Mapping Medieval Miracles: Archaeology News From Past Horizons

Mapping medieval miracles : Archaeology News from Past Horizons
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The Raising of Lazarus, (c. 1410) from the Trs Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, Muse Cond, France. Image : (Wikimedia, used under a CC BY-NC
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Mapping medieval miracles

Article created on Sunday, May 11, 2014
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The work of the medieval saint often began even before birth; the earliest text telling the life story of 6th-century Gildas has him making important
pronouncements from the safety of his mothers womb. Even after death, patron saints were portrayed in the exercise of astonishing powers. The author
of the vernacular Irish text which recounts the life of Saint Bairre of Cork sees the saint resurrect a kings dead wife by bathing her. The Welsh saint,
Beino, is recorded as reducing a recalcitrant king to a pool of water, by force of words alone, a feat worthy of Game of Thrones.
A conference which took place in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge saw the launch of a project to
categorise and chart the thousands of miracle stories recorded about saints of the British Isles between 500 and 1300. The meeting, Mapping the
Miraculous: Hagiographical Motifs and the Medieval World, had been organised by three graduate students at Cambridge Robert Gallagher, Julianne
Pigott and Sarah Waidler in collaboration with a colleague from St Andrews, Jennifer Key.
Establishing the bona fides
Hagiographers, tasked with writing the biographies of the holy men and women who converted pagan populations or headed Christian communities,
relied on the wondrous and weird to establish the bona fides of the saints who populated the religious landscape of early England, Ireland, Scotland and
Wales. The layered stories of saints acts served multiple purposes in medieval communities, from regulating orthodox religious behaviour to
explaining the otherwise unexplainable in the natural world, said Pigott.
Political expediency was another aspect of saintliness: a timely miracle could save a dynasty. When his local king feared that he would die before
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producing a male heir, Saint Abban is depicted as coming to his rescue. Abban took the kings new born daughter in his hands and prayed to God that
the king might have an heir; and the girl he immersed in the font he took out as a boy, and laid it in the kings bosom. Here is thy son, he said. And the
king was exceedingly glad.
Pigott explained: It isnt difficult to imagine how a narrative such as this might have served the needs of both ruler and ruled. Potentially, it reassured
contemporary audiences that, by divine intervention, the proper order of succession would be followed, and life would continue as normal. Though, to
the modern reader its certainly more complicated.
Charting miracle stories

The conference was the first step in a project to categorise and chart the thousands of miracle stories recorded about saints of the British Isles between
500 and 1300. The organisers hope that this collaborative tool will help students and established scholars plot the parallels and divergences between
textual accounts of wonder-working across linguistic and geographic boundaries.
Their ultimate intention is to develop an online database called Mapping Miracles that will allow scholars to see how miracles recorded in texts that
were often composed centuries and hundreds of miles apart, share commonalities and differences. While recently, the current Pope made saints of two
former popes, the medieval path to sainthood was a much more democratic affair. Authors created, copied and amended miracle accounts to support the
case of their chosen holy-man, often to accord with local knowledge and customs.
Gallagher said: When we began work on this project each of us was struck by the differences in the miracle accounts we had each previously
considered to be universal. We all have specialisms in a certain range of vernacular and Latin texts, but when we began this collaborative research, we
realised that the assumptions we held as a result of our own work, may not hold true for texts produced in other regions.
As a digital database, Mapping Miracles will offer significant advantages over more conventional efforts at creating indices of literary motifs, as the
proposed online format will facilitate complex cross referencing, creating a richer and more nuanced picture of the material, while also allowing scholars
from around the world to contribute to the process. The transformation of a baby, from girl to boy, attributed to Saint Abban is just one example of how
the database might be used to categorise a miracle in several ways, said Pigott. Its interesting on a number of levels: the sacramental setting of
baptism, the mutability of gender, and the provision of service to a king and his political needs.
Waidler said: Miracles were a strong feature of the extensive bodies of Latin and vernacular literatures produced in these islands throughout the
medieval period. Reading these texts today we are offered a window on the medieval mind, helping us to understand how people might have thought
about not just the divine, but their own lives and personal concerns. The landscape itself, with its place names, is a record of how deeply the lives of the
saints are scored into our culture.
Repetitive nature of narratives

Miracles are told and retold in the texts that survive in medieval and early modern manuscripts we find littered across European libraries. For now, the
Mapping Miracles team is focusing on the British Isles but as hagiography is not confined to one geographic region or even one period of history,
theres no reason to suppose that their online project wont expand accordingly. Gallagher noted: Part of the fascination of miracles lies in the
repetitive nature of narratives that have endured for so long rather as pop music, much of it is very simplistic in form and content, yet its popular for
exactly that familiarity.
Pigott added: Notional familiarity may be consciously constructed, and we cant just read repetition as failure to innovate. Medieval authors took the
universal and particularised and localised it. I would argue they often turned stereotypes into oicotypes to borrow a term from folkloric studies. For
example, they took Biblical miracles and made them more relevant to local concerns, so the Irish saint conveniently changes water into beer, rather than
wine. A miracle tale will resonate more with the reader if they can recognise their own cultural values at play.
Source: University of Cambridge
More Information
Mapping Miracles
Cite this article
University of Cambridge. Mapping medieval miracles. Past Horizons. May 11, 2014,
from http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/05/2014/mapping-medieval-miracles
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