Introduction

Benedict was a monk of Christ Church, the monastic community attached to Canterbury Cathedral that looked to the archbishop of Canterbury as its titular abbot. He was in Canterbury on December 29, 1170, when four of King Henry II’s knights argued with the archbishop, left to arm themselves, and came back and killed him. The Passion is the best account we have of the trauma felt by those who witnessed this violence and saw the archbishop’s dead body lying on the cathedral’s floor. No complete copy of the Passion has survived to the present day. Fortunately, an author working at the end of the twelfth century, Elias of Evesham, decided to include extracts from the Passion as part of a compilation now known as the Quadrilogus II. These extracts are extensive, and it appears that Elias utilized a very significant portion of the text.2 See the Note to the Translation above and Robertson’s comment, MTB, vol. 2, pp. xx–xxi: “we may safely assume that the missing portions of [the Passion] cannot have been very considerable.” Translations of those extracts are placed here, as Benedict would have intended, to be read before the Miracles.

Benedict started collecting miracles in the late spring of 1171, after the Christ Church monks allowed pilgrims access to Becket’s tomb. He worked assiduously, showing the drive and focus that would later make him a fine administrator. By the time the news arrived in Britain of Pope Alexander III’s canonization of Becket on February 21, 1173, Benedict had finished the bulk of the Miracles. It began to circulate after he wrote the last chapter of Book IV, a miracle story that can be dated to late March/early April 1173. From mid to late 1173, he made two minor additions to the text, totaling nine more chapters. The entire work, including the Passion (most likely written in 1172), was completed by the first celebration of Becket’s feast day on December 29, 1173. It had taken him less than three years to produce all of this text.3 Books I–III of the Miracles have been dated to c.1173–4 and Book IV to 1179 due to the mistaken estimation of Emmanuel Walberg, “Date de la composition des recueils de Miracula Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis,” Le Moyen Âge 22 (1920): 259–74, at 261–4. For an analysis of where Walberg went wrong and a detailed argument for the dating of the Passion and Miracles to 1171–3, see Rachel Koopmans, “Benedict of Peterborough’s Compositions for Thomas Becket: Passion, Miracles, Office,” Medium Ævum 90:2 (2021): 247–74.

The Miracles found eager readers across Europe. A monk of São Mamede in Portugal, some two thousand kilometers southeast of Canterbury, was so grateful for Benedict’s Miracles that he offered a blessing at the end of his copy: “May he who brought the text of the book to this land be blessed by the living God and His saints and live a long life, honoured by his princes and kings, and by the bishops and the whole clergy of this and foreign lands.”4 For this colophon and its translation, see Anne J. Duggan, “Aspects of Anglo-Portuguese Relations in the Twelfth Century. Manuscripts, Relics, Decretals and the Cult of St. Thomas Becket at Lorvão, Alcobaça and Tomar,” Portuguese Studies 14 (1998): 1–19, at pp. 1 and 19; see also her analysis of the manuscript in “Lorvão Transcription.” Three thousand kilometers to the east of São Mamede, the cathedral chapter of Kraków owned a collection of Becket’s miracles, very likely Benedict’s, by the late twelfth or early thirteenth century.5 Waclaw Uruszczak, “Répercussions de la mort de Thomas Becket en Pologne (XIIe–XIIIe siècles),” in Raymonde Foreville (ed.), Thomas Becket: Actes du colloque international de Sédières 19–24 août 1973 (Paris, 1975), pp. 115–25, at p. 116. The Miracles was easiest to find in monastic libraries in England and in France, but copies also found their way to St. Gall in Switzerland, Böddeken in Germany, Heiligenkreuz in Austria, Vallombrosa in Italy, and Tui in Spain.6 The shelfmarks of these manuscripts are St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. MS 580; Paderborn, Erzbischöfliche Akademische Bibliothek Theodoriana Ba 2; Heiligenkreuz, Stiftsbibliothek Cod. Sancrucensis 209 and 213; Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Lau­renziana, Conv. soppr. 230; and Tuy, Archivo de la Cathedral de Tuy MS 1. The most recent listing of the manuscripts of Benedict’s miracle collection is found in Vincent, “William of Canterbury and Benedict of Peterborough,” at pp. 367–72. For a mapping of references to manuscripts in English medieval library catalogues and other documents, see Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2011), Figure 7, p. 131. Further north, there are fragments of a copy in the Danish National Archives, and far to the northwest, in Iceland, a writer working at the turn of the fourteenth century had access to the stories Benedict had written in Canterbury many years before.7 For the Danish fragments, see Synnøve Midtbø Myking, “Thomas Becket, Clairvaux, and Ringsted: Saintly Diversity and European Influences in a Twelfth-Century Fragmentary Legendary from Denmark,” Classica et Mediaevalia: Danish Journal of Philology and History 72 (2023): 255–88. For the presence and use of Benedict’s Miracles in Iceland, see Thómas Saga Erkibyskups: A Life of Archbishop Thomas Becket, in Icelandic, ed. and trans. Eiríkr Magnússon, RS 65 (London, 1883), pp. clv–clvi. As Anne Duggan has explained, the international interest in Thomas Becket’s cult was in part a result of Becket’s networks and friendships: see Anne Duggan, “Religious Networks in Action: The European Expansion of the Cult of St Thomas of Canterbury,” in Jeremy Gregory and Hugh McLeod (eds.), International Religious Networks (Woodbridge, 2012), pp. 20–43. No other British collection of miracle stories was copied and read by people living so far from its point of origin, and few other texts composed in late twelfth-century Britain, of any type, traveled so far.8 For studies focused on other contemporary British miracle collections, see Simon Yarrow, Saints and Their Communities: Miracle Stories in Twelfth-Century England (Oxford, 2005); Ruth J. Salter, Saints, Cure-Seekers and Miraculous Healing in Twelfth-Century England (York, 2021); Anne E. Bailey, “Reconsidering the Medieval Experience at the Shrine in High Medieval England,” Journal of Medieval History 47:2 (2021): 203–29; and Tom Lynch, Making Miracles in Medieval England (London, 2023). Another monk at Christ Church, William of Canterbury, wrote a full Life of St Thomas and an even longer collection of miracles. But it was Benedict’s Miracles not William’s that saw astonishing circulation for a miracle collection.9 William of Canterbury, Miracula S. Thomae Cantuariensis, MTB, vol. 1, 137–546. For the comparative circulation of the two collections, see Vincent, “William of Canterbury and Benedict of Peterborough,” Tables 2 and 3, pp. 367–73.

The distances the Miracles traveled underline the breadth of the European fascination with Becket, but they are also a testament to the text’s readability and excellence. Edward Grim, the writer of a widely read Life of Becket, praised its “elegant style.”10 Edward Grim, Vita Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi et Martyris, MTB, vol. 2, pp. 353–450, at p. 448. The literary qualities of miracle collections tend to receive very little attention from scholars, but Grim’s assessment was not misplaced. In the late twelfth century, an elegant style meant not only graceful writing, but also texts filled with allusions, echoes, comparisons, and parallels, in particular allusions to biblical figures, passages, and events.11 For a description of this kind of connective, allusive, and episodic literary style, see Nancy Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago, 1977), esp. pp. 197–222; for an example of a contemporary hagiographer writing with such literary aims, see John of Forde, The Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, Anchorite, trans. Pauline Matarasso, Cistercian Fathers Series 79 (Collegeville, MN, 2011), and Matarasso’s introduction, pp. 78–9, 82–3. Benedict’s ability to sound such chords surely contributed to the Europe-wide readership of the Miracles, and also to his selection as the composer of Becket’s liturgical Office, the music, lyrics, and readings that would be used throughout Latin Christendom to celebrate the feast day of St. Thomas of Canterbury on December 29.12 The Becket Office is indexed in the Cantus Database (https://cantusdatabase.org) as Feast no. 14122900. For an edition of the monastic version of the Office, see Liturgies in Honour of Thomas Becket, trans. Kay Brainerd Slocum (Toronto, 2004), pp. 135–48. For the secular version, see Sherry Reames, ed. and trans., “Liturgical Offices for the Cult of St Thomas Becket,” in Thomas Head (ed.), Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology (New York, 2001), pp. 561–94.

At the end of the translation, I have provided biographical notes for persons in the Passion and Miracles who can be found in other contemporary documents, such as witness lists to charters, rentals, and Pipe Roll accounts. Nearly all the people who can be identified held some wealth and position. Ordinary people, priests, and the poor left few or no traces in late twelfth-century records. Still, seeing names from the Miracles appear in other documents underlines the simple but important fact that Benedict met with and described the stories of real, living people. Of course, this does not mean that we hear the unfiltered voices of those people in the Miracles, nor that those speakers themselves, when they told their stories at Canterbury, did not dramatically edit, shape, and embellish their lived experiences. Nevertheless, behind this text are hundreds of encounters with living, breathing visitors who had stories to tell about themselves. Benedict did not see himself as writing fiction. Nor should we, however much we might interpret miracle stories and the history and meaning of Becket’s early cult differently than he did.

I have also included, as an appendix, a translation of eighteen stories from William of Canterbury’s collection of Becket’s miracles. These are the “parallel miracles”: stories that both Christ Church collectors, Benedict and William, decided to recount in their respective collections.13 The first person to focus on the “parallel miracles” (his phrase, adopted from the synoptic study of the Gospels) was Abbott, St Thomas of Canterbury, vol. 2, pp. 76–273. William started his collection in June 1172 while Benedict was still hard at work on his. William meant his text to be no mere continuation of Benedict’s, but a free-standing, wholly independent collection.14 For the dating of William’s Miracles, see Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate, pp. 139–58 and 181–200. For an updated listing of the manuscripts, see Vincent, “William of Canterbury and Benedict of Peterborough,” Table 3, pp. 372–3. Many scholars have taken the opportunity to compare the two collections on specific themes. See, for instance, Didier Lett, “Deux hagiographes, un saint et un roi: conformisme et créativité dans les deux recueils de Miracula de Thomas Becket,” in Michel Zimmermann (ed.), Auctor et auctoritas: Invention and conformisme dans l’écriture médiévale, actes du colloque de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (14–16 Juin 1999) (Paris, 2001), pp. 201–16; Gesine Oppitz-Trotman, “Penance, Mercy, and Saintly Authority in the Miracles of St Thomas Becket,” in Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (eds.), Saints and Sanctity (Woodbridge, 2011), pp. 136–47; Hilary Powell, “The ‘Miracle of Childbirth’: The Portrayal of Parturient Women in Medieval Miracle Narratives,” Social History of Medicine 25.4 (2012): 795–811; Franca Ela Consolino, “Gli spazi del meraviglioso nei miracoli di Tommaso Becket,” in Franca Ela Consolino, Francesco Marzella, and Lucilla Spetia (eds.), Aspetti del meraviglioso nelle letterature medievali (Turnhout, 2016), pp. 47–58; and Rachel Koopmans, “The Smallest Matters: Vanishing Water, Missing Birds, Revived Animals, Recovered Coins, and Other Trifling Miracles in the Thomas Becket Collections,” Journal of Medieval History 48:5 (2022): 587–606. As such, he decided to provide his own accounts of significant miracles that he would have known Benedict had already described in his text. A year later, when Benedict was wrapping up his collection, this situation may well have been reversed. William might have written his accounts first, with Benedict deciding to add on stories he deemed important to his collection. The eighteen parallel miracles are valuable for dating evidence and for revealing places in which the collectors were utilizing letters, but they are most interesting for showing how two monks working in the same place and at essentially the same time could describe the same miracles very differently.

The introductory material that follows is divided into two parts. In the first part, I address the relationship of Benedict and the Christ Church monks to the living Thomas Becket, Benedict’s account of the murder in the Passion, the atmosphere at Canterbury in the first months after Becket’s death, and why and when Benedict began writing the Miracles. In the second part, I turn to the making of the Miracles. I discuss how Benedict gathered material, looking at how he categorized stories, whose stories he valued the most, and his use of notes and letters. I then focus on two defining features of his construction of the Miracles: his efforts to match similar miracles together and the many parallels he drew between Becket’s miracles and biblical events and passages. I suggest that “connective” is a better term than “chronological” or “thematic” to describe the organizational style of his collection. Dated stories in the early parts of the Miracles are an aspect of Benedict’s work that has especially enthused modern scholars. I list and analyze them, arguing that Benedict used them to draw still more parallels between Becket and Christ. After examining the circumstances in which Benedict brought the Miracles to completion, I conclude by considering the ways in which his later life and career continued to be shaped by Canterbury’s new saint.

Some stories in the Miracles are almost startlingly contemporary, such as the experiences of a teenager who attempted to take her own life, a pregnant woman in terrible distress who could not give birth, a workman presumed killed in an accident on a construction site, a man who consulted with many doctors and still did not recover from his sleep disorder, and many other people and their families struggling to deal with the consequences of serious illness and disability.15 See Addition 8, IV.54, Addition 7, and I.13. Benedict did not shy away from describing intense emotions: the monks who could not stop crying after Becket’s death, the father pleading for the revival of his dying daughter, the pilgrims rejoicing and dancing in the street when one of their traveling party became well, the amazement of a lord who found that his leprous shepherd boy, whose company everyone had shunned because he smelled so bad, came home from Canterbury perfectly healed, or the woman so happy with her recovery that she said she felt she could fly.16 See Prologue, IV.65, III.42, IV.76, and II.24. Benedict was a good observer as well as an elegant writer. We are fortunate that he was the one who wrote this text.