Miracle Narratives Research Articles

Structural Confusion in the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Navigating Unstable Narratives in the Miracles of Castrojeriz

Abstract This article addresses links between musical-poetic structure and architecture in four songs of the Cantigas de Santa Maria. Made at Alfonso X of Castile’s court in the latter years of his reign (1252–84), the Cantigas present a unique case of miracle narratives (cantigas de miragre) set to song. As Parkinson has shown, the four songs in the Castrojeriz set present technical faults that hinder effective comprehension of their miracle texts. This article shows that the songs’ cyclical structures can aid textual logic by aligning narrative highlights with points of sonic focus in the poetry and music. Tension between textual and musical-poetic form often mirrors the songs’ narratives, which concern difficulties during the construction of Castrojeriz’s church. This article argues that such tensions can be read as a text-as-building metaphor, also alluded to in the songs as they appear in surviving manuscripts.

The Hagiographical Landscape of Twelfth-Century England

ABSTRACT This article explores hagiographic landscapes as depicted in miracle narratives from twelfth-century England. These stories, which focus on miraculous healing sought by pilgrims at saints’ shrines, often situate their protagonists in locations that, although based on real places, are reimagined for didactic purposes. The article argues that the journeys undertaken by pilgrims in the stories were meant to be read on a metaphorical level and that these re-imagined landscapes functioned to depict the protagonists’ inner journey from sin to salvation.

Realism, Myth and Spiritual Mestizaje in Las malas by Camila Sosa Villada

Abstract: By reclaiming the power of self-definition and the use of the term travesti to designate their unique experience within the Latin American cultural, economic, and political context, travesti intellectuals have fought the dehumanization of their personhood. In her novel Las malas , the Argentine author Camila Sosa Villada not only reclaims the right to self-definition but also connects the realistic accounts of human rights violations against travesti subjects with the spiritual, mythical, and religious roots of the travesti experience. To make these connections, Sosa Villada appropriates magical realism, a literary mode that provides the space to naturalize the presence of travesti subjects as protagonists of folktales, miracles, and religious narratives while denouncing violence against travesti bodies. In this way, the author unveils and corrects the dichotomic nature of cultural narratives that exclude travesti and trans subjects from religious and cultural spaces in Latin America. Moreover, by rewriting folktales and religious narratives, and by situating travestis as protagonists of narratives of miracles, Sosa Villada deploys "spiritual mestizaje" that dignifies and humanizes travesti personhood, opening previously proscribed spaces for these agents. In this way, Sosa Villada not only disrupts and expands the literary tradition of magical realism by adding the travesti experience to the predominantly heteronormative corpus of magical-realist narratives but exercises religious agency.

Zeus Bronton’un Gücü: Yeni Bir Mucize Anlatısı Üzerine Notlar

N. Eda Akyürek Şahin and Hüseyin Uzunoğlu have recently published an interesting dedica-tion to Zeus Bronton from the 2nd-3rd century A.D. in this journal (Gephyra 23, 2022, 119-120 no. 19, with phs.). Following an attempt to further elucidate the text, this inscription is here identified as a narrative account of the power of Zeus Bronton. While the inscription finds a place in a growing number of documents about the worship of this god in Phrygia Epiktetos, it also reveals important parallels with the so-called “confession stelai” from Lydia, though it comes from about 200 km away and employs somewhat different vocabulary. More broadly, I argue that the text is to be situated within a wider genre of miracle narrative or aretalogy that is particularly prominent in the epigraphic evidence from Anatolia, but far from unique to it.

Biblical interpretation during the era of the COVID-19 pandemic: Perspectives from Africa

Biblical interpretation and/or hermeneutics is largely influenced by context and prevailing events and/or issues. This is attested by many scholars in the field. Previous pandemics have influenced the way biblical hermeneutics is conducted during the period. The situation is not too different from the emergence of COVID-19. The pandemic has been scripturalised to argue that it is the fulfilment of scriptural signs for the second coming of Jesus. Others assert that it is the result of human sins and 5G technology. Amid these propositions, biblical narratives concerning miracles/healing, eschatology, and hope were handled uniquely. This study employs narrative research criticism to analyse various propositions concerning COVID-19 and how biblical texts were engaged to propound an epideictic rhetorical theory of biblical interpretation during the emergence of COVID-19. The main finding is that although there are many assigned eschatological interpretations to the pandemic, there is an epideictic interpretation of miracle narratives of Jesus to minister healing to persons affected and infected by COVID-19.Contribution: This study emphasises the problem-solving approach to biblical interpretation in the African context. It proposes the application of this approach in response to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The “Adbhuta-Dharma” Narratives in Translated Chinese Sarvāstivāda Texts

The concept of “adbhuta-dharma” (Ch. weicengyou fa 未曾有法) has developed and changed throughout Buddhism’s history. Indeed, the subject and the content of adbhuta texts as well as the meaning of the term “adbhuta” (marvelous phenomenon) varies across the scriptures. Looking through the scriptures, it would seem that they originated as narrative elaborations on various aspects of the Three Jewels—the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Saṃgha. Then gradually, “adbhuta-dharma” came to encapsulate those narrative elements in the scriptures related to the miraculous in the life of the Buddha as well as the careers of his disciples. As one of the twelve divisions of the Buddhist canon, the literary form of the adbhutas overlaps with other canonical genres, namely the nidānas, the avadānas, and the jātakas tales. This article will provide a careful analysis of adbhuta-dharma narratives in important Sarvāstivād in Sūtras, Vinayas, Abhidharmas, and other texts such as the Chuyao jing 出曜經 and the Buddhacarita (Ch. Fo suoxing zan 佛所行贊). These narratives are important because, while many monks and laypeople might have been left uninspired by the complexities of Buddhist thought and doctrine, miracle narratives were more accessible, playing an important role in popularizing Sarvāstivāda ideas and doctrines. These miracle stories reached audiences that other Sūtra narratives and exegetical works could not, helping in the dissemination of Buddhist thought and practice, as well as the later development and spread of Mahāyāna works in India and beyond.

“zu grob gewest”: Metainvective Communication in Confessional Disputes over Narration of the Saints in the Sixteenth Century

Abstract The article is devoted to coarse uses of language as a subject of dispute in confessional controversies over legendary narration. Such metainvective forms of communication are systematized, and questioned with regard to their functions: in the Protestant Lügenden (word combination of “legend” and “lie,” lying legends) and their Catholic replies, the “true” faith and its defense are connected with communicative behavior. Whereas Lutherans are above all effective at adopting coarse speech and the metainvective reproach of lying, the Counter-Reformation argumentation develops the strategic potential of metainvective communication in very different ways. Metainvective statements become a weapon particularly when they are absorbed into figures of meta-metainvective, which not only display the coarse speech but reveal and then criticize the strategy behind it. The tension between polemical prefaces and annotated miracle narratives in the Lügenden as well as the thematic proliferation of the legend discussion in the Catholic reports and sermons are ultimately shown to be genre-dynamic effects of the use of metainvectives.

Thinking with Wolves

AbstractThis article is an examination of the career of the “wolf child”—a human child lost or sacrificed by human parents but nurtured by wolf mothers—in imperial South Asia. Notably, wolf children become a particular concern of evangelical Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; for the latter, these children featured as subjects in a miracle narrative, in which they were preserved from harm against all odds by their divinely animated lupine foster mothers. This history limns the curious trajectory that begins with an anthropology of the cultures that sacrifice children to wolves and ends in a missionary theology that claims wolf children as evidence of Christian grace and redemption. It underlines how unexpectedly significant a reckoning with the nonhuman was for evangelical theology and narrative in the colony, and how the narrative depended on trans-species alliance for imagining the operations of grace in imperial zones.

The Humed Serpent: Lucian, miracles, enlightenment, and empire

AbstractIn his essay ‘Of Miracles’, published separately and as the final chapter of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume enlists Lucian’s Alexander, or the False Prophet as evidence for his claim that miracle narratives first take root among gullible rural populations before spreading to cultured city-dwelling elites. This essay reads Lucian’s Alexander and On the Death of Peregrinus against the Humean grain to suggest that miracle stories emerge as a consequence of the forms of commerce and circulation enabled by empires. In light of this, I recharacterize Hume’s geography of gullibility as an aspirational but unsustainable ideal engendered by the emergence of an eighteenth-century ‘Republic of Letters’.

The Invisible Church: C. P. E. Bach, Die Israeliten in der Wüste ‒ A Freemasonic Oratorio?

Abstract The miracle narrative of the first oratorio by C. P. E. Bach – the escape of the people of Israel from the thirst death by Moses – comes from the Book of Exodus. In the course of the second part of the work, however, the figure of Moses is unexpectedly taken over by the Redeemer. The place turns out to be a paraphrase of Genesis 3:15. In the context of the German Enlightenment the biblical story can be interpreted as a reference to the assimilation process of the Jewish community. The composed libretto includes an interpolation, which speaks about the real advent of the Messiah, thus placing the work among the representatives of the messianic-cult of the Enlightenment. The interpolated text section focuses on the religion above religions as imagined by the latitudinarianism of the leading philosophers of the Enlightenment and testifies to the Masonic spirit in it. The text of the final chorus re-interprets the church dedication (the original function of Bach’s oratorio) as the dedication of the invisible Church: the soul.

Permindar Kaur: Locating a ‘Black’ Artist in Narratives of British Art in the 1990s

Speaking at a conference in October 2016, Permindar Kaur asked, ‘Am I a Black artist?’ To be regarded as a ‘Black artist’ or not to be: what are the consequences for the trajectory of an artist's career; our understanding of the aesthetic affects of that artist's work; and their historicization within narratives of British art? This essay argues that the question of Kaur's ‘Blackness’, whether self‐defined or perceived by others, has had significant implications for the ways in which her artworks have been interpreted and historicized. Following Stuart Hall's essay ‘Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three “Moments” in Post‐War History’, this essay examines specific moments – artworks and their display – in Permindar Kaur's career, and their ‘periodization’ – interpretation and positioning – within a wider curatorial and art‐historical narration of the Black anti‐racist art agenda of the 1980s, and the Cool Britannia multiculturalism and nationalist Scottish Miracle narratives of the 1990s. Presenting Kaur as a case study, this essay provides insight into the challenges of narration faced by artists of colour.

The Female Condition: Gender and Deformity in High‐Medieval Miracle Narratives

AbstractThis article explores the intersection of medicine, religion and gender within the context of miracle narratives compiled in England and France in the High Middle Ages. Women in miracle accounts have much to tell us about medieval ideas of gendered sickness and health, yet this is an area which has received little scholarly attention. Focusing on stories of female deformity and disfigurement, it is argued that sickness has a feminising effect on women's bodies in these sources, but proposed that symptoms of excess femininity were not always seen as the spiritual hindrance that might be expected.

The Meaning of Resurrection Miracles in Pentecostal Theology

Abstract Early Pentecostal literature contains many narratives of miracles of individuals being raised from the dead. While attention has tended to their factual or evidential value, including to some extent in the narratives themselves, this article examines the interpretations given to such miraculous events in Pentecostal theology. Specifically, it finds four major trends in interpretation in the literature: first, the meaning of the resurrection miracle as evidential, as a ‘proof’; second, the miracle as a sign of God’s victorious power over death and/or his mercy for the deceased and his/her family; third, the resurrection as prefigured in earlier miracles, especially Jesus’ raising of Lazarus; and finally, the miraculous return to life as a return to the realm of death, in which it is clear this event is not the final victory.

Communal Acts in the Process of Death: A Comparison Between Nordic and South European 15th-century Hagiographic Material

ABSTRACT This paper analyses communal elements which were essential for a resurrection miracle narrative. The analysis focuses on the comparison between Nordic and South European hagiographic material. In resurrection miracle depositions, five particular acts of death were frequently recorded in order to show that people were sure about the arrival of death and that a person was believed to be cured through a proper miracle. The material suggests that the acts around a dying person were perceived similarly in Scandinavian and South European miracle testimonies. Thus, Scandinavia’s remote geographical location, far from the heart of Christianity, had almost no impact on the ways a resurrection miracle narrative was formulated in the late Middle Ages. Even though these acts seem to be hagiographical topoi, both the witnesses and the commissioners of canonization processes considered these acts such as fit their perception of a death moment and a miraculous recovery.

During Credo He Shouted "Blessed be […]; now I can hear": Nordic Child Miraculees Interacting with Liturgy

This article focuses on miracle narratives associated with saints originating in the Nordic region, written from the 12th to the 15th century, where a rich collection of images of children present around and inside of churches and at shrines can be found. Many of the tales portray children in devotional activities, giving an indication of how children moved and acted in these spaces. The events described often transpire during prayers and services, and show how children were seen and heard in spaces where liturgical activity shaped the rhythms of the day and the year. By examining how children are presented, as present and participating in these spaces, and by noting the bits of sensory information given in the narratives, this article adds to our mental image of the religious practices as well as sensory experiences of medieval children.
 Keywords: Medieval children, miracles, Nordic saints, hagiography, sensory experience. 
 On cover:Monks singing the Office and decorated initial A[sperges me.]. Gradual Olivetan Master (Use of the Olivetan Benedictines), illuminated manuscript on parchment ca. 1430-1439. Italy, Monastero di Santa Maria di Baggio near Milan, Ca 1400-1775.Beinecke Ms1184: The olivetan Gradual. Gradual. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Anna M. Nogar, Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue, 1628 to the Present (2018) and Anna M. Nogar, Enrique R. Lamadrid, and Amy Córdova, Hermanas de azul: Sor María de Ágreda viene a Nuevo México / Sisters in Blue:

Reviewed by: Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue, 1628 to the Present by Anna M. Nogar, and: Hermanas de azul: Sor María de Ágreda viene a Nuevo México / Sisters in Blue: Sor María de Ágreda Comes to New Mexico by Anna M. Nogar, Enrique R. Lamadrid, and Amy Córdova Elizabeth McDyer (bio) Anna M. Nogar, Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue, 1628 to the Present. University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. Pp. 474. Anna M. Nogar, Enrique R. Lamadrid, and Amy Córdova, Hermanas de azul: Sor María de Ágreda viene a Nuevo México / Sisters in Blue: Sor María de Ágreda Comes to New Mexico. University of New Mexico Press, 2017. Pp. 88. In Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue, 1628 to the Present, Anna Nogar takes her readers on an astonishing transatlantic journey through the centuries. She uncovers María de Ágreda, the at-times-forgotten or narratively limited Spanish nun historically identified as the protagonist of the [End Page 219] US Southwest "Lady in Blue" folkloric tale. According to the tale, de Ágreda bilocated, miraculously appearing to Indigenous populations in what is now the US Southwest to prepare them for Christianity and colonization although she never left Spain. As Nogar notes, scholars have largely ignored the Lady in Blue story except as a regional legend, disconnected from its larger historical context. In contrast, Nogar inserts the story of the Lady in Blue within its transatlantic context of Spain, New Spain, and the missionary zeal of what is now the US Southwest. By examining Lady in Blue narratives contextualized by historical, cultural, and oral sources, she argues that the staying power of the legend stems from de Ágreda's popularity as a spiritual author in Spain and New Spain. In so doing, she affirms María de Ágreda's preeminent role as a female colonial figure. To do this, she examines the miracle narrative over four centuries and the transatlantic circulation of de Ágreda's writing. After her well-crafted introduction, Nogar leads us through the history of the Lady in Blue narrative on the one hand, and the biography of María de Ágreda, including the diffusion and societal role of her spiritual writings, on the other. The first four chapters trace the narrative history alongside Sor María's biography and writings during the colonial era. Chapter 1 examines the foundational texts of the Lady in Blue narrative, with special attention to their writers (evangelizing missionaries) and their respective audiences. In chapter 2, Nogar establishes Sor María's importance in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spain as a spiritual author and confidant to King Phillip IV, which allowed her most famous text, Mística ciudad de Dios, to circulate broadly. Chapter 3 details how her prominence in Spain led to her role as an influential spiritual author and religious figure in New Spain, with wide publication of her works that made her ideas accessible to large swathes of colonial Mexican society. Sor María's popularity in Spain and New Spain formed a transatlantic devotional community. In chapter 4, Nogar turns her attention specifically to Northern New Spain (New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California). She shows that through Franciscan friars and Jesuits, de Ágreda's writing preceded and paved the way for the Lady in Blue narrative, which in turn became a foundational [End Page 220] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Illustration from Hermanas de azul: Sor María de Ágreda viene a Nuevo México / Sisters in Blue: Sor María de Ágreda Comes to New Mexico. Amy Cordova © 2017. Courtesy: University of New Mexico Press. story, "cited from both written and collective memory" and "an essential episode in the exploration and colonization" (7). The last two chapters span transformations of the Lady in Blue narrative from the nineteenth century onward. They contrast significantly with the first two centuries of the Lady in Blue narrative's history that intertwined María de Ágreda's authorial...

Narrativas de milagres

Este artigo analisa alguns exemplos registrados no Manuscrito 01, que se encontra na Seção de Obras Raras (OBR), da Biblioteca Central do Estudante (BCE) da Universidade de Brasília (UnB). Intitulado, na tradição bibliotecária da UnB, como Flos Sanctorum, trata-se na verdade de narrativas de milagres e de vidas de “santos padres”, cuja produção data, provavelmente, do século XIV, realizada em âmbito monástico, no norte de Portugal. O corpus conta com 143 exempla e milagres, devidamente assinalados sob forma de rubricas. O principal sentido que se pretende destacar dos exemplos selecionados é o da justiça divina que, como um truísmo, manifesta-se em todas as narrativas. Entretanto, as lógicas pelas quais essa justiça se realiza são oriundas da experiência política e social terrena, o que termina por sacralizar o poder profano.

Anna Russakoff, Imagining the Miraculous: Miraculous Images of the Virgin Mary in French Illuminated Manuscripts, ca. 1250-ca. 1450. Studies and Texts, 215; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination, 7. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2019, xviii, 194 pp., ill.

This monograph deals with illuminated manuscripts created in French-speaking regions from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century, i.e., from the earliest narratives of Marian miracles written in <?page nr="542"?>Old French to the codices produced at the Burgundian court at the waning of the Middle Ages. Its focus, however, is very specific: it is a systematic analysis of the miniatures depicting both material representations of the Virgin (mainly sculptures, but also icons, panel paintings, altarpieces or reliquaries) and the miracles performed by them, usually as Mary’s reaction to a prayer (or an insult) to one of Her images.

Des cathares aux lollards. Des miracles eucharistiques inédits dans l'Angleterre duxvesiècle

The manuscript Oxford, Merton College, 13 contains five eucharistic miracles copied in England at the end of the 1420s. The first narrative, which was written by a Cistercian around 1200, recounts how the clergy in Mantua used a miraculous wafer to combat the Cathars. The four others, presented more briefly, are based on well-known traditions. The transcription of the texts and their acquisition by Merton College around 1468 took place in the context of the struggle against the Lollards. The manuscript is marked by the debates excited by the theology of Wyclif, and sensitive subjects, such as predestination, relics or the eucharist are touched on in pastoral material. The miracle narratives, which had been written to combat dualist heresies in the late 12th century, are taken up again to face the challenge represented by Wyclif. The previously unpublished texts are transcribed and translated in the annex.

The Medical Interest of Old French Miracle Narratives

The Medical Interest of Old French Miracle Narratives