengeance could be petitioned like any other miracle, but they could be produced reactively by a saint as well. Either way, these intercessions were triggered by human actions taken with a foreknowledge of the saint in question, thus following the structure outlined in chapter three. The misbehaviour of these people shows not only what a saint could not tolerate and what a hagiographer found instructive; it also highlights the elements of the cult of the saints which people resisted. The cult of the saints was a ubiquitous feature of life based on an understanding that the saints were known to be powerful thaumaturges. Despite this, people were willing to defy, attack and ignore the local saint, perhaps enacting a critique of the cult and its workings.
Chapter five concerns the act of thanksgiving that regularly came after a miracle. Whilst it was never required to give thanks to a saint after an intercession, thanksgiving was common and expected. A saint who was not properly thanked could reverse a miracle or stop interceding for future supplicants. Thanksgiving stood as a conclusion to the petitionary process, an act which showed that the preceding ordeal was over. These acts could be as simple as an individual cry of thanks, but if a miracle was picked up by the custodians of a shrine, thanksgiving could become prolonged and elaborate. Some people included material offerings as part of their thanksgiving, from a memento of a miracle to a rebuilding programme for the local church. Whatever a person did and gave in thanks, a supplicant’s thanksgiving could never truly live up to the miraculous favour the saint had performed for them. There was a development of a reciprocal relationship between saint and beneficiary, but it was profoundly uneven, and each individual had to come to terms with this debt. As long as they made an effort, however, a supplicant could leave happy that they had been deemed worthy of intercession and that they had behaved graciously following their miracle.
Finally I conclude that miracles were made in medieval England through a collaborative endeavour which revolved around a basic structure. A person had a problem, and acting upon their knowledge, they brought that problem to a saint in the hope and expectation of intercession. This was a communal event involving supplicants, custodians and the saint. The cult of the saints was flexible, but it maintained this basic structure despite the range of events and experiences brought to bear. Unacceptable behaviour was punished, but people could be redeemed. Tensions were present within communities and between the communities and external threats. By petitioning a saint, a person could take an action to improve their lot whilst demonstrating their piety publicly. A successful petition marked the end of a crisis and showed that an individual had a relationship with the saint. Ultimately the cult of the saints was driven by these communal actions. The saints, custodians, hagiographers and supplicants were all focused on making miracles.
Notes
· 1 ‘Igitur cunctis fratribus in choro astantibus, uenit predictus uir candelam manu gestans cum uespertina sinaxis decantaretur, pergensque ante altare diutius orauit, sicque candelam optulit. Qua oblata, rursus ad orationem stetit. Res mira et uehementer stupenda! Cum coram cunctis astaret mutus, subito cadens riuum sanguinis ex ore cepit excreare, nimiaque pre angustia in pauimento circumquaque uolutare. Finita ergo uespertina prece, accessit ad illum qua excreans iacebat domnus Aeuicius, ea tempestate prior loci, cum quibusdam senioribus, interrogans quid haberet, aut cur sanguinem excreans sic iaceret. Surgens itaque homo in medio fratrum, oculosque cum manibus ad Deum intendens, demum lingua resoluta, hanc primam ita cepit uocem formare: ‘Sic me adiuuet omnipotens Deus, meusque dominus sanctus Ecgwinus, per cuius meritum in me misero tale miraculum operatus est Christus, sicut uobis uera dixerim.’ Sumensque principium orantionis omnia seriatim pandit, ut supra habetur comprehensum. Qua narratione finita, fratres exhilarantur, conuocatur etiam populus, ora relaxantur in summis Dei laudibus; incipientesque ‘Te Deum laudamus’, classicum sonant diutius, extollentes Dei miracula quam poterant dulcius, qui est super omnia benedictus Deus.’ Dominic, Miracula S. Ecgwini, pp. 88–91.
· 2 William Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 63.
· 3 For example Augustine of Hippo, De utilitate credendi, in Patrologia Latina, 42, col. 90.
· 4 Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages: The Wiles Lecture Given at the Queen’s University of Belfast, 2006 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 4–9.
· 5 Peter Lombard, Sententiarum Libri Quatuor, in Patrologia Latina, 192, col. 688–89.
· 6 Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London: Dent, 1977), pp. 49–50. As Finucane notes, the closest we come to a postmortem miracle is the resurrection of a man when he was thrown into Elisha’s tomb and touched the prophet’s bones, Kings 13. 21.
· 7 See for example Bede’s Vita Cuthberti, Bertram Colgrave, ed. and trans., Two Lives of St Cuthbert: A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede’s Prose Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 290–307; Felix’s Vita Guthlaci, Bertram Colgrave, ed. and trans., Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), pp. 160–7; Stephen’s Vita Wilfridi, Bertram Colgrave, ed. and trans., The Life of Bishop Wilfrid By Eddius Stephanus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 142–7.
· 8 Joel T. Rosenthal, ‘Bede’s Use of Miracles in “The Ecclesiastical History”’, Traditio, 31 (1975), 328–35 (p. 329).
· 9 ‘Mira Dei pietas, mira et tremenda potestas!’ Eadmer, Miracula S. Oswaldi, pp. 318–19.
· 10 For example, the wonder expressed by Wulfstan at the healing of a child after Swithun’s translation, Wulfstan, Narratio de S. Swithuno, pp. 462–3, is matched by that expressed by Aelred in the persistence of the miracles performed by the saints of Hexham, Aelred, De sanctis Hagustaldensis, pp. 173–6.
· 11 Geoffrey, Miracula S. Modwenne, pp. 202–5.
· 12 ‘festinent ad celestia bonis operibus gaudia’, Lantfred, Miracula S. Swithuni, pp. 294–5.
· 13 Ethnographic studies show that many supplicants conceive of miracles as evidence of a divine presence with the potential for that presence to bestow gifts upon them, often based on their behaviour. See for example Alexandra Kent, ‘Divinity, Miracles and Charity in the Sathya Sai Baba Movement of Malaysia’, Ethnos, 69 (2004), 43–62 (p. 48); Anthony Shenoda, ‘The Politics of Faith: On Faith, Skepticism, and Miracles among Coptic Christians in Egypt’, Ethnos, 77 (2004), 477–95 (p. 478). See also Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), p. 71 on Christian miracles as evidence of God, particularly through the person of Jesus, working in the world. On the anthropologist as participant observer to a miracle, see Bruce Grindal, ‘Into the Heart of Sisala Experience: Witnessing Death Divination’, Journal of Anthropological Research, 39 (1983), 60–80.
· 14 David Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 3.
· 15 Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 550 to c. 1307 (London: Keegan & Paul, 1974), p. 67. The first English saint afforded papal canonisation was Edward the Confessor in 1161. See Robert Bartlett, England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), p. 461.
· 16 Graham Jones, ‘Introduction: Diverse Expressions, Shared Meanings: Surveying Saints across Cultural Boundaries’ in Graham Jones, ed., Saints of Europe: Studies towards a Survey of Cults and Culture, ed. by Graham Jones (Donington: Tyas, 2003), pp. 1–28 (p. 11).
· 17 Rollason, Saints and Relics, p. 4.
· 18 Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?: Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 3.
· 19 G. J. C. Snoek, Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist: A Process of Mutual Interaction, Studies in the History of Christian Thought, 63 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), p. 9.
· 20 Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (London: SCM, 1981), pp. 1–3.
· 21 Martin Biddle, ‘Archaeology, Architecture, and the Cult of the Saints in Anglo-Saxon England’, in The Anglo-Saxon Church: Papers on History, Architecture, and Archaeology in Honour of Dr H. M. Taylor, ed. by L. A. S. Butler and R. K. Morris, CBA Research Report, 60 (London: Council for British Archaeology, 1986), pp. 1–31 (pp. 1–3).
· 22 Finucane, p. 39.
· 23 Bede, HE, I.23–30, pp. 70–107.
· 24 Alan Thacker, ‘Loca Sanctorum: The Significance of Place in the Study of the Saints’, in Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West, ed. by Alan Thacker and Richard Sharpe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 1–43 (pp. 38–9).
· 25 Robert Bartlett, ‘The Hagiography of Angevin England’, Thirteenth-Century England, 5 (1995), 37–52 (p. 40).
· 26 E. W. Kemp, Canonization and Authority in the Western Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 99.
· 27 Finucane, p. 83.
· 28 Thomas D. Hill, ‘Imago Dei: Genre, Symbolism and Anglo-Saxon Hagiography’, in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and Their Contexts, ed. by Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 35–50 (p. 35).
· 29 Ibid., p. 47.
· 30 Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 5–16.
· 31 Régis Boyer, ‘An Attempt to Define the Typology of Medieval Hagiography’, in Hagiography and Medieval Literature: A Symposium, ed. by Hans Bekker-Nielsen and others (Odense: Odense University Press, 1981), pp. 27–37 (pp. 28–9).
· 32 Hilary Powell, ‘“Once Upon a Time There Was a Saint …”: Re-evaluating Folklore in Anglo-Latin Hagiography’, Folklore, 121 (2010), 171–89 (p. 171).
· 33 Peregrine Horden, ‘What’s Wrong with Early Medieval Medicine?’, Social History of Medicine, 24 (2009), 5–25 (p. 18).
· 34 Anne E. Bailey, ‘Wives, Mothers and Widows on Pilgrimage: Categories of “Woman” Recorded at English Healing Shrines in the High Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval History, 39 (2013), 197–219 (pp. 217–19).
· 35 Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), p. 45.
· 36 Patrick J. Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 12.
· 37 Koopmans, pp. 61–2; Geary, Living with the Dead, pp. 22–3.
· 38 Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. by János M. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsworth, Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture, 14 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 20.
· 39 James Howard-Johnston, ‘Introduction’, in The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown, ed. by James Howard-Johnston and Paul Antony Hayward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 1–24 (p. 19).
· 40 Paul Antony Hayward, ‘De-mystifying the Role of Sanctity in Western Christendom’, in The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. by Howard-Johnston and Hayward, pp. 115–42 (p. 130).
· 41 Geary, Living with the Dead, p. 11.
· 42 Gurevich, p. xix.
· 43 John Arnold, Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005), pp. 5–12.
· 44 Simon Yarrow, Saints and Their Communities: Miracle Stories in Twelfth Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), p. 16. For more on the audience of hagiography, see chapter I.
· 45 Lawrence P. Morris, ‘Did Columba’s Tunic Bring Rain? Early Medieval Typological Action and Modern Historical Method’, Quaestio, 1 (2000), 45–65 (p. 64).
· 46 Barbara Newman, ‘Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century’, Speculum, 73 (1998), 733–70 (p. 737).
· 47 Michael Goodich, ‘Mirabilis Deus in Sanctis Suis: Social History and Medieval Miracles’, in Signs, Wonders, Miracles: Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church, ed. by Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory, Studies in Church History, 41 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), pp. 135–56 (pp. 144–5).
· 48 Geary, Living with the Dead, pp. 9–17.
· 49 Brown’s first published work on the cult of the saints is Peter Brown, ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies, 61 (1971), 80–101.
· 50 Hayward, ‘De-mystifying’, pp. 115–17.
· 51 Geary, Living with the Dead, p. 13.
· 52 Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 19.
· 53 Brown, The Cult of the Saints, p. 22.
· 54 Anne E. Bailey, ‘Peter Brown and Victor Turner Revisited: Anthropological Approaches to Latin Miracle Narratives in the Medieval West’, in Contextualizing Miracles in the Christian West, 1100–1500: New Historical Approaches, ed. by Matthew M. Mesley and Louise E. Wilson, Medium Aevum Monographs, 32 (Oxford: The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 2014), pp. 17–39 (pp. 20–1).
· 55 Finucane’s Miracles and Pilgrims concerns the years 1066 to 1300 and Pierre-André Sigal, L’homme et le Miracle dans la France Médiévale, XIe-XIIe Siècle (Paris: Cerf, 1985) concerns the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
· 56 Susan J. Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England: A Study of West Saxon and East Anglian Cults, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series, 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 234–52.
· 57 Rollason, Saints and Relics, pp. 182–205.
· 58 Yarrow, pp. 14–21.
· 59 Koopmans, pp. 9–27. See also Aviad M. Kleinberg, Flesh Made Word: Saints’ Stories and the Western Imagination, trans. by Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 279–85; Bailey, ‘Peter Brown’, pp. 36–9.
· 60 Koopmans, pp. 25–7.
· 61 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. by W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990); David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
· 62 Marcel Mauss, Sociology and Psychology: Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (London: Routledge, 1979); Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
· 63 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 1969); Victor Turner, ‘Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in the Rites de Passage’, in Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, ed. by William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt, 4th edn (New York, NY: Harper, 1979), pp. 234–43.
· 64 Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythic Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981); Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
· 65 Sahlins, Islands of History, pp. xiii–xv.
· 66 The closest to my date range is Koopmans, who actually extends her perspective to the end of the twelfth century to include the Becket material and other later miracle collections. However, Koopmans primarily considers the work of Lantfred, Goscelin, Osbern and Eadmer before going on to look at the hagiographers of Becket. See Koopmans, pp. 112–15. Other studies tend to fall either side of the Norman Conquest.
· 67 Although I have surveyed all of the hagiography produced in this period, there are certain texts I return to more than others, as indicated by the list of abbreviations. This date range was chosen to include the most source material whilst having a clear cutoff point. In practice this has led to my not including borderline texts like Reginald of Coldingham’s Miracula S. Cuthberti, composed 1165–1174, and Thomas of Monmouth’s Vita S. Gulielmi Nordowicensis, composed 1150–1173. See Michael Lapidge and Rosalind C. Love, ‘England and Wales (600–1550)’, in Hagiographies: histoire internationale de la littérature hagiographique latine et vernaculaire, en Occident, des origines à 1500, ed. by G. Philippart and M. Goullet, 7 vols (Turnhout: Brepols, 1994–2018), III, 203–325 (pp. 262, 276). Reginald’s Miracula S. Cuthberti is edited by James Raine, ed., Reginaldi Monachi Dunelmensis Libellus de Admirandis Beati Cuthberti Virtutibus quae Novellis Patratae sunt Temporibus, Publications of the Surtees Society, 1 (London: Nichols, 1835). Thomas’s Vita S. Gulielmi Nordowicensis can be found in Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Miracles of William of Norwich, ed. and trans. by M. R. James and Augustus Jessopp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896).
· 68 This is mainly concerned with material found in liturgical books intended for use on the feast days of the saints. I have also added some comment on the marking of feast days in the calendar as well as the place of English saints in the litany. See Appendix I.