Bruce Venarde is an accomplished medieval historian as well as a veteran translator of medieval primary sources in Latin and modern monographs in French. [1] His decades of experience enrich the present volume, notable for its coherent conception, clear contextualization, and compelling prose. The texts translated here represent the five earliest collections of Marian miracles written in France: Herman of Tournai’s The Miracles of St. Mary of Laon (c. 1146); Hugh Farsit’s A Little Book of Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the City of Soissons (mid 1140s); Haimo of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives’s Letter to the Brothers of Tutbury (1145); John “Son of Peter”’s The Miracles of the Church of Coutances (c. 1130); and Gautier of Compiègne’s The Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary (mid 1140s). Venarde’s overall introduction explains the concepts and terms (saints, relics, pilgrimages, Marian devotion, medicine, miracles and miracle collections) necessary for even beginning students to read knowledgeably, and the introduction to each text provides substantial historical context. The book can thus be assigned profitably to graduate or undergraduate classes in its entirety, and would be perfect for advanced seminars centered on many aspects of medieval Christianity and culture.
But each text also has its own particular interest. Herman of Tournai’s work is a gem with wide interest for scholars and students alike. Written to praise Bartholomew de Jur, bishop of Laon elected in 1113, Books One and Two of The Miracles of St. Mary of Laon retell the famous episode of the revolt of the commune of Laon in 1112, and recount the miracles that occurred during two fund-raising relic tours to western France and England undertaken by the canons of Laon in 1112 and 1113. Book Three is largely a chronicle of the monastic rebirth of the Laon area, focused particularly on Norbert of Xanten and the Premonstratensians, with a notable focus on women’s success within this movement. Given the unexpectedly wide range of topics covered in this seventy-five-page text, any classroom teacher assigning Guibert of Nogent’s better known Monodies might think seriously of adding Herman’s work in order to allow comparative perspectives to emerge. Herman also offers a number of surprises, such as his claim--appropriate for a relic tour--that no one can be healed except in his or her home diocese (56), the appearance of a five-headed dragon rampaging through Christchurch, England (60), or a proud Briton’s claim that King Arthur still lives (64).
Hugh Farsit’s account of the miracles worked by the Virgin at the nunnery of Notre-Dame in Soissons focuses largely on healing miracles during the outbreak of a wasting, widespread plague that ate away the flesh of sufferers. Those seeking cures came to venerate the Virgin’s slipper, possessed by the nuns. Some of the most intriguing episodes in this text involve women, such as the woman who bit the slipper in her zeal (121), the woman whose eaten-away nose grew back (125), or the woman whose womb produced three stones, each bigger than the last, before at last birthing a healthy baby (138). But perhaps the most intriguing element of this text is the way Mathilda, abbess of Notre-Dame, seems to control access to the slipper-relic, and the strong possibility (suggested by Venarde) that she, or another nun or nuns, kept accounts of these miracles from which Hugh would then have worked.
Abbot Haimo of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives’s text takes the form of a letter to the monks of Tutbury (a dependent priory in England). The primary interest here is in his description of “the cult of the carts,” a phenomenon that took hold in these decades whereby pious locals would themselves load and drag carts of building materials to a church under construction as an act of piety (but not, Venarde notes, of efficiency; horses or oxen would have done the job more quickly). As Haimo says (160), this practice began at Chartres and then spread through Normandy, especially at places dedicated to the Virgin. In somewhat circular fashion, some of the miracles described here involve people cured after having been injured by a heavy object that fell off an overloaded cart, or saved after having fallen beneath the wheels of a cart.
John, canon of Coutances and son of Peter the Treasurer of Coutances, produced a delightfully less-focused account of miracles, as an old man looking back over decades of such supernatural occurrences. John emphatically did not share the opinion of Herman of Tournai that one could only be cured within one’s home diocese. In fact, one of his main points seems to have been that residents of Bayeux should consider coming to Coutances when searching for miraculous intervention. For instance, a man named Vitalis, a parishioner from Bayeux, vowed to join a procession to Coutances, but having had the reasonable thought that “St. Mary of Bayeux and St. Mary of Coutances were one and the same” (187), he decided there was no need to make this journey. Thus, when he fell out of a tree and shattered a leg, he had to be carried to Coutances in order to be cured. Similarly (194-95) a woman from Bayeux had been cured of insanity by visiting the Virgin’s church in Coutances. But when she returned home some neighbors berated her, arguing that Mary could have saved her just as well in Bayeux, with its more venerable church and more numerous clergy. This insinuation caused her to relapse, and she had to be taken to Coutances again to recover.
Gautier of Compiègne’s text is little-known and rather mysterious, retelling several stories (first known in versions by Guibert of Nogent and William of Malmesbury) that emphasize Mary’s mercy even toward prostitutes and those who frequent them, as long as they are devoted to the Virgin.
The book concludes with four appendices that translate texts related to those in the body of the work: (1) Book I ch. 57 of Hugh Farsit’s unedited Otium (the earliest account of the 1112 revolt in Laon; Venarde edits the Latin and presents an English translation); (2) Herman of Tournai’s Life of St. Ildefonsus which offers several Marian miracles; (3) Guibert of Nogent’s In Praise of St. Mary, 10 and 12, which provide earlier versions of miracles reported by Herman of Tournai and Gautier of Compiègne; (4) the same author’s Monodies, Book III, 12-13 and 15, which give different versions of several miracles from the relic tour recounted by Herman of Tournai (somewhat disappointingly, Guibert reports that buildings in Christchurch were burned by lightning, not a dragon). A fifth appendix lists Venarde’s emendations to the Patrologia latina text of Hugh Farsit’s A Little Book of Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the City of Soissons.
There is one intriguing absence from this excellent collection. As Venard notes (20), “no anti-Jewish sentiment appears in the miracle collections translated here,” in distinction to later twelfth- and thirteenth-century vernacular collections of Marian miracles, or to the 1137 Latin collection by the English monk William of Malmesbury. This absence certainly does not prove that northern France was free of anti-Judaism in the 1130s and 1140s. But it does suggest--and this is not the least interesting implication of Bruce Venarde’s decision to present these collections as a group--that at this early date the link between anti-Judaism and Marian devotion had not yet hardened into a commonplace, at least in northern France.
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1. E.g., Bruce L. Venarde, Women's Monasticism and Medieval Society: Nunneries in France and England, 890–1215 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Bruce L. Venarde, ed. and trans., Robert of Arbrissel: A Medieval Religious Life (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003); Jacques Dalarun, Robert of Arbrissel. Sex, Sin, and Salvation in the Middle Ages, translated, with introduction and notes by Bruce L. Venarde (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006).