Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Idea of English Miracles of the Virgin
- 2 The Theophilus Legend in England: Mary the Advocate, Mary the Jew
- 3 The Theophilus Legend in England, Again: From the Devil’s Charter to a Marian Paradigm
- 4 The Virgin and the Law in Middle English Contexts
- 5 The Fate of English Miracles of the Virgin
- Afterword
- Appendix 1 ‘The Founding of the Feast of the Conception’ in the South English Legendary
- Appendix 2 ‘Blood on the Penitent Woman’s Hand’ (Bodleian Library MS e Museo 180)
- Appendix 3 The Charter Group Miracles and Other Short Texts from British Library MS Additional 37049
- Appendix 4 An Index of Miracles of the Virgin Collated with Existing Lists
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The Fate of English Miracles of the Virgin
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Idea of English Miracles of the Virgin
- 2 The Theophilus Legend in England: Mary the Advocate, Mary the Jew
- 3 The Theophilus Legend in England, Again: From the Devil’s Charter to a Marian Paradigm
- 4 The Virgin and the Law in Middle English Contexts
- 5 The Fate of English Miracles of the Virgin
- Afterword
- Appendix 1 ‘The Founding of the Feast of the Conception’ in the South English Legendary
- Appendix 2 ‘Blood on the Penitent Woman’s Hand’ (Bodleian Library MS e Museo 180)
- Appendix 3 The Charter Group Miracles and Other Short Texts from British Library MS Additional 37049
- Appendix 4 An Index of Miracles of the Virgin Collated with Existing Lists
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
But merci, ladi, at the grete assyse Whan we shule come bifore the hye justyse.
Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘An ABC’These wonders (whiche they call miracles) bee wrought dayly in the Churche, not by the power of God, as many thinke, but by the illusion of Sathan rather … Neither are they to be called miracles of true christen men, but illusions rather, wherby to delude mens mindes, to make them put their faith in our Lady, & in other Saints, and not in God alone.
Thomas Bilney c.1531, according to John FoxeAs the Protestant Reformation reached England – bringing with it the rejection of the cult of saints and attacks, rhetorical and real, on shrines, pilgrimage, and associated miraculous events or items – belief in the kinds of Marian intercession described in Miracles of the Virgin could epitomize Catholic ‘superstition’. As Ælfric had insisted centuries earlier, the glut of Marian apocrypha that had developed independently of scripture had to be suppressed in favor of biblical accounts (in which Mary features only minimally), since false or unverifiable narratives posed a threat to the honor due to God alone. Marian feasts with apocryphal bases, which had been so central to early English devotion, were to be invalidated. Visual depictions of Mary shifted to meeker and softer representations of Luke's acquiescent maiden. Images and sculptures associated with long-popular shrines and miracles were attacked with words, hammers, and flames.
While I have been advocating for a view of English Marian miracles – particularly the Middle English corpus – that embraces their miscellaneity as representative and thereby reveals visible developments of sets and subsets of miracle narratives like the ones explored in this book, I cannot deny that the complex history of reform attitudes toward Mary and the equally complex history of the English Reformation seem to create a basic evidentiary problem for me. Could it be that the English corpus looks the way it does because the sixteenth-century eradication of ‘superstitious’ texts and images means that the genre is now so badly represented that any traces of development, whether in the whole or in thematically related subsets, are accidental?
- Type
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- Information
- Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval EnglandLaw and Jewishness in Marian Legends, pp. 138 - 170Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2010