This translation of the collection of miracle stories produced at Rocamadour in Quercy in 1172-73 has been inspired by the recognition that the text, an important example of a sometimes overlooked genre, has enormous potential. Its value lies in the fact that it can be used to address a wide range of issues bearing on how the availability of various types of source material from different times and places affects our understanding of the past. In particular, there are three important areas of investigation to which the Rocamadour collection contributes: the role of modern translations of primary sources in the study of medieval history; the ways in which miracle stories can be approached by historians; and the possibility of using miracle collections to compensate for the lack of more mainstream narrative history from areas such as the twelfth-century Midi.

The value of translated sources

The first area to consider is the imbalance in the sorts of medieval source material which are available in modern translations. In recent years there has been a remarkable growth in the number of sources available in English. In the context of the British university system, at least, this has largely been a response to the needs of students and teachers, as many undergraduate, and increasingly postgraduate, courses are geared towards the study of primary materials in translation. This is a very salutary development: medievalists are responding to the expectations of students, who usually come to the subject with a background in looking at sources at school level. And they are carving out a niche for medieval history as a discipline, in that its source-driven character enables it to depart qualitatively as well as simply chronologically from the teaching of later periods. In a sense, the relative paucity of source material for the medieval period becomes a pedagogical asset. Whereas modernists can expose their students to only a small part of the abundant sources available to them, medievalists – especially those whose specialisms are before the thirteenth century, when the amount of surviving material begins to increase substantially – can aspire to mobilizing a meaningful sample of the sources to hand in their teaching.