Note on the Translation

The Passion, as the name implies, focuses just on Becket’s last day and the aftermath of his death. It was not embraced by medieval readers, who preferred more expansive Lives. There is no manuscript that contains the Miracles that also includes the Passion, and in fact no complete copy of the Passion is known to survive.4 The known manuscripts of the Miracles utilize other works as an introductory text, such as John of Salisbury’s Life of Becket, or simply present the Miracles alone. For a listing of manuscripts with descriptions of their contents, see Anne Duggan, “The Santa Cruz Transcription of Benedict of Peterborough’s Liber Miraculorum Beati Thome: Porto, BPM, Cod. Santa Cruz 60,” Mediaevalia. Textos e estudos 20 (2001): 27–55, at pp. 30–8, and Nicholas Vincent, “William of Canterbury and Benedict of Peterborough: The Manuscripts, Date and Context of the Becket Miracle Collections,” in Edina Bozóky (ed.), Hagiographie, idéologie et politique au Moyen Âge en Occident: Actes du colloque international du Centre d’Études supérieures de Civilisatione médiévale de Poitiers 11–14 septembre 2008 (Turnhout, 2012), pp. 347–88, at pp. 367–72. Fortunately, the writer Elias of Evesham utilized large portions of the Passion in the late twelfth-century compilation now known as the Quadrilogus II. This compilation was intended to tell the story of Becket’s life via four different author’s accounts (like to the four Gospel writers), with a fifth, Benedict’s Passion, supplying the majority of the description of Becket’s last day and death.5 The full text of the Quadrilogus II was edited by J. C. Robertson in MTB, vol. 4, pp. 266–405. On this interesting compilation, see Michael Staunton, Thomas Becket and His Biographers (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 6–7 and Anne Duggan, “The Lyell Version of the Quadrilogus Life of St Thomas of Canterbury,” AB 112 (1994): 105–38. Robertson believed that most of the Passion was preserved in the Quadrilogus II, and I have translated it as Robertson edited it, with each of the eleven “extracts” numbered I–XI. We have lost whatever prologue Benedict may have given the text, along with his description of the first blow struck by the knights, but otherwise the eleven extracts read as a remarkably coherent narrative.

For the text of the Miracles, Robertson relied on two medieval manuscripts (the two surviving in England) along with a partial collation of a third manuscript held in Paris.6 The manuscripts are Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.14.37 and London, Lambeth Palace Library MS 135, with further collation from Paris, Bibl. Nationale Lat. MS 5320: see Robertson, MTB, vol. 2, pp. xxiv–xxvi. Today, very largely due to the work of Anne Duggan, we have a much greater knowledge of the numbers and locations of manuscripts of the Miracles, and an editor might well choose different manuscripts as a basis for an edition. Still, the differences that Duggan has identified between the manuscripts have not been radical, and the text presented by Robertson provides a sound basis for a translation.7 Duggan has published collations of a number of manuscripts in “The Lorvão Transcription of Benedict of Peterborough’s Liber Miraculorum Beati Thome: Lisbon, Cod. Alcobaça CCXC/143,” Scriptorium 51 (1997): 51–68, at pp. 64–8, and Duggan, “Santa Cruz,” pp. 47–55. When I follow Duggan’s collations rather than Robertson’s edition, I have made note of the fact. Philipp Lenz has done a partial collation of another early manuscript, St. Gallen MS 580: see Lenz, “Construire un recueil de miracles: Les Miracula Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis de Benoît de Peterborough,” unpublished PhD thesis, University of Geneva, 2003, pp. 128–30. The text’s stemma has yet to be worked out. I have, however, made two changes to the numbering of chapters in Robertson’s edition. The first is in Book II, where many manuscripts present the chapters Robertson ordered as number 61 and 62 in reverse order.8 See Robertson, MTB, vol. 2, p. 106 nn. 1 and 5, and Anne Duggan, “Santa Cruz,” p. 51. The St. Gall manuscript also has these chapters in reverse order, and the caption writer saw these chapters in reverse order as well. I have switched their positions in this translation. The second change I have made is at the end of the Miracles. Chapter 94 of Book IV was the original end of the collection, and some manuscripts go no further. Other manuscripts carry on with two more stories, while others add on these two and then seven more. In some manuscripts, all nine of these additional chapters are included as part of Book IV, while in others, the final seven additions are made into a very short Book V.9 Anne Duggan did the foundational work with the manuscripts that revealed how these additions worked: see Duggan, “Lorvão Transcription” and Duggan, “Santa Cruz.” For his edition, Robertson followed the sole manuscript that includes still more additions, four stories composed by an anonymous Christ Church monk after Benedict’s death, and he split up the end of the Miracles into not just a Book V but a Book VI as well.10 Robertson unfortunately followed post-medieval handwriting in this manuscript (Lambeth Palace Library MS 135) as a basis for his creation of a Book VI. No medieval reader would have thought of the Miracles as having six books. For this translation, I have placed Benedict’s nine added stories after Book IV and numbered them Additions 1–9. I have not included the stories composed after Benedict’s death.

Robertson tracked down and provided references for Benedict’s citations from classical texts, work I have relied on below, but he decided not to identify the far greater number of biblical citations and allusions in either the Passion or the Miracles. He explained that he feared filling the margins with references, and also that “such references would usually be needless,” because those who “had an ordinary degree of acquaintance” with the Bible would recognize them easily.11 Robertson, MTB, vol. 2, Note B, pp. xlix–l. The level of familiarity with the Bible that Robertson could assume from his late nineteenth-century British audience is quite different from what is general today, and I have identified and indexed as many of these citations as possible. For the sake of consistency, I have utilized the verse and chapter numbering of the Douay–Rheims Bible (an English translation of the Vulgate Latin Bible utilized by medieval Christians) and Chicago-style short abbreviations for the names of the books of the Bible. Benedict felt free to play with biblical or liturgical passages, often inserting words or phrases that made them more relevant to whatever he was discussing. I have, therefore, translated his biblical echoes and citations as it seemed best within the context rather than trying to follow the Douay–Rheims translation. Despite my best efforts, I am sure that I have not caught all of these biblical echoes nor done Benedict’s writings full justice in this regard. Still, a rough rule of thumb for the care Benedict took over the composition of a passage is the density of its allusions, and to miss this humming subtext is to miss a large part of what Benedict intended readers to find pleasurable and compelling in his writings. To give today’s readers something of the same experience, I have italicized passages in which Benedict was echoing another text.

Benedict almost always provided a place of origin or family name for the subjects of the miracles. When I was able to identify these places of origin, I translated them into modern English (e.g., Ansfrid of Dover), but when I was defeated, I retained the Latin in italics (e.g., Ralph de Tangis). When Benedict was referring to a family name, or when an individual’s name is conventionally spelled in this manner, I retained the Latin ‘de’ without italics (e.g., Ranulf de Broc).

For the reader’s convenience, I have adopted the captions to the chapters that are found in most manuscript copies of the Miracles.12 In the manuscripts, the captions are usually found either grouped together at the beginning of the manuscript (such as St. Gallen MS 580 and Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.14.37), or split up into books, such that the captions for Book I are found at the beginning of Book I, those for Book II at the beginning of Book II, and so forth (see British Library Egerton MS 2818; Porto, Bibl. Públ. Mun. MS 349; Lisbon, Bibl. nacional, cod. Alcobaça CCXC/143; and Lisbon, Bibl. nacional, cod. Alcobaça CCLXXXIX/172). Two manuscripts with no chapter headings are Heidelberg, Universitäts-Bibliothek, cod. Salem IX.30 and London, Lambeth Palace MS 135. Robertson printed the captions as a general table of contents: see MTB, vol. 2, pp. iii–xv. Medieval readers used them as means of navigation, and they can serve the same purpose for today’s readers, though it pays to be wary. Benedict was all but certainly not their author. They look to have been written by someone who skimmed through a manuscript fairly quickly, was prone to picking up wrong names and places, and did not always grasp the most salient point of a chapter. When a caption contains an incorrect name, place, and/or illness, I have corrected it and made note of the fact by brackets and a footnote.

I am very grateful to Dr. Shelagh Sneddon for checking the entire translation for accuracy and making many suggestions that I have adopted here, though of course all errors that remain are my own. I have tried to strike the balance that all translators desire – to create a readable text in English while remaining faithful to Benedict’s words. I hope that the result will bring more readers to his remarkable work.