The Miracles of St Aebbe of Coldingham and St Margaret of Scotland

The Miracles of St Aebbe of Coldingham and St Margaret of Scotland, ed. and tr. Robert Bartlett (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2003; pp. liv + 154. £45). This edition and translation of two miracle collections from two moderately successful shrines of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries provides a little more raw material of the routine extraordinary experiences of medieval Christians. The two saints are the Anglo-Saxon St Aebbe, and Margaret, the eleventh-century queen of Scotland. The texts themselves date from the late twelfth and mid-thirteenth century respectively. As Professor Bartlett makes clear, they tell us little about the saints themselves, more about contemporary cults. The earlier text is of St Aebbe, whose remains were rediscovered and re-interred at the priory church of Coldingham. While Bartlett points out the Scottish royal patronage of the priory, he also draws attention to the conscious promotion of the shrine by the monks and the part played by the local laity, including Henry, a once prosperous peasant who had allegedly been poisoned by a rejected lover. In 1188, after the saint appeared to him in a vision, he built an oratory with his own hands near to the site of Aebbe's ancient monastery on the promontory that bears her name. As the medieval author makes clear, the monks who mocked the worker's efforts were clearly proved wrong by the crowds of people who rushed to the place. Nevertheless, Coldingham's corporate take-over of the site shortly afterwards included the demolition of Henry's chapel and the construction of something more spacious and suitable for divine service. Both saints performed their miracles mainly on local pilgrims and were overwhelmingly concerned with healing. Bartlett provides a statistical analysis of the miracles without ever extracting more significance than the relatively small samples of evidence will bear. Still, it is intriguing that the majority of the recorded beneficiaries of St Aebbe's powers should be women, in significant contrast to contemporary healing shrines. Is this deliberate targeting of a group less likely to be able to journey to more distant pilgrimage sites? The ‘Miracles of Saint Margaret of Scotland’, taken from a fifteenth-century manuscript which found its way from Dunfermline to Madrid is a more sophisticated document, building on an already well established cult. Even so, the monks were not going to turn away a crowd who had mistakenly turned up on the feast of Margaret, virgin and martyr, believing her to be the Dunfermline Margaret. There is surprisingly little political propaganda from a text produced in the royal abbey, although Margaret frequently stresses her title of ‘queen of Scots’. The incident when she appears to a knight of Wemyss to inform him that she is off to win the battle of Largs (1263) with her husband and sons, therefore looks like a fairly crude later interpolation. Bartlett's translation is scrupulous without sacrificing fluency: the production standards of Oxford Medieval Texts are as high as ever

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