Wonderful to relate: miracle stories and miracle collecting in high medieval England

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)When contemplating texts about the saints, or hagiography, most people today undoubtedly think first of their lives, the specific details and circumstances of which seem essential to understanding their actual meaning to the people who have venerated them through the centuries. In her Wonderful to Relate , however, Rachel Koopmans demonstrates that what mattered most to people in high medieval England was a saint's supernatural interventions in their own world, that is, contemporary miracles. Without them, a previously cherished saint could suffer neglect; with them, a local cult center could form around the relics of a saint about whose life virtually nothing was remembered. Koopmans focuses on process: how did miracles stimulate the formation of a cult? Her forcefully argued and convincing answer: through the circulation of narratives, that is, the shaping of the miracle into a and the oral telling and re-telling of that story. Hearing of a source of miraculous power, people in need sought it out, and after their experience, they told their stories. The saint's cult grew. No matter what happened next, Koopmans wants her reader to remember the primacy of orality. To understand this better, she borrows the concept of the story from the social sciences, and in her first chapter insightfully analyzes one such medieval story. Insistent that some qualities of the oral survive in later written accounts, she does not shrink from describing other qualities that inevitably disappear, such as accompanying gesture, tone of voice, and so forth--in effect, performance, though she does not refer to scholarly work in the field of performance studies. Hovering over the book is nostalgia for the lost world of orality, the embodied experience of hearing and telling personal stories.This haunting world of orality forms only the pre-history for Koopmans's project, which substantively addresses the next phase. Some miracle stories had, of course, been recorded in texts, for the saints were modeled on Christ, and the evangelists included accounts of his miracles in the gospels. What is new in England from 1... to 1120, Koopmans convincingly demonstrates, is the purposeful gathering of posthumous miracles into books, written collections of stories documenting the interventions of dead saints in the lives of living believers. Thus, for what had gone unexamined, presumably viewed as an inevitable development, Koopmans offers a history. And it is the history of a rather overlooked literary genre, the miracle collection.Koopmans takes a new and distinct point of view by considering the miracle collection both as an entity and a genre. Where previous scholarship had tended either to focus entirely on one saint's dossier, including all miracles rather than those in a specific collection, or to analyze miracles by genre and period, Koopman insists on the value of treating each collection as a conscious creation and an example of a literary genre. …