Medieval Miracle Accounts as Stories

Literary versus Forensic Purposes

We can begin with the general contrast. Aviad Kleinberg wrote that every hagiographic work is ‘an exercise in persuasion’, and that is a perception that is generally and deeply true. ⁸ Even the presence in a hagiographic text of doubters and critics, including sometimes beneficiaries such as heads of monastic institutions, is intended to buttress an ultimate confidence among the audience, as these doubters and critics are either satisfied or silenced. Richard, prior of Much Wenlock in the first years of the 12th century, was, we are told, ‘unwilling to accept miracle stories easily,’ but, after inquiring into a miraculous cure performed by St Milburga, who was enshrined in his own church, he rejoiced, ‘elated at this new and unusual miracle.’ ⁹

But, while all such writing was intended to demonstrate the sanctity of a man or woman, the meaning of that word ‘demonstrate’ is not always exactly the same, having stronger and weaker implications. One may distinguish the weaker, more generally persuasive, sense, calling that the literary approach, from the approach that sought to show that someone was a saint by more formal rules, calling that the forensic. Other labels might serve as well, but the terms ‘literary’ and ‘forensic’ do convey the essence of the distinction.

Hagiographers were always literate and often literary and learned. They wrote the same kind of prefaces as other writers, with the same rhetorical commonplaces: the modesty topos, the plea that they are writing only at the request of their fellows or the command of their superiors, the invitation to correct their errors, the assertion that they write only truth. They were sometimes masters (or, more rarely, mistresses) of elaborate Latin style. If they were revising or recasting an earlier piece of hagiographic writing, they might well strike a self-satisfied note. The notorious self-trumpeter Gerald of Wales pointed out the superiority of his version of the Life of St David over what he called ‘the old and now virtually outdated version’: ‘In this work the reader will find superfluities cut back, defects supplied, and clumsy phrases rewritten.’ ¹⁰ These writers knew they were aiming to produce top-quality works of letters. But sometimes this conception of literary achievement might sit uneasily with other purposes of writing about the saints and their miracles, other conceptions of what the form of a miracle account should be, especially those that had a strong sense of what constituted proof.

A small but very revealing example of the tension between the literary and the forensic conceptions concerns the matter of witnesses to miracles. Latin writers who saw themselves in a classical tradition might blanch at the inclusion of vernacular names, especially Germanic ones. This self-denying ordinance could be applied to the names of those involved in miracles. Thus, when Thiofrid, abbot of Echternach, wrote his verse Life of St Willibrord around 1100, not only did he have to call the saint Willbrord to make the scansion easier, but also, when mentioning the saint’s punishment of those who usurped church lands, he refused to ‘commit to writing so many barbarous names.’ ¹¹ His contemporary Osbern of Canterbury omits the names of informants in his Life of Alphege as barbarous: ‘I consciously refrain from giving their names, since I am unwilling to discolour the very beginning of my discourse with barbarous appellations.’ ¹² Likewise, in his Latin translation of Coleman’s Old English Life of Wulfstan, addressed to the monks of Worcester, William of Malmesbury admits: ‘Brethren, I have not concealed from you that I have suppressed almost all the names of the witnesses, lest the barbarity of their names should wound the ears of the fastidious reader.’ ¹³ Examples could be multiplied. Latin writers with pretensions could and did choose to omit the names of witnesses to miracles on the grounds of their uncouthness.

Yet such an omission could be hazardous if one encountered a more demanding canon of proof. Such awkward tension between two different ways of dealing with testimony in miracle accounts is revealed in the work of the Cistercian Walter Daniel. Walter composed his Life of Ailred, abbot of Rievaulx, soon after Ailred’s death in 1167, including in it, as might be expected, the accounts of several in vita miracles, mainly cures. ¹⁴ But, very soon after sending his composition into the world, he found he was challenged and had to defend the way he had undertaken it. Two unnamed prelates doubted Ailred’s miracles and as a consequence Walter was asked to give the names of witnesses to those miracles, which he had not done in the Life. In the short but highly informative text known as The Letter to Maurice he did so, though hardly with a good grace. Scarcely any hagiographer, he claims, gives the names of his sources, and it might surely have been enough, he laments, that he had said in the Life that he had reported only what he had seen or what others had seen and told him about. Anyway, he adds, echoing a common trope, virtue is more important than the power to perform miracles: ‘I marvel more at Ailred’s charity than I would marvel if he had had raised four people from the dead’ (four being one more than Jesus’ three). But his critics are satisfied only with ‘proofs in words publicly proclaimed,’ and Walter duly lists the names of those who witnessed Ailred’s miracles, going through them in the order in which they occur in the Life. But he does this with a certain truculence. One of his comments is especially significant. His critics, he says, seem to equate proof of crime (crimen) and proof of virtue (virtus). ¹⁵

These words were written around 1170, in the heart of that formative period when the doctrine and practice of papal canonization were being hammered out. The first papal canonization of an English saint, Edward the Confessor, took place in 1161, and the papal pronouncement that eventually came to embody the papal claim to a monopoly of canonization, Audivimus, dates to 1171–72. ¹⁶ By the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216) the process is clear. When Innocent authorized an inquiry into the sanctity of Gilbert of Sempringham in 1201, he expected to receive the sworn evidence of named witnesses, recorded in writing and authenticated with appropriate seals. ¹⁷ Miracles and proof had always been paired, but, for many long Christian centuries, the balance of opinion was that miracles constituted proof, not that they required it; they were like witnesses testifying to sanctity, they were not themselves in the dock.

Walter Daniel had been pressured into giving the names of witnesses to miracles, and felt that it was an unwelcome intrusion of semi-judicial procedures. By 1200 those semi-judicial procedures were standard in canonization processes. The tension between literary and forensic purposes could hardly be more explicit. It is a shift that Rachel Koopmans also describes: the new forms are ‘more like a bureaucratic process than a warm conversation with friends.’ ¹⁸ Walter Daniel certainly felt he had been dragged from the congenial world of the latter into the colder light of the former. It was no longer possible to leave out the witnesses’ names because they sounded uncouth and barbaric to Latinate ears.

It is thus important to be aware of the context in which miracle stories were being written down and collected. Those for a new cult or a contested cult may well have a sharper probative tone than others. They will be closer to the forensic pole. And those of the later Middle Ages aimed at securing canonization will have a different feel from those circulating among gossipy and supportive confreres.

And an issue that may be relevant here is the balance of types of miracle. It is often suggested that miracles of punishment are proportionally more important in the early Middle Ages but, in the later Middle Ages, become relatively insignificant compared to miracles of healing. If this is true, then one explanation might be, not that the saints had become kinder, but that the more rigorous demands for witness testimony in the later period favoured healing over punitive miracles: those healed by the saint would be happier to attest their cure than those harmed by the saint (if they indeed survived), while fervent monks reporting the sudden deaths of their enemies might not be what papal commissioners were looking for. The forensic demands of the new outlook would then be shaping the very content of miracle accounts. This, however, remains speculative.

Narrative Motifs

But, regardless of their place along this gamut, from persuasive to forensic, all miracle accounts can be broken down into their narrative components, and it is clear that recurrent motifs are a fundamental building block of these little narratives. This ‘family likeness’ of many miracle accounts was noticed by the Reverend Augustus Jessopp in the preface to the Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich, which he co-edited with M. R. James in 1896: ‘When we can get over the long lists of miracles, which even in their nauseous details have all a strong family likeness to one another, there still remains a very valuable element of social history …’ ¹⁹ Jessopp was unusual at that time in perceiving the value of miracle accounts for social history, typical of the time in regarding their details as nauseous, and nothing other than perfectly perceptive in noting their family resemblances.

Motif analysis is a tricky business. The first step, of course, is the catalogue. The classic example of the cataloguing of narrative motifs is the Motif-index of Folk-literature in six volumes, first published in the 1930s by the American folklorist Stith Thompson. ²⁰ His method was exhaustively taxonomic. We read, for instance, of:

Return from lower world up steep slope

Return from lower world by being slung by bent tree

Return from lower world on eagle

Return from lower world on vulture

Escape from lower world by magic

Escape from lower world on miraculously growing tree

Ascent from lower world on animal

Escape from lower world on bird

Escape from lower world on horse of lightning

Escape from lower world by spiders

Stith Thompson was a medievalist as well as a folklorist—his first publication, in 1918, was Old English Poems, Translated into the Original Meter ²¹ —and he included in his Motif-index examples from medieval romances, although not from hagiography. In the preface to his vast catalogue, he explicitly invoked the analogy with the systems of classification employed by biologists, and he also made it clear that his job was listing not interpreting: ‘No attempt has been made to determine the psychological basis of various motifs or their structural value in narrative art.’ ²² Presumably these were tasks left to subsequent generations.

The torch of motif-classification was taken up by another American scholar who also combined interests in medieval literature and contemporary folklore, the great pioneer in the motif analysis approach to medieval miracles, C. Grant Loomis, whose book White Magic: An Introduction to the Folklore of Christian Legend, appeared in 1948. ²³ Loomis, who spent most of his academic career in the German department at Berkeley, studied in Munich under Max Foerster, author of, among many other publications, a series of nine articles entitled Beiträge zur mittelalterlichen Volkskunde (‘Contributions to medieval folklore studies’), and worked with him on the sources of Aelfric’s saints’ Lives, and later wrote a dissertation at Harvard on ‘Old English Saints’ Lives,’ combining all this with being an active folklorist, serving for some years as editor of the journal Western Folklore—‘Western’ in this case meaning ‘west of the Rockies.’ ²⁴

Loomis comments in his preface, ‘A complete index of all the miracles which appear in Christian legend would be a useful and desirable work.’ No one could disagree with that. He adds, ‘Such a labor, it is likely, would exceed the usual life span of any patient compiler.’ Nor could one disagree with that. But his industry still commands respect. What he did do was work his way through the great collections such as the Acta Sanctorum and Migne’s Patrologia, and also a sampling of both medieval collections, such as Gregory of Tours’s hagiography, and modern compilations (Plummer for Ireland, Rees’s Cambro-British Saints, for example), noticing recurrent narrative motifs, although excluding, for comprehensible reasons, the mere description of a miraculous cure. White Magic is a fairly slim volume, 250 pages, but it is based on fairly stout research: there are well over 1500 saints listed in the index of saints. Anyone searching for examples of ‘lions, friendly’ or ‘sunbeam supports objects’ can rely on Loomis (although, of course, nowadays the giant computerized database has overshadowed him and his task as completely as the power loom did the hand loom).

Loomis boldly chose to use both the term ‘magic’ and the term ‘folklore’ in his title. Neither of these is an exact or simple concept. And classifying Christian miracle as magic is controversial. Indeed, many scholastic thinkers of the Middle Ages made great efforts to distinguish and differentiate miracle and magic. They had less trouble with the concept ‘folklore,’ since this term was not coined until 1846, when it was a conscious neologism, championed by its inventor as ‘a good Saxon compound, Folk-Lore—the Lore of the People.’ ²⁵ The 14th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1929 defines ‘folklore’ as ‘the traditions, customs and superstitions of the uncultured classes in civilized nations,’ and this definition is intended to mark off folklore from the culture of both the cultured classes and the uncivilized nations. Thus it did not include art history, philosophy, high literature and so forth, but nor did it stray into the realm of the anthropologists. In fact, in its associations, implications and connotations, the term ‘folklore’ has as its more or less legitimate offspring the ‘popular culture’ that was so ubiquitous in the discourse of historians and critics in the late 20th century.

Scholars of hagiography and the cult of the saints were natural participants in the long debates about ‘popular culture’ that characterized that period. The most memorable contribution in this area was in the first chapter of Peter Brown’s book, The Cult of the Saints, with its critique of the so-called ‘two-tier model.’ This approach, Brown says, would equate ‘the rise of the cult of the saints’ with ‘the capitulation by the enlightened elites of the Christian church to modes of thought previously current only among the “vulgar”.’ Brown doubts the value of this sharp distinction and cites with approval his mentor the great classical historian Momigliano, at the conclusion of an investigation into popular religious beliefs: ‘Thus my inquest into popular beliefs in the Late Roman historians ends in reporting that there were no such beliefs.’ ²⁶

But regardless of the value of terms like ‘folklore,’ ‘magic,’ or ‘popular beliefs,’ Loomis’s compilation is still extremely useful as a classified compendium of motifs appearing in miracle accounts. But taxonomy is not explanation. To categorize is a helpful first step, but it is a first step. It is desirable to go beyond listing motifs. The following section of this article considers a particular narrative motif, one which occurs frequently in miracle stories, and explores and assesses what Jessopp called the ‘family likeness’ among different instances. In the three following examples, some of the text is direct citation, some is paraphrase.

At some time in the 1140s a young Norfolk shepherd fell asleep under a bush while tending his flock. ‘While he was snoring with his mouth open, a snake suddenly entered into him, and, as if it had found an agreeable dwelling, made its way into his intestines.’ When he awoke, he was unaware of what had happened but felt discomfort, and spent some years in increasing pain. Finally, in 1151, his father brought him to the shrine of St William of Norwich, scraped some stone from the shrine, and gave it to his son to drink in water. When the holy water reached the snake in his guts, it went mad; the pain increased, the boy ran out of the church and vomited up not only the snake but also its two young. The father killed the three snakes and preserved them in a cleft stick ‘as a sign of such a great miracle.’ ²⁷ These are indeed nauseous details.

Another story comes from the miracles of St Verdiana of Castelfiorentino, a Tuscan recluse who died (probably) in the first half of the 13th century; the miracle seems to be 14th-century:

When a certain gardener at Florence, lying down after his work in the summer season, was resting under a tree and sleeping with his mouth open, a snake entered into his mouth. He was woken by the disturbance in his intestines and uttered terrible cries in his distress, and soon afterwards his belly began to swell up. The remedies suggested by doctors were in vain. Since he continually got worse, both he and his friends and family began, humbly and devoutly, to invoke St Verdiana, as many people suggested, imploring the favour of her help in his great grief and need. After many vows and prayers, the unhappy man was carried to the body of St Verdiana with great wailing. … As soon as he entered the church, he became silent. When he was placed by the saint Verdiana’s altar, he bent down, opened his mouth and the snake came out, stained with blood and filth. Immediately he became as healthy as he was before or had ever been … ²⁸

The third example is different, in that it concerns an in vita miracle. The saint who performs the miracle is Pavacius or Pavin, an early (that is, fourth-century) bishop of Le Mans, although the text dates from the ninth century, so it is best considered an entirely fictional story:

A peasant from Anjou went out to harvest, and, tired by his labour, had a nap after eating. While he slept with his mouth open, a snake entered through his mouth into his belly. When he awoke, he did not at first know he had a snake in his belly, but nevertheless felt a terrible belly ache. That night as he slept in his bed, the snake began to move about and cause him great pain. His cries brought his neighbours, who sent for doctors. But they could do him no good (they never do in miracle stories). He began to frequent churches to seek healing and, one night in a dream, was told to go to St Pavacius, bishop of Le Mans. Pavacius understood the nature of his ailment, touched his belly, made the sign of the cross and put his finger in the man’s mouth; he at once vomited up the snake. ²⁹

These are only three examples of dozens one could cite. Loomis alone has 18, indexed under ‘snake, swallowed.’ What can be deduced from these stories? First, of course, the danger of sleeping outdoors with your mouth open. Beyond that salutary lesson, there are forking paths. One could be called realist, the other literary. They are not mutually exclusive, but take different starting points. The realist assumption is that there are numerous narratives of this kind because the situation they describe often happened. For example, parasitic worms must have been widespread in the medieval period, and they can certainly exit through the mouth. If people saw this happen at a shrine, they would then need an explanation for how they had entered in the first place. The literary approach, in contrast, starts with the fact that there are many stories of this kind, and approaches them as narratives.

Several large issues in medieval history have been characterized by this tension between the two interpretative styles: are our texts in any sense lenses through which we see the past, or can we only ever see the text and analyse it as such? For example, there is debate about what can be known about the indigenous European paganism of the early Middle Ages. Can it be reconstructed as a lived world-view, or is it largely a textual construct, embodied in stereotyped Christian writings that give us only, in James Palmer’s words, ‘elaborate imaginings of paganism’? ³⁰ Likewise, is the heresy of the High Middle Ages virtually an alternative religion of dissent and opposition or is it, as in the view of R. I. Moore, ‘contrived from the resources of [the] well-stocked imaginations’ of churchmen. ³¹ The similarity of these two formulations underlines the problem: do the Christian and Catholic texts which describe paganism or heresy tell us about anything more than the ‘imaginings’ of their authors? ³²

When studying hagiography, it is often especially difficult to decide the relative weight of literary model and recurrent social situation. This is because there were both strong literary conventions in the genre and also great continuities in cult practice and experience. Even when the hagiographer helps with an explicit reference, as in the case of the quarrel between the men of Gloucester and the men of Worcester over who should possess the holy body of St Kenelm, where the author comments, ‘Both sides wrangled, as once the peoples of Tours and Poitiers did over the body of St Martin,’ ³³ and we are thus alerted to a literary echo present in the writer’s mind, we cannot conclude that the incident did not occur, nor that we are absolved, by identifying a literary trope, from exploring the reality of disputes like these over the bodies of the holy dead.

In the case of these swallowed snakes, some things can be excluded. There is no Ur-text casting a long shadow. The Bible, of course, and the great influential hagiographies, such as those of Antony or Martin, left a deep imprint on all medieval writing about the saints, and, if we read of resurrections, or water changed to wine, we may well first wish to tease out textual relations. But the swallowed snake story does not come from such sources. Nor is mutual influence at all likely. The three stories are found in texts written in the Carolingian empire, in 12th-century England and in late medieval Italy. None of these texts had a wide circulation and there is no conceivable influence of one on the others.

It is natural to ask whether anything about the saints involved helps clarify the motif. William of Norwich is not a snake specialist; he does cure one other beneficiary of snakebite, but that makes only two miracles out of 120 or so. ³⁴ He is notorious as the earliest recorded case of a Christian boy supposedly ritually murdered by the Jews, the so-called blood libel, but his miracles are mainly the usual run of cures, although it must be said he also has a vicious streak, striking down doubters or lukewarm devotees. Pavacius of Le Mans is renowned for having expelled a dangerous fire-breathing dragon, ten cubits long, which is termed also serpens, ³⁵ but most of his miracles involve the cure of ailments that are very generally described.

It is Verdiana who provides the clearest case of association of saint and snakes; she actually lived with them. Having heard in a sermon that St Antony of Egypt had been tormented by demons in animal form, she prayed to God that she might undergo a similar kind of suffering. In due course ‘two horrible serpents (duo orribiles serpentes)’ slithered into her cell. Her Life describes her as being appalled, since ‘she knew that the snake is Satan’s familiar animal (sciens amicam bestiam Sathanae esse serpentem).’ Perhaps she had forgotten her prayers to suffer like St Antony or perhaps she was unpleasantly surprised by the answer. The snakes stayed with her for a long time, although often going out and returning, but they were never absent when she took her frugal meal, which they shared with her, eating from the same plate. However, if there was not enough to eat, they beat her so fiercely with their tails that she could not get up for days. Verdiana, nevertheless, forbade the bishop of Florence from getting rid of them, and healed them when hostile travellers cut off their tails. Eventually, however, the local people killed one and drove off the other, much to the saint’s regret, since ‘she had been deprived of the company that had been sent by God (societate a Deo data privata fuisset).’ ³⁶ It is thus not surprising that, in her late medieval and modern iconography, St Verdiana is represented with snakes, as on a 14th-century embroidered textile now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. A painting by Giovanni dal Ponte from around 1420 depicts her standing, holding a snake in each hand. ³⁷

Clearly, things coming into or out of the body are not matters indifferent to human beings, but, following Stith Thompson’s austere refusal ‘to determine the psychological basis of various motifs,’ it is best to refrain from even mentioning what is vulgarly called a Freudian explanation of these snakes. And invocation of the Minoan snake goddess might be far-fetched, despite the unmistakable similarities in iconography. But it is not nonsensical to ask if the cure of the Florentine gardener who swallowed a snake belongs in some way appropriately to a saint who was so intimate with snakes. And this is where the fact that the expulsion of swallowed snakes is such a frequent motif in miracle accounts is important: it warns us against premature over-interpretation of a case like this. The expulsion of swallowed snakes is a common motif; some of the saints who perform the miraculous expulsion have a snake association and some do not. That is the pattern that emerges and then itself requires explanation. Motif analysis can help us frame our questions.

A Case Study: Reginald of Durham

The case study of an individual miracle account, which concludes this article, is drawn from Reginald of Durham’s Little Book on the Powers and Miracles of the Glorious Bishop Cuthbert, ³⁸ a text which was edited by James Raine the elder in the very first volume of the Surtees Society in 1835 (and, sadly, has never been translated). More happily, Reginald’s own autograph survives, still in Durham, where it was written. ³⁹ It is a small book, less than 6 inches high and just over 4 inches wide (15 by 10.7 centimetres), consisting of 166 folios. It must have been composed over several years, since it is dedicated to Ailred of Rievaulx, who died in 1167, as already mentioned, while its final pages describe events during the Scots invasions of 1173–74. ⁴⁰ The book is a collection of 129 miracle stories, some of them dating back to earlier centuries but the majority from Reginald’s own lifetime. The average length of these tales is over 700 words, so the longer of them have a real chance to develop narrative momentum and variety. One of the longer narratives will be discussed here in detail.

Reginald’s characteristic form is to open a chapter with some general elevated comments about his saintly patron before turning to the narrative. The story analysed here, in chapter 68 of the work, begins in just this way:

St Cuthbert shines forth with the scent of the brightest incense, which glows on the outside but, while it is burned up with flames, is shown as good by its sweet vapours. His brightness gleams with justice; his sweet smell shines forth in the minds of hearers through his works of virtue. ⁴¹

Reginald continues for a while with this ambitious and paradoxical mingling of visual and olfactory imagery—Cuthbert is both ‘the fire of love (ignis amoris)’ and ‘the fragrance of eternal sweetness (fragrantia eternae dulcedinis)’—before reaching a narrative marker, that could be read in such a way as to sound bathetic: ‘There is a village in Cheshire …’ But the concreteness of the detail is a consistent feature of Reginald’s narratives: the grandiose introits are not undercut by the everyday elements that follow but are buttressed and illustrated by them. So, we are told the name of the village (it is Leighton in the Wirral), given a brief account of its location and then informed that it has a little church dedicated to St Cuthbert. The marshalling of miracle stories from many subsidiary centres of Cuthbert’s cult is a feature of Reginald’s collection, supporting his assertion that Cuthbert’s power could be felt everywhere, not just at his shrine in Durham. This miracle is the first of a group of five reported from the region.

This particular miracle centres on the church itself—a humble little building, according to Reginald, built of rough wattles and situated in remote woodland, rarely visited by the locals, who had no particular devotion to St Cuthbert. This was all about to change: ‘not long afterwards the venerable confessor announced to all of what great merit he was, he who until then had seemed almost unknown to the inhabitants and of no honour among them.’ ⁴² This builds up a little suspense, even if the drift will come as no surprise.

Then we switch to straightforward narrative: ‘It happened that a crow built a nest in the roof of the church, as it did each year …’ The crow has young and their croaking (vox stridula) bothers the locals. An ill-mannered young man (iuvenis) then climbs up onto the roof to get rid of the crows, making holes in the rotting wood of the structure as he does so. But he doesn’t care. Switching to direct speech, Reginald gives us the young man’s blasphemous words to the birds: ‘Cuthbert’s roof won’t be any protection for you and his church will be no help for you against me.’ ⁴³ Such disrespect for a saint’s name has inevitable consequences. While the young man reaches toward the nest with one hand, and with the other grasps one of the wooden pegs that held the wattle in place, suddenly the whole section comes crashing down, bringing him with it, half-dead. The wooden peg he was holding adheres to his hand and cannot be released—Reginald gives a detailed description of the state of the hand, introduced by a direct address to the reader or hearer: videres, ‘you would see.’

Doctors, unsurprisingly, are useless, but eventually, advised by his friends, the suffering young man has himself carried into Cuthbert’s church, where he spends three days—how many miracles require three days!—penitently begging Cuthbert’s forgiveness. A vigorous description of his symptoms allows Reginald to deploy a rich vocabulary of bodily, semi-medical terms: nervi, humor, venae, etc.—showing a feature that is not uncommon in miracle accounts, despite their avowed stance of hostility to actual doctors. Reginald’s contemporary, William of Canterbury, recorder of Becket’s miracles, has also been characterized by the richness of his medical terminology. ⁴⁴

St Cuthbert himself now appears in the story. On the third night, while the miserable young man lies awake in the church, a light bursts forth and a venerable bishop appears. His physiognomy and clothing are described in detail. The youth’s teeth chatter, his limbs shake. The bishop takes him by the arm and addresses him gently: ‘You have been punished for your thoughtless act and suffered not the vengeful anger of Cuthbert, whom you reproached and whose peace you violated, but rather the true reward of your idiocy.’ ⁴⁵ Cuthbert explains that he is more used to mercy than revenge, and proceeds to heal the young man by banging his paralyzed fingers against the altar, first healing his index finger, then his middle finger, then his ‘medical finger,’ as it was known. But the little finger, called the ‘ear finger’ from its obvious function, was left contracted, as a reminder to him.

Cuthbert disappears; the young man reports the miracle to the priest and all the local people; the place gains great honour. And, at some point, the priest and some of the aged parishioners turn up at Durham, to tell Reginald the whole story. ‘So great is St Cuthbert in a distant land,’ he concludes, ‘who shows with his wonderful miracles that he is everywhere.’ ⁴⁶

A social historical analysis of this miracle account would, quite rightly, point out that it concerns a young man, that it is a punishment miracle (although also, of course, a healing miracle), that it takes place away from the main cult centre, etc. All of this is vital information. But it also has narratological features: the length of the narrative (about 1200 words); the amount of direct speech; the extended physical descriptions; and, notably, the presence of the narrator, telling us what is coming, labelling the youth’s words as blasphemous, showing us the wound (videres), explaining how he knows the story. Reginald of Durham obviously did not feel the pressure, weighing heavily on Walter Daniel at this very same period, to name names. The youth remains an anonymous youth, the bearers of the story are simply ‘the priest and other ancient men, parishioners of that church.’ Neither Walter Daniel’s critics, nor papal commissioners in a canonization hearing would have put up with that. As mentioned, in the conclusion to this account Reginald says that because of this miracle the place came to be treated with much more honour, and in fact we learn in one of the later miracle accounts from this group of five local stories that the humble church of wattle and thatch was completely rebuilt in well-fashioned stone. As a short story writer, Reginald of Durham stands comparison with the greats.

So, to sum up these three suggested approaches, first, it might be useful to place hagiographic narratives along a range or scale from ‘literary’ to ‘forensic,’ the generally persuasive to the more formally probative; it is also important to weigh up what we mean by motif, and look at individual stories to see how characteristic or how unusual certain motifs are; and finally there is much to be learned from a close reading of the literary gems that miracle accounts sometimes offer. These are just a few angles of approach to what is one of the most enormous bodies of written material to have come down to us from the Middle Ages. There is no shortage of material, nor of possible methods of analysis.