In Wonderful to Relate, Rachel Koopmans provides a history of miracle collecting in twelfth-century England, arguing that the craze for recording miracles developed for various personal motivations rather than institutional ones. Having surveyed more than seventy-five collections of miracles, Koopmans demonstrates that there were two phases of collecting, ca. 1080–1140 and ca. 1140–1200, the first characterized by a need to preserve the stories of the past circulating within monastic centers and the second characterized by a desire to record the oral stories of lay visitors who experienced healings. In the first two chapters, Koopmans lays the groundwork for her study, drawing upon anthropological and linguistic analyses of storytelling to demonstrate how personal narrative drives these miracle collections, and she challenges us to accept storytelling as a practice that formed the cult, rather than the shrines, the liturgy, or the indulgences; Koopmans argues that stories about saintly intervention embodied the cult, as they are evidence of a communicative process that bonded the social order. While this position discounts the value of Norman building programs in supporting the cultic identities of monastic centers in England (a process that surely worked in concert with the recording of miracles), it does force us to reconsider laicization as a phenomenon of late medieval England. Koopmans faces a problem, however, in that we cannot know how much shaping these miracle collections underwent or what the laity actually said about their experiences, so instead of analyzing their stories, she examines the collectors themselves and attends to their motivations. Koopmans looks to the work of Susan Stewart, who suggests that collecting is an objectification of desire, that one takes pleasure in collecting and documenting what is found. These collections then tell us far more about the desires of the collectors than about the laity who reported the miracles. Koopmans examines the work of six collectors to demonstrate this point: Lantfred of Fleury, who recorded miracles about Swithun at Winchester; Goscelin de St. Bertin, who collected at several houses before settling at St. Augustine’s, Canterbury; and Osbern, Eadmer, Benedict of Peterborough, and William of Canterbury, all monks of Christ Church Priory, Canterbury. Koopmans uses the collections of the first four monks to set up the history of collecting, arguing that the practice flourished under Norman administration of English houses. Then, in the final three chapters, Koopmans focuses her attention on the miracles of Becket recorded by Benedict and William, when miracle collecting reached its zenith before losing traction as canonization was institutionalized. Storytelling almost certainly continued to shape the cults, but once sanctity became regulated centrally, Koopmans argues, recording these stories was no longer needed, a point that is more than reasonable but does not quite satisfy as a rationale for the practice’s end, given the theory of desire that underscores the argument.

Wonderful to Relate is most compelling when focused on individual collectors, such as Goscelin, who wrote to increase his own reputation as a hagiographer and writer. The specific focus on traditions at Christ Church, however, complicate an overall view, as one wants more comparative evidence, rather than the bulk of the material used to frame this argument coming from Canterbury, the most powerful religious locale in England, one that supported the production and preservation of manuscripts and, thus, the evidence. Some attempt is made to survey the nature of collections from other centers, but it is hard to visualize how the six specific case studies fit into that larger tradition of collecting. A table describing the details of the seventy-five collections would help, even as additional chapters about collections from other places would strengthen the universality of the argument. Using collections produced after the Conquest as a measuring stick, Koopmans defines a collection as one with thirty plus miracles (the largest collections she considers have more than one hundred). With this in mind, Koopmans identifies only one pre-Conquest collection worthy of consideration (and this by Lantfred, a continental monk) to indicate that Anglo-Saxons were not interested in collecting stories, even accepting uncritically the Norman rebuke of Saxon monks for their negligence. As Koopmans notes, there is some evidence that recording miracles was a practice before the Normans arrived (parchment posted at shrines that recount miracles in Old English, as well as a reference to the Saxon monk Ælfwine who collected miracles about Æthelthryth). The nature of collecting may well have shifted between Saxon and Norman administrations, but given the nature of loss from Anglo-Saxon England and given the Norman investment in record keeping, one might instead identify the difference and indicate why the Normans were motivated to collect stories of English saints. It would be useful, for example, to provide evidence of such interest in the continental houses that shaped Lantfred or Goscelin, who helped generate collecting as an activity in England. One might also qualify the larger argument by asking about the nature of collecting at major centers like Winchester and Canterbury: what resources were available to support this initiative? As Koopmans illustrates there was a form of imitation within Christ Church, between Osbern and Eadmer and Benedict and William. How had that community developed a particular (competitive?) milieu of collecting? Wonderful to Relate is a strong book, one that shows a breadth of research on hagiographical practice. There are some details worth rethinking, and it will be obvious that I was not impressed by chapter 3 on the Anglo-Saxon monastic centers, in part because of sweeping generalizations like “no hagiography of any kind was written in England between 800 and 950” (47). Much better would be to acknowledge the lack of hagiographical evidence in this unsettled period, rather than to assess the Anglo-Saxon religious culture by a later collecting practice.