Rachel Koopmans's theme is the development in England during the later eleventh and twelfth centuries in both numbers and scale of miracle stories concerning saints. Her pattern of exegesis is episodic, chronological and even teleological in form, essentially beginning, after a nod at Lantfred of Fleury's collection concerning St Swithun, with the many saints’ Lives compiled by Goscelin of St Bertin and culminating with the massive collections of miracula associated with Thomas Becket accumulated by Benedict of Peterborough and William of Canterbury. The body of source material is substantial. Koopmans estimates that at least seventy-five such collections were produced in England during the period, becoming almost a defining form of monastic literary culture. Hence her categorisation of the material, which can at times seem almost too rigid, enables her to handle the works with clarity and considerable style. Her substantial achievement is to mould a diverse body of original sources into a comprehensible whole and to trace its development with a lively intelligence. Nevertheless her treatment tends to render any general reflections subordinate to her accounts of particular writers. Hence her explanation for this remarkable efflorescence in the genre, citing a sense of the loss of earlier saintly narratives and a desire to preserve what remained against a background of monastic revival and the multiplication of monastic libraries, occurs virtually as an aside in her account of Eadmer of Canterbury. A perceptive and revealing explanation of the way in which an interest in Anglo-Saxon saints actually united new Norman abbots with their Anglo-Saxon monks appears almost as a footnote to the chapter devoted to Osbern of Canterbury. At the heart of the book lies an excellent account of the tension between the narrators of miraculous events and those who recorded them. Again, this tension is normally described episodically, within the context of individual writers, but Koopmans's analysis of the matter is regularly perceptive and illuminating. The nature of the miracles is at times defined by the status of the teller. Women tend to retail healing miracles; monks tell of dreams and visions; those of higher rank indulge in more circumstantial detail. During the second half of the twelfth century not only do miracle collections tend to become more substantial but there is an increasing emphasis on the experiences of the laity, which in turn reflect characteristically lay concerns, shipwrecks, animals, precision regarding names and places. But those who recorded these matters also imposed their own prejudices. Benedict of Peterborough was not alone in seeming to prefer the narratives of fellow monks or scholars, or events that took place near to Canterbury. Conversely he was sceptical of the tales told by women. His colleague, William of Canterbury, more credulous and even sensationalist, gave much less weight to the accounts of his fellow monks but demonstrated an almost obsessive interest in ‘medical’ miracles, detailing symptoms and even possible causes. Koopmans's account effectively culminates with the Becket material and she is at her best in her subtle analysis of the works of Benedict and William and of the contrasts between them.

Yet, as she points out, the numerous contemporary Lives of Becket surprisingly say nothing about his miracles, prompting the reflection that his life, and death, were of a qualitatively different order to those of previous saints and that the records of his subsequent career as a miracle-worker cannot simply be regarded as the culmination of a literary genre more than a century old. Koopmans's work ends with some explanation for the decline in such collections around the end of the twelfth century. Perhaps too many now existed; the emergence of a university culture was unsympathetic to their continuance; accumulations of exempla were more useful to a new breed of preachers. In particular Koopmans's sympathies become clear when she laments the emergence of formal canonisation procedures, where miracle stories became like evidence given under questioning at a trial. An odd conclusion, it might seem, where a good story is to be preferred to the truth.