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

by Rachel Koopmans

While the late Anglo-Saxons rarely recorded saints' posthumous miracles, a shift occurred as monastic writers of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries started to preserve hundreds of the stories they had heard of healings, acts of vengeance, resurrections, recoveries, and other miraculous deeds effected by their local saints. Indeed, Rachel Koopmans contends, the miracle collection quickly became a defining genre of high medieval English monastic culture.

Koopmans surveys more than seventy-five collections and offers a new model for understanding how miracle stories were generated, circulated, and replicated. She argues that orally exchanged narratives carried far more propagandistic power than those preserved in manuscripts; stresses the literary and memorial roles of miracle collecting; and traces changes in form and content as the focus of the collectors shifted from the stories told by religious colleagues to those told by lay visitors to their churches.

Wonderful to Relate highlights the importance of the two massive collections written by Benedict of Peterborough and William of Canterbury in the wake of the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170. Koopmans provides the first in-depth examination of the creation and influence of the Becket compilations, often deemed the greatest of all medieval miracle collections. In a final section, she ponders the decline of miracle collecting in the thirteenth century, which occurred with the advent of formalized canonization procedures and theological means of engaging with the miraculous.

Genres: History

352 pages, Hardcover

First published November 9, 2010

Reviews

[Eve Jenkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rachel Koopmans book is beautifully written on very a niche subject-the themes behind the miracles of the Middle Ages, and " in tune" with Tom Hollands work on the ages, she works on the miracula or miracle accounts at various pilgrim shrines, determining what the medieval pilgrim's experienced with regards to what the pilgrims expected and desired. It is a detailed book, looking at lesser known shrines in English cathedrals (bearing in mind they were Catholic theology then)-like st Hugh. What I found fascinating was how the pilgrims regarded St Thomas Becket as the great Doctor . At a time when medicine outside the church did not usually work and could be extremely painful, she raises examples of how the work of Galen and the Greeks came to Europe via Arabic medics,brought by Constantine the brilliant African doctor, which he translated at Salerno into Latin. Canterbury's medical library was vast and the monk-doctors were able to tell Epilepsy and its forms from insanity and other mental illness as a result, for instance.Koopmans description of the miracles are compelling and take the subject seriously, as the medieval pilgrims did. Her scholarship is wide-ranging and easy to read.