The twelfth century was a period of considerable cultural and intellectual activity throughout Northern Europe: so much so that the term ‘the Twelfth Century Renaissance’ has been used to describe the period. To some extent, this upsurge in cultural activity, and the accompanying growth of philosophy, literature, sculpture and architecture, can be linked with the expansion of what might be called ‘the European experience’ beyond the confines of Europe itself. Three crusades to the Eastern Mediterranean were undertaken during the twelfth century, and the resulting contact with Islamic civilisation (and indeed with the values of Hellenic philosophy which Muslim scholars had themselves encountered and incorporated into their own intellectual framework centuries before) undoubtedly provided a stimulus to medieval European thought and speculation.

The cultural growth of the period can also be linked with the emergence of powerful, centralising monarchies which, in addition to vying with each other for territorial gain and sway throughout Northern Europe, competed in the sphere of cultural patronage. Perhaps the best example of this was the rivalry between Henry II, the Angevin king of England whose domains extended at one time from the Scottish borders to the Pyrenees, and Louis VII, the Capetian king of France; this tended to manifest itself as a kind of rivalry of splendour between their courts. In the Angevin domain the monarch and his high-ranking officials were the patrons of the so-called ‘court clerics’, writers who, although they may have taken clerical orders, were less concerned than their monastic counterparts to draw moralistic conclusions from their stories. Indeed, it could be argued that the court clerics had a role as essayists, gossips and anecdotalists who wrote to divert, and thus to provide matter for relatively light-hearted philosophical and theological debate in court circles. Although it would perhaps be anachronistic to speak of ghost stories and accounts of supernatural events as ‘entertainment’ at this period, it is certainly the case that the principal aim of the court clerics was to amuse and amaze, rather than to edify in the manner of the monastic authors whose accounts of Miracula make up the first section of this book.