“A Desora Desperto y vio una Grand Claridat”: The Role of Dreams and Light in the Construction of a Multi-Confessional Audience of the Miracles of the Virgin of Guadalupe

Amanda Valdés Sánchez

doi:10.3390/rel10120652

Abstract

This paper examines the religious proselytizing agenda of the order of Saint Jerome that ruled the Extremaduran sanctuary of the Virgin of Guadalupe since 1389. To this end, I analyze how the Hieronymite’s used literary motifs such as dreams and light in the codex of the Miracles of the Virgin of Guadalupe to create a multi-confessional audience for their collection of miracles. I contend that these motifs were chosen because they were key elements in the construction of a particular image of the Virgin that could appeal to pilgrims of different faiths. Through them, the Hieronymites evoked in the minds of Muslim pilgrims and Christian captives beyond the sea the imagery and rhetoric of Sufi devotional literature and Islamic hagiography, in order to create a vision of the Virgin that was able to compete with the more important Islamic devotional figures: the Prophet, Sufi masters and charismatic saints. Finally, I explore how the possible influence of North African devotional models, such as the Shadhiliyya order or the hagiography of the Tunisian saint, Aisha al-Manubiyya, suggests that the aims of the monastic authors of this Marian miracles collection went far beyond the conversion of Castilian Muslims, aiming at the transformation of the Extremaduran Marian sanctuary of Guadalupe into a Mediterranean devotional center.

Highlights

Sometime in the 15th century, a young North African woman of Muslim origin arrived at the town of Guadalupe in Extremadura in order to serve the monastery of the Virgin of Guadalupe, for whose devotion she had made such a long journey
As in the hagiography of these saints, such as the Tunisian Sufi Aisha al-Manubiyya, the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared in dreams to her faithful after an invocation, working through this apparition a miracle that satisfies their requests.11. This parallelism is especially significant because the saint, like the Virgin of Guadalupe, used dreams in her miracle stories to convert some of her followers to the ascetic path
I do not wish to argue that these motifs have their origin in Islamic tradition; rather, they belonged to the Christian tradition as well, Castilian Christians chose them because they could appeal to a potential Muslim audience and because they enabled them to invest the Extremaduran Virgin with a religious authority constructed according to the parameters of Islamic religious tradition

Summary

Introduction

Sometime in the 15th century, a young North African woman of Muslim origin arrived at the town of Guadalupe in Extremadura in order to serve the monastery of the Virgin of Guadalupe, for whose devotion she had made such a long journey. The sanctuary of the Virgin of Guadalupe was linked to the repopulation and Christianization of the Castilian colonial lands in the south of the Iberian Peninsula. The story of the apparition of the Extremaduran image was one of the many legends emerging across southern Iberian lands, in which Marian images appeared in rural settings to individuals of humble origins, such as shepherds, peasants and artisans The diffusion of these kinds of narratives disseminated a Christian notion of the miraculous and helped develop a new sacred geography that characterized the religious imaginary of the southern territories. Felipe Pereda has observed regarding the evangelization of the first moriscos of Granada (Pereda 2007)

Dreaming with the Virgin

The Marian Enlightenment

From Redemption to Conversion in Guadalupe and the Magreb

Conclusions