The Spectacle of Memory/Mary in Gonzalo de Berceo's Milagros de Nuestra Senora

Abstract

Medieval artists exploited the power of the mental image, and its potential as a means of conveying multiple associations-vividly demonstrated by the classical and medieval tradition of memory systems-and they did so with an increasing eye to the mental image as a means of Christian remembering. In Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, V. A. Kolve's magisterial study of the mental image as a means of knowing and of coming to knowledge for the medieval public, both educated and unlettered, he examines the powerful claim that visual representation makes upon the memory, and explains how medieval authors and artists drew upon both popular and learned iconographic associations in order to create individual hermeneutic systems in their own art. This is not to be equated with Biblical Exegetics; Kolve's point is that medieval artists strove to develop systems of association, not necessarily what the Exegetes would have deigned the correct interpretation.' Gonzalo de Berceo's collection of twenty-five Marian miracles, Milagros de Nuestra Sefora (mid-thirteenth century), furnishes the reader with a series of didactic lessons, conveyed through striking images. Berceo envelopes his collection in a package designed to