“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

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.

Miracles of the Virgin in Middle English, ed. and trans. by Adrienne Williams Boyarin. A Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Peterborough, Ont., 2015, 164 pp., 12 b/w ill.

The admiration and worship of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages was simply paramount, both in clerical and in secular literature, in the visual arts, and in music. Mary <?page nr="292"?>appears countless times in legendary literature, and so also in Middle English. She might produce miracles and help miserable people in need if they pray hard enough. Those stories were ubiquitous all over medieval Europe, as Williams Boyarin comments, referring to Latin, French, Anglo-Norman, Provençal, Italian, Spanish, Castilian, Arabic, and Ethiopean (10). I wonder, however, what the difference between Spanish and Castilian might be, and why German, French (Gautier de Coincy) or Swedish, Polish or Czech texts are missing entirely in this list. Nevertheless, the focus of the present book rests on Middle English examples, such as those contained in The South English Legendary, in the Vernon Manuscript, and in the collection produced by the printer Wynken de Worde in 1496.

Water — The Nile — And the Täʾamrä Maryam. Miracles of the Virgin Mary in the Ethiopian Version

Starting with the biblical Gǝyon (= the Gǝʿǝz name for the Nile) the river Nile plays an important role in Ethiopian perception.The corpus of the miracles of Mary [Täʾamrä Maryam] particularly during the reign of emperor Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (1434-68 A.D.) was enlarged with stories reflecting a local background and Ethiopian history. And suddenly in the 19th century the ‘idea of diverting the Nile’ which since early times was a challenging topic in the relationship between Egypt and Ethiopia, again turned up in a miracle of the Virgin Mary, referring to the time of the Crusaders and the resulting diplomatic activities. This article wants to evaluate how far the Ethiopians regard themselves as masters of the Nile waters and to what extent they derive their legitimacy from divine sources.