Whenever I read a medieval miracle collection, I am reminded of the appeal of looking at a collection of butterflies. Both kinds of collections are hard to resist, no matter how much one might disapprove, in theory, of killing butterflies, or of reveling in stories of miracles. The colors of the insects can be so startling, and their shapes so arresting, that it is easy to feel captured and chloroformed yourself, mesmerized by the variety of the display. There is a pleasure too in contemplating the ordering of the specimens: the straight rows, the squared and spread wings, the labels...

In the early 1170s, a judge in Bedford sentenced Eilward of Westoning to blinding and castration for petty thievery. Eilward, a pauper, was duly blinded—a jailor stabbed his eyes with a knife—and castrated. Some days later, however, after asking Thomas Becket for help, Eilward discovered that he could see again. Benedict of Peterborough, one of the two monks at Canterbury who recorded this story in a miracle collection, describes how people came to see Eilward in Bedford and hear his tale: “Word of this went out among the vicinity, and the new thing attracted no small multitude of...

Readers have long been struck by the similarities of stories preserved in miracle collections. The late Victorian editors of the miracle collection of William of Norwich, for instance, commented that “even in their nauseous details [William’s miracles] all have a strong family likeness to one another.”¹ Scholars today use less florid language but often make the same observation, describing medieval miracle collections as “extraordinarily repetitive,” “stereotyped,” “highly conventionalized,” and “schematized and topoiridden.”² The types or clusters of certain kinds of stories in miracle collections have especially attracted attention. It is a rare collection that does not include a story about...

No hagiography of any kind was written in England between 800 and 950. Bede had composed numerous hagiographical texts in the early eighth century, including a particularly influential account of the life and posthumous miracles of Cuthbert (d. 689), but the Viking invasions destroyed many monasteries in England and brought this literary tradition to a standstill. When the political situation had finally stabilized somewhat in the second half of the tenth century, there was a renewal and reform of monastic life in England. With this came a “mini-revival,” in Rosalind Love’s words, of hagiographic composition.¹ In the late tenth and...

Though they lived a century apart, the careers and interests of Goscelin of St.-Bertin (d. after 1107) and Lantfred of Fleury (fl. 970s) bear close comparison. Both were born and spent their childhoods outside of England—Lantfred in west Frankia, Goscelin in Flanders. Both were members of large and influential Benedictine abbeys in their home regions. After coming to England, both spent their time visiting and living among Benedictine monks. Both were highly accomplished writers with a particular interest in miracle stories and miracle collecting. Both wrote about English saints for whom there was little or no previous written commemoration,...

In the early 1090s, Osbern of Canterbury described the miracles of Dunstan as “those things that ought to be written” [eorum quae scribenda sunt].¹ It was a novel sentiment for an English monk. For centuries, English literati had not felt it necessary to turn spoken stories into text. Miracle collections compiled in tenth-and eleventh-century England were almost all the work of foreign monks. The most prolific was Goscelin of St.-Bertin, a Flemish monk who arrived in England in the early 1060s and began writing hagiographic texts for a wide range of English saints in the late 1070s and early 1080s....

Eadmer of Canterbury was likely in his forties when he decided to rewrite Osbern’s Life and Miracles of Dunstan. He declared that his aim was to correct the style and the faults in Osbern’s work such that “all ambiguity [will be] set aside both to those living and to those who will follow later.” Although some might accuse him of being inspired by arrogance or envy, he knew of no such motive in himself. He wrote out of “the love of truth alone.”¹ In his reworking of the Miracles, Eadmer left no story or even phrase handed down by Osbern...

Near the close of his fifth book of the miracles of Thomas Becket, about two-thirds of the way through a collection that would become the longest ever created in medieval England, William of Canterbury began a chapter with a short but striking reference to his own collecting project. “Brother William returns to hear what novelty the people will bring,” he wrote, perhaps trying to encourage himself to keep going, before recounting yet another miracle story.¹ In the early twelfth century, hardly any collections hit the forty-chapter mark. By the end of the century, a collection of forty chapters seems almost...

The miracle collections for Thomas Becket written by Benedict of Peterborough and William of Canterbury at Christ Church are easily the most spectacular productions in the history of English miracle collecting. Despite their significance, though, the Christ Church collections have received less careful scrutiny than many shorter collections.¹ There is much that needs untangling before it is possible to look closely at the texts themselves.² In this chapter, I examine the creation of these two enormous texts and place their composition within the timeline of Becket’s early cult and canonization. My conclusions concerning the dating and additions to the collections...

“We have not read that any saint in earlier times flashed out in so many and such great miracles so quickly after his death,” Benedict of Peterborough explains in the prologue to his collection of Thomas Becket’s miracles. “Therefore, by the will and precept of the brothers, I am compelled to commend them to the memory of letters. Although my wisdom does not suffice nor my faculties be plentiful, I take up the burden freely and devotedly, trusting in him who says ‘Open your mouth and I will fill it.’”¹ Benedict took up his burden in mid-1171, when Becket’s cult...

In the introduction of his vita for Becket, William of Canterbury provides an evocative glimpse into his work as “the martyr’s scribe.”¹ He describes how he had a vision after he had been asked by his brothers to take up “incorrect and imperfect notes” and write a miracle collection.² In the vision, the saint said to him, “‘Choose what you will’”: “hearing this, he felt in himself the mercy of the martyr. . . . Rejoicing and freed from care, he awaited his choices to be turned into the best ones, his vision into truth, and work into rest ....

The endings of long miracle collections are often ragged. Most collections begin with a substantial, carefully composed and rhetorically sophisticated prologue, but few were granted anything similar at their conclusion. Many lengthy miracle collections simply stop, without explanation, their endings as frayed and unsatisfying as that of the Bayeux Tapestry.

Miracle collecting as a whole came to a similarly tattered conclusion in England. In the first two decades of the thirteenth century, miracle collecting continued at a fairly brisk pace. Substantial collections were composed in the course of the canonization bids for Gilbert of Sempringham (canonized 1202), Wulfstan of Worcester...