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 story 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 “personal 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 1080 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. This is very much a literary history, in that literary links provide the historical context. Where others have looked to political history for the motivations of miracle writers, she looks within literature to find one writer following the example of another.
According to Koopmans's history, miracle collecting began at a specific time, circa 1080, and became a “craze” or “mania.” By about 1140, authors concerned about the loss of the past, stories of miracles worked by saints associated with their own institutions (primarily monasteries) began to consult their elders and to compose rhetorically sophisticated narratives that they gathered into units of about thirty individual stories. A shift after 1140 resulted in collections of contemporary stories rather than those from the past. These stories were gathered from strangers, usually laity, rather than members of the community, and were shorter and simpler, with an emphasis on the truthfulness of the miracle related. These later collections tended to contain around 100 stories.
After setting out her approach and some pre-history in the first two chapters, Koopmans devotes the rest of her book to a chronological survey making up chapters 3–10, in which she treats both well-known and unstudied writers. Her earliest collectors are both continental monks trying to make their reputations in England as writers: Lantfred of Fleury and Goscelin of St. Bertin (chapters 3 and 4). Then Osbern of Christ Church, Canterbury, began to imitate Goscelin, and native miracle-writing was on its way (chapter 5). Chapter 6 treats the reaction to the Norman Conquest. In an overview of Anglo-Norman miracle-collecting, Koopmans concludes that once the Normans began to believe that Anglo-Saxon saints remained powerful, the collecting and writing of their miracles became an important undertaking of the early twelfth century. Chapters 6–10 treat in detail Koopmans's second phase, which largely followed trends set by the first collection of the miracles of Thomas Becket. In her fascinating conclusion, Koopmans sets out reasons for the loss of interest in miracle writing and collecting after 1220. She shows that new miracle stories continued to circulate orally, and old collections continued to be read, but the impetus to write new miracles virtually disappeared as other genres became fashionable. Perhaps Koopmans's most important contribution lies in the thought-provoking insight that miracle collectors were first and foremost writers, full participants in a fluid literary culture in which fads arose and fashions changed.
