The Hem of Whose Garment?

Osbern the precentor wrote his miracula sancti dunstani ¹ some time after the death of archbishop Lanfranc in 1089, probably after 1095.² It is the first collection of posthumous miracles of the saint and was produced at Christ Church Canterbury. Within this collection, in the first section of healing miracles, Osbern tells the following story. Sometime before the conquest, in the month of June, a mother brought her crippled daughter to Canterbury. After visiting the tomb of Saint Dunstan, she was healed. The following is Osbern's account of the climax:

Tum illa comprehensa lacinia vestis filiae suae traxit eam ad locum, moxque toto corpore in terram prostratae adorant sanctum ambae, fletibus et ejulatibus illius bonitatem pulsantes. Et vere pulsabant, quibus tam cito misericordiae illius viscera patebant. Necdum enim Phoebus marinis fluctibus caput intulerat, et illa quae morbo contracta fuerat, ruptis venis brachia extollebat manuum articulos omnes extendebat [...] Itaque accurrimus, vidimus, flevimus, et facto mane cum exultatione totius urbis, Dominum Deum nostrum Jesum Christum laudavimus. (Stubbs, p. 139)³

Within this short passage, Osbern, in a characteristic display, makes available to his readers a number of allusions. The first of these is perhaps the most natural: Christ's healing of the bleeding woman who touches the hem of his garment.⁴ It is a short step from the woman whose faith on touching Christ's garment was enough, to another woman of good faith grasping the hem of her daughter's clothing. To ensure that we identify this, Osbern includes a reference to bleeding – ruptis venis – a little later.

Having set up this automatic association between garment hems, Osbern points us somewhere else with his vocabulary. The language of the Osbern passage mirrors almost exactly an Old Testament reference, et illa, apprehensa lacinia vestimenti ejus (Genesis 39.12). This technique of using biblical language precisely with the occasional synonym is characteristic of Osbern's style throughout the vita dunstani. It is a surprising reference, being the point at which Potiphar's wife grabs for Joseph's garment, catching its hem and demanding he return and sleep with her. Osbern is juxtaposing two deeply contrasting passages, evidently expecting his audience to appreciate the ironic comparison of virtue and vice within the one image of clothing.

We are fortunate enough to have another miracula text for St Dunstan, also produced at Canterbury, by Eadmer before 1116 and probably after 1109.⁵ Eadmer, without doubt more than able to identify the source and purpose of Osbern's biblical allusions, takes a rather dramatic step and cuts them all. This should at least partly be understood as a way of removing traces of Osbern's style in order to justify his own version, but he has removed all of Osbern's drama:

Hanc mater sepulcro boni Dunstani applicuit, et utraeque procidentes unanimiter sibi sanctum misereri postulavere; dictis vesperis in vigilia ipsius festivitatis, precibus incubuerunt et ante solis occubitum sanitatem juvenculae anus et ipsa perfecte obtinuerunt. (Stubbs, p. 228)⁶

This technique contrasts with other parts of Eadmer's updated text in which he tends to replace Old Testament references with more straightforward allusions to the New Testament. Eadmer perhaps understands and disapproves of Osbern's ironic use of allusion and responds with a pointedly sober version. Eadmer's final sentence indicates that his cuts might be understood as an attack upon Osbern:

Quid laudum, quid gratiarum, quid votorum Domino Christo Ejusque Dunstano hinc a confluenti multitudine persolutum sit, quis describet? (Stubbs, p. 228)⁷

Read in isolation, this passage appears a common enough rhetorical flourish. In relation to Osbern's eyewitness account, it becomes a specific attack upon the earlier writer. The contrast between the doubt of Eadmer's Quid laudum and Osbern's confident laudavimus is a clear parallel.

This is a marginal episode, a local miracle which was not disseminated particularly widely and perhaps had no resonance outside Canterbury. Within this community, and within the aggressive dialogue between Eadmer's updated text and his source, Osbern, it can be moved perhaps a little nearer the centre. Eadmer's updating of Osbern's texts is set within a context of criticism of his predecessor;⁸ here we can see how Eadmer attacks the style of the earlier writer and undermines his self-appointed role as eye witness to the miraculous. This is somewhat more than a rhetorical device to justify his updating of the earlier text. Elsewhere in the miracula, Eadmer systematically writes archbishop Lanfranc out of the narrative, a stark contrast to Osbern's memorializing of the former archbishop as an active partner in Dunstan's miracles.⁹ In his historia novorum,¹⁰ Eadmer more explicitly dealt with the rivalry between Lanfranc and Anselm in the memory of the Christ Church community:

[ab iis qui sunt] filii ecclesiae Cantuariensis [...] paucis petitum iri precamur; ne nobis qui ista scripsimus, quasi in nihili laboraverimus, ipsi succenseant, judicantes fortassis apud se, ea quae gloriosum et magnificum patrem Lanfrancum suo tempore constat fecisse ad tuendam conservandamque nominatae ecclesiae dignitatem satis sufficere et superabundere. (Rule, pp. 214-5)¹¹

This concern in turn affects his portrayal of Anselm's predecessor who is never allowed to overshadow him in the miracula sancti dunstani. It was Osbern's role in the memorializing of Lanfranc, who by the end of the eleventh century was the example by which Anselm was being judged at Christ Church, which provided a major impetus to Eadmer's attempt to replace the earlier text.¹² This attempt to undermine the earlier text for contemporary reasons is discernible in this brief comparison of two treatments of the same minor miracle story.

Sandy Vaughan, U. of Cambridge

NOTES

1. W Stubbs (ed.), Memorials of St Dunstan (London: Rolls Series, 1874). The translations are my own, with considerable assistance from Dr Neil Wright.

2. A reference to cardinal Albert refers to a cardinal priest created after 1094 who may well have visited Canterbury after Whitsun 1095 along with Walter of Albano.

3. Then [the woman], having taken hold of the hem of her daughter's garment, dragged her to that place. Soon with them both prostrate, their whole bodies on the ground, they worshipped the saint, beating at his goodness with lamentation and wailing. And they were indeed striking, so quickly his heart [lit. bowels of his mercy] opened to them. Scarcely had Phoebus dipped his head into the sea's waves, but she who had been bound by disease lifted up her arms with burst veins and extended all the joints of her fingers. [...] We came running, saw, wept and the following day we praised our Lord God Jesus Christ, with the whole city rejoicing.

4. Matthew 9.20, Mark 5.27, Luke 8.44.

5. Eadmer's autograph Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 371 was completed by 1116; he was away from Canterbury before 1109.

6. The mother brought her to the tomb of blessed Dunstan and, both kneeling before him together, asked the saint to have mercy; the evening prayers having been said on the vigil of the feast, they applied themselves to prayer and before the sun set she and the old woman fully obtained the cure of the young girl.

7. And who will be able to describe what praise, what thanks, what offerings were given by the gathering multitude to the Lord Christ and his Dunstan?

8. Stubbs, pp. 162-164.

9. One example of this is with the healing of the madman Egelward. In Osbern's text, the demoniac is restrained by Lanfranc's sanctis manibus (Stubbs, p. 145); Eadmer removes the archbishop's contribution and has Egelward controlled by plurimis fortissimis viris (Stubbs p. 234).

10. M Rule (ed), Eadmeri historia novorum in Anglia (London: Rolls Series, 1884).

11. We beg briefly [to those who are] sons of the church of Canterbury [...] not to be angry with us who have written these pages as though we had wasted our labour. They judge perhaps in their own minds that the works which, as is well known, that glorious and magnificent Father Lanfranc produced in his time amply suffice and more than suffice to maintain and preserve the prestige of the Church of Canterbury, transl. G Bosanquet, Eadmer's History of Recent Events in England (London, 1964), pp. 229-30.

12. For other examples of Eadmer's defence of Anselm, see R Southern (ed), The Life of St Anselm (Oxford, 1962), especially pp. 50, 71, 79, 170.