The writing down of a miracle tale was a meeting point between the oral culture of the lay people and the literate, Latin culture of the clergy. The question is to know to what degree the extant manuscripts give a trustworthy documentation of this meeting. Examples from the miracula of four Swedish saints, Eric of Uppsala, Birgitta of Sweden, Bishop Nils Hermansson of Linköping and Katherine of Vadstena, are scrutinized in this paper, in order to come as close as possible to the original storytelling moment.

Miracle tales are marvellous sources – not only because they deal with miracles. In them, we come closer than in almost any other category of sources to what was medieval daily life. We meet with ordinary people who are otherwise not mentioned in any surviving sources, and share in their worries, their sufferings, their joys, and not least in their faith.

But how trustworthy are the accounts? May we hear in them the authentic vox populi, the voice of the people? The answer given in this paper is that this is the case, more or less, since the registrars, who were proficiently bilingual, knew that the tales could be subject to renewed inquiries, but that they have filtered the stories to some extent, and especially the wording of the vows and other theologically sensitive issues.