Chapter 6 - THINKING WITH THE SUPERNATURAL

Summary

The first chapter of this book began by exploring the ways in which a range of authors conceptualised the supernatural order. This chapter returns to the thought of some of those authors in order to develop the preliminary ideas laid out there. Here, however, the central concern is different: it is with the ways in which the writers themselves responded to, and, in a loose sense, ‘used’, the frequently troublesome wonder stories that they told, especially those in which the supernatural was ambiguous and resistant to explanation.

The emotional power of wonders was a constant in the central middle ages, lying, as Caroline Bynum has observed, in rarity, an unexplained cause and the inescapable sensation that the story had some deep significance. And yet there was change too. Since the early twelfth century, some chroniclers, for example Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury, had traded in stories about the wondrous. These stories, for all their oddness, tended to fit into a larger providential scheme and to nestle into conventional theological categories. Extra-ecclesial elements certainly figured in accounts such as the stories of the witch of Berkeley and Walchelin's vision of the wild hunt, but the moralities of these tales remained ultimately clear. The later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, as we have seen, in chapter 1, witnessed the further proliferation of such stories as the scope of things judged ‘worthy of being remembered’ by historical writers expanded.