 Half-Baked Babies, Chivalry and Miracles in Late Medieval Brittany: Stories from the Canonization of St. Vincent Ferrer
Laura A. Smoller
In this talk, I want to suggest that we can locate an additional source for at least part of the traveling nature of miracle stories at a more grass-roots level: in the minds of those persons who believed they had benefited from a saint's intercession and who told their tales to others. As modern research into human cognition suggests, human beings tend to structure their memories along the lines of narratives familiar to them.[2] Persons who recalled the miracles they had witnessed or experienced, then, fitted their memories of those miracles into pre-existing, familiar story-lines. That narrative-line could come from an existing miracle story, from the liturgy, or, as I will show, it could come from even farther afield: from the world of romance or folklore. Let me illustrate this point by telling a few miracle stories myself, drawn not from the collections of shrine-keepers or sermon writers, but from the testimony of ordinary individuals who told their tales at an inquest looking into the canonization of St. Vincent Ferrer, held in Brittany in 1453-54. Vincent Ferrer was one of the most celebrated preachers of his time and already had an international reputation as a holy man when he undertook a preaching tour of Brittany in the year 1418 and died in the Breton city of Vannes the following year. And, when, 35 years later the papacy took up the case of Vincent Ferrer's canonization, the most important of the canonization inquests was that held in Brittany, the site of Vincent's wonder-working tomb.[3] In many cases their tales illustrate the sort of creative memory shaping that allowed stories to transform themselves from one venue to another before they even reached the ears and pens of literate keepers of the saint's shrine. For some witnesses, religious associations, including the liturgical season in which the events occurred, colored their tales of the miraculous. This is the case in one of the most dramatic miracle stories to come out at the Brittany inquest: the tale of the near drowning of a youth named Johannes Gueho. Four witnesses testified to this miracle: Johannes Le Vesque, described as a married cleric, probably in minor orders; Petrus Cadier, a merchant; Thomas Tournemote, a weaver; and Margota Boudard, a domicella or woman of minor nobility.[4] All four witnesses agreed on the basic outline of the story. The near disaster had occurred the previous year, on the vigil of the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul (June 28), when a youth called Alanus Bouic tried to teach Gueho to swim at the river banks near the town of Josselin. The two boys had gotten out into deep water near a mill, where they quite literally got in over their heads; Bouic had swum to safety, leaving Gueho behind. When he went under for the third time, Margota Boudard, then all the bystanders, called upon Vincent Ferrer to beg for his intercession, resulting in Gueho's miraculously floating back to shore. There, anxious bystanders took him up, wrapped him in a tunic, and marveled at his rescue. The witnesses differed on certain minor details of the story. For example, Johannes Le Vesque, Petrus Cadier, and Thomas Tournemote insisted that Gueho had died before the vow to Vincent Ferrer, so that the miracle consisted in both his resurrection and his return to shore. Margota Boudard was not sure that Gueho had died, but insisted that he had been rescued from the danger of death by the saint's intercession. [5] Johannes Le Vesque and Margota Boudard noted their surprise that no water had come out of Gueho after he was pulled from the river; the two others did not recall this detail at all. [6] Even more striking, however, are the differences in the witnesses' memories of what happened between the time of the vow to Vincent Ferrer and the time that Gueho recovered from his trauma. In these differences, one begins to see the shaping power of liturgy and religious imagery on individuals' memories. According to three of the witnesses, after the vow to Vincent Ferrer, Gueho was conveyed miraculously across the river to the bank on which all the bystanders were waiting. As Johannes Le Vesque recalled it, for example, the dead Gueho traversed the river "alone, not moving his body any more than a log would move." [7] In Margota Boudard's memory, however, after the vow, "the boy raised his hands towards heaven, then pulled them down, joined, towards his chest."[8] Margota's memory, then, pictured the revived Gueho with the upstretched hands of the resurrected dead at the Last Judgment. A fifteenth-century Book of Hours prepared for the duke of Brittany a few years after the canonization inquest portrays the Day of Judgment in just this manner.[9] Although Margota would not swear that Gueho had, in fact, died before his rescue, her memory supplied this interpretation for her, conflating in gesture Guerre's miraculous revival and the general resurrection of the dead on Judgment Day. The addition of the image of Guerre's raised arms and clasped hands was not the only way in which Margota's memory of his revival differed from that of the three other witnesses. Margota alone of the four insisted that after the invocation of the saint, Gueho moved through the water towards the crowd on the river bank "[as if] he was walking on the land." And, to underscore the miraculous nature of this walking, she added that those present had told her that the water was so deep that one could not touch the bottom and walk with one's head above water.[10] Remember that according to the other witnesses, Gueho had floated to shore like a log. Where, then, did Margota get the idea that Gueho appeared to be walking? The miracle's liturgical setting seems to have provided this detail. As did the other witnesses, Margota recalled that the miracle had occurred on the vigil of the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul. Her description of Gueho walking on the water recalls the gospel story of Jesus walking on the water and Peter stepping out to meet him, sinking as his faith faltered. It is a story Margota would have associated with the feast of Peter and Paul. She seems to have inscribed this image from the liturgical setting onto her memory of the miraculous drowning of the previous day. The testimony of Johannes Le Vesque, the married cleric, adds confirmation to the suggestion that the miracle's liturgical setting could shape memories of the miracle. Le Vesque's narration of Gueho's rescue contains a bizarre detail to which none of the other three witnesses make reference. When Gueho at last reached shore, as he recalled, "even though Gueho appeared to have both his throat and his head disconnected [disligata] from his body, and was the color of a dead person and had closed eyes, he began to cry out 'Jesus'."[11] None of the other witnesses describe Gueho in this manner; nor does it make sense that the head of a drowning victim would appear thusly (unless he had dived headfirst into shallow water, which was not the case here). No other witness has Gueho crying out to Jesus. Rather, Le Vesque's story makes sense only if one looks again to stories told about Sts. Peter and Paul. In particular, Le Vesque's tale has resonances of the story of Paul's martyrdom by beheading. As Jacobus de Voragine told it in The Golden Legend, "as soon as [Paul's] head bounded from his body, it intoned, in Hebrew and in a clear voice, 'Jesus Christ,' the name that had been so sweet to him in life."[12] Did Le Vesque visualize a nearly decapitated Gueho similarly calling out the name of Jesus? I think so. Le Vesque's memory, it seems, wove together the stories of Paul's beheading and Gueho's drowning to produce his own moving narrative, just as Margota's memory reflected stories of Peter and of the Last Judgment. Their recollections mingled spiritual images drawn from the liturgical context with their lived experience of the miraculous. The world of chivalry and romance also could shape the stories witnesses told about miracles. Hear, for example, the tale told by a noble man named Radulphus de Bosco Johannis.[13] In his youth, Radulphus had been involved in a battle that took place in Normandy involving partisans of the French king and the English king. Radulphus had been fighting on the side of the king of France and found himself brought down, wounded, and captured by the English forces. Severely injured, in fact nearly at the point of death, he was thrown into a deep pit, where he remained, half-dead, for nearly a half hour. Then he gingerly raised his head above the edge of the pit and looked around. He saw his enemies, the English, taking several of his French-speaking and Breton companions and throwing them into the same pit in order "to kill and mutilate" them. Fearing that he would be unable to escape the hands of his enemies or to evade death itself, Radulphus commended himself to the Blessed Mary of Virtues, who was invoked commonly in the city of Dinan, and to Master Vincent Ferrer. Should he escape this danger, he vowed, he would make pilgrimages both to the church in Dinan in which the image of the Blessed Mary of Virtues was venerated and to Vincent's tomb in Vannes, and he promised he would leave offerings in both places. At once, Radulphus tells, there came into his view a horse standing next to the pit, "saddled and bridled [and trimmed] with red threads." Climbing out of pit, Radulphus mounted the horse, "which tamely allowed him to do this and balked not at all." Nor did the animal move until Radulphus was firmly seated. Radulphus marveled that the horse's saddle was prepared just as if he himself had ordered the horse to be saddled. [14] And thanks to the appearance of the horse, he escaped from the danger he was in, returned home safe, and fulfilled his vow, confident that he had been rescued miraculously through the intercession of Vincent Ferrer. Rescue from this dire situation no doubt would appear miraculous to anyone trapped in such a pit. But Radulphus's memory of this miracle may have been shaped as much by tales of chivalry and romance as by traditional miracle stories [including battlefield miracles worked by the Breton near-saint Charles of Blois]. The miraculously-appearing horse puts one in mind of Yvain's lion or of the marvelous steed Bayard which rescues and brings victories to the hero Aymon and his four sons in a series of epics. Or one thinks of the boats and barges that mysteriously appear and convey the heroes of the quest for the Holy Grail to and fro. In fact, Radulphus's tale has a number of resonances with episodes in the Vulgate Grail cycle. While there is no single episode in which a horse appears to rescue a hero from mortal danger, there are two noteworthy instances in The Quest of the Holy Grail in which horses materialize for the heroes. In one instance, Perceval has lost his horse, without which he cannot attempt to follow Galahad. As he lies in despair, a woman appears to him, promising him a horse should Perceval pledge her his faith. Upon his promise, she returns with a huge and wondrous black horse. At once Perceval mounts, and the horse carries him off at the speed of the wind, heading straight for a huge river. In his fear, Perceval makes the sign of the cross, at which the steed throws Perceval and plunges headlong into the river, disappearing in a burst of flames. Then and only then does Perceval realize that he has been tricked by the devil. [15] The miraculous horse that rescued Radulphus seems in some sense to offer an inversion of this tale: a tame horse sent by a saint's intercession rather than a wild horse sent by the devil. The second horse in the Grail cycle materializes after Lancelot and Galahad have spent several months together at sea in a miraculous boat. Putting in to land at the edge of a forest, they see a knight in white armor come riding out of the wood. He is leading a white horse and, addressing Galahad, tells him to leave his father and mount the white horse, to bring his adventures to their fulfillment and close.[16] The appearance of this snow-white horse offers a parallel and a correction to the black devil-horse that came to the hapless Perceval. Perhaps such an episode inspired Radulphus as well in his memory of the heaven-sent steed that brought about his rescue. If he were thinking of the Grail stories, then Radulphus's memory of the horse's appearance is perhaps significant. He insists that the horse's trappings were made of red threads. In the Vulgate cycle, the Grail consistently appears draped in red cloth, as, indeed, is Galahad attired in his first appearance at Arthur's court. So for the noble warrior Radulphus, tales of chivalry may indeed have shaped his memory of this battlefield miracle. And, if one were to blend the theme of knighthood with that of saintly intercession, what more natural a model for one's tale that the stories of the Grail heroes? Another source of memory-shaping narratives was the world of folklore. Folk tales appear to be at work, in particular, in a third miracle tale: a story in which a mother cuts up her baby to cook it, and the child is reconstituted and revivified by Vincent Ferrer's intercession. And one sees the intrusion of folkloric material as the tale goes through several retellings. Our first traces of the story of the chopped-up baby come to us from the Brittany inquest through the testimony of a noble woman named Oliva de Coatsal, a widow of age 50 or so. According to Oliva, her own infant son had been resuscitated by the merits of Vincent Ferrer some thirty-three years before, that is, within a year or two of the saint's death and burial in Brittany. She had brought the dead infant to Vincent's tomb in Vannes, placed him upon the sepulcher, and prayed that, if Vincent were indeed a saint, he would intercede with God to restore the infant to life. Immediately upon the completion of her prayer, the baby was restored to life, to the joy of a great crowd of onlookers and followed by a ringing of the cathedral bells to announce the miracle more broadly. [In fact, Oliva believed this was only the second miracle so made public in the Vannes cathedral after Vincent Ferrer's death.] Then the story of the chopped-up baby appears. "Immediately after the resurrection of her son," our widow continues, the parents of another infant came to the tomb, a child--in her estimation--also of some one and a half years. This child, as the parents related, had been cut into two parts by his mother, and one could still see the "sign of this division" in the child's head, presumably a seam indicating where the two halves had been fused. Why had the mother committed such a horror? According to the father, she was pregnant and desired to eat meat, but the couple had none. A vow made to Vincent Ferrer by both parents had resulted in the baby's resuscitation and complete healing through the saint's merits, and--presumably--the trip to Vincent's tomb to offer their prayers and thanks.[17] This tale obviously struck the commissioners impaneled in Brittany. They stopped Oliva to ask her several questions. Did she know these parents? No. Did she know from whence they came? No, only that they spoke in French and not Breton. Did Oliva know how long the infant had remained dead and cut into two parts and how long afterwards he had been carried to Vincent's tomb? She did not know. Nor did she know anything else about the infant. [18] And there it stands. A story known through hearsay, maddeningly unverifiable (at least one senses the commissioners' frustration not to be able to elicit any tangible evidence to point to the now decades-old miracle's authenticity), tantalizingly bizarre. The only "proof" that Oliva can offer in her testimony is that one could still see "the sign of the division" in the infant's head. By the time that she related her memory to the Brittany panel some thirty years later, however, the case of the chopped-up baby had apparently acquired a wide notoriety in the duchy. We hear it again from a witness who testified late in the course of the canonization inquest, a man named Guillermus Rollandi, of some thirty years of age, born, presumably a year or two after the events Oliva de Coatsal recalled. Guillermus appeared before the papal commissioners in Brittany in order to testify about the miraculous resurrection of his thirteen-year old daughter some two years previously. The girl had apparently sickened and died following some acute, grave illness. While she lay stiff and cold--dead in the estimation of all bystanders--, Guillermus testified, "he recalled a certain miracle of which a table (tabula) on Vincent's tomb made mention, namely, that God had resuscitated an infant whose mother had killed him on account of the prayers of Vincent Ferrer."[19] That memory prompted Guillermus to invoke Vincent's intercession on behalf of his own daughter, and she immediately returned to life. So this story had a long life in fifteenth-century Brittany. But the tale was not just part of Brittany's memory of Vincent Ferrer. It traveled with those who visited the duchy. Thus, we encounter the tale as well in the testimony of one of the witnesses at the Naples inquest into Vincent Ferrer's canonization held in 1454, a man from Valencia not named but identified simply as a herald. And here, many tellings removed from the original version of the story, we see how folklore has intruded upon the tale. Our herald had apparently spent some time in Vannes, the site of Vincent's tomb, for he described his own miraculous rescue from a near ship-wreck of a boat headed back to Vannes from Compostela. There also, he had "heard tell" of a man who had a demented wife. As the herald told it, the man instructed his wife to prepare him lunch to be ready on his return home. The woman took up their fourteen-month-old son, killed him with a sword, "dividing him through the middle," and then took one-quarter of the body--from the upper half--and cooked it. When her husband returned home for lunch, she presented him with "the said part of his son, boiled in broth and saffron, in which was apparent a hand and a certain part of the boy's body." Our witness added dialogue to the tale: "What have you done?" wailed the husband, with "tears and great sorrow." The wife's reply: "This is a quarter part of your son and mine: eat."[20] At this point, according to the herald, the husband took up the various parts of the boy (both cooked and uncooked), took them to the Vannes cathedral and placed them on Vincent Ferrer's tomb. There he remained, wailing and lamenting, until nightfall, when those presiding in the cathedral gave him leave to go home. When the father arrived home, he found his son playing "under the bed, in the manner of boys." But--the confirming detail again--the quarter part of his body that had been boiled was still tinted with saffron.[21] The father, seeing this great miracle, presented his son to the cathedral to help with the service of Vincent Ferrer. Our Valencian herald added that he himself had seen the boy alive and well, still tinged with saffron, only six days later. And he affirmed that this story was well known in Vannes and beyond.
Whatever version of the tale our Valencian heard in Brittany, whether he encountered a saffron-hued baby or not, someone's memory had created out of the incident a vivid, grabbing narrative, complete with dialogue. In fact, this version of the story has echoes of motifs found in folk and fairy-tales. The serving-up of a stewed child to an unsuspecting father shows up in the Grimms' tale "The Juniper Tree." Resuscitation from parts--more commonly of an animal than a child--is a frequent folk-tale motif, and in fact shows up in tales from Brittany as well as in the perhaps better-known tale of St. Germanus of Auxerre's resuscitation of a calf cooked for him. Remembering such themes helps the teller to remember the story as a whole, just as the vivid visual images created by the embellished tale heard in Naples help fix the tale in the teller's and listener's memory.[22] It may well be that as this story made its way through Brittany and, via our traveler and others like him, abroad, tellers recalled the miracle along the lines of folk stories they knew, conflating a bare-bones version of the story with other dramatic tales to create the fleshed-out narrative that shows up in 1454 in Naples. Folklore, chivalry, and liturgy all were rich sources of narrative material in the later Middle Ages. The ease with which a tale could pass from place to place and from exemplum to literature demonstrates the wide circulation such tales could have. Embedded in social consciousness, such stories could easily shape people's memories and even perceptions of events they themselves experienced, even--or perhaps particularly--such spiritually-charged occurrences as miracles. Thus, we have seen the liturgical calendar imposing itself upon memories of the miraculous rescue of the drowning Johannes Gueho, tales of chivalry coloring Radulphus de Bosco Joannis's memory of his battlefield rescue, and the world of folklore embellishing a hearsay story of a chopped-up, then resurrected baby. Widely-known narrative models thus could color people's testimony about the miracles they had experienced or heard tell of before those memories ever made it into written form. The power of such pre-existing "scripts," I would suggest, can explain some of the similarities in miracle stories attributed to various saints in the later Middle Ages. While I do not wish to deny the agency of those authors who creatively borrowed miracle stories from competing saints, these examples raise the possibility that at least some of the travels of late medieval miracle tales can be explained by their tellers drawing on common narrative models.
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In the Middle Ages, miracle stories had a way of traveling. A story
attributed to the action of St. James, for example, might just as easily
show up in a list of miracles worked through the offices of the Virgin
Mary. The saint, the shrine, the setting, and even the name and home of
the miracle's recipient were all malleable. As Benedicta Ward has noted,
"[Miracle stories] record the intervention of God in human affairs, but
how, where, when, and to what effect could vary. Miracles were not
copyright." Ward and other scholars working on miracles have often
attributed the shifting nature of medieval miracle tales to the
interests of authors who compiled collections of miracula.
Such writers freely "borrowed" and reworked other material in the
interest of promoting their own local shrine or to make an edifying
point in a sermon. Thus, a miracle worked by Our Lady of Soissons
could equally be claimed by the keepers of the shrine of the Virgin
at Chartres. Or the story of Odo of Cluny's silence could become,
in the hands of Cistercian authors, an illustrative support for
Cistercian rules of silence.
By the time our Valencian herald recalls the case of the cut-up
baby for the Naples inquest in 1454, the tale has been considerably
embellished from the stark version we originally encountered in the
Brittany testimony of widow Oliva de Coatsal. The meat-craving
pregnant wife has become more sinister, demented. We now have dialogue,
homey details like the baby playing under the bed, and a recipe
(boil one part baby with broth and saffron; serve). The poor infant
is actually cooked and very nearly eaten (what might have happened if
the hand were not visible in the stew?). There is a definite setting,
the city of Vannes, and the dramatic vigil at the tomb followed by
the boy's miraculous reappearance--whole and alive--at home. And the
"sign of the baby's division" of the Brittany tale has been replaced
by the saffron-tinged quarter of the baby's body. In the place of
the parents' grateful pilgrimage to the saint's tomb, we have the
father's oblation of the child to the service of Vincent Ferrer.