The Accommodating Queen: The Miracles of the Virgin Mary in the Legenda Aurea

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.

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Miracles of the Virgin Mary, in Verse/Miracula sancte Dei genitricis Virginis Marie, versifice. Nigel of Canterbury , Jan Ziolkowski

Speculum ◽

10.2307/2852001 ◽

1989 ◽

Vol 64 (2) ◽

pp. 475-477

Author(s):

David Carlson

Keyword(s):

Virgin Mary ◽

Miracles Of The Virgin

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The Extinction of Paganism and the Church Historian

The Journal of Ecclesiastical History ◽

10.1017/s0022046900028657 ◽

1984 ◽

Vol 35 (3) ◽

pp. 339-357 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Gerald Bonner

Keyword(s):

Virgin Mary ◽

God's Will ◽

Great Mother ◽

Medieval Church ◽

In Christ ◽

Miracles Of The Virgin ◽

The Church ◽

What Matters

Any period of history which later ages deem to have been significant is apt to gather to itself a mythology. To the medieval Church the first three Christian centuries appeared as a period of continuous slaughter, in which legions of martyrs preferred to perish rather than deny their faith in Christ. With such an assumption it was inevitable that the extinction of paganism during the years which followed the conversion of Constantine should be seen as a pious work undertaken in conformity with God's will – gesta Dei per Christianos – and when Julian the Apostate attempted to turn back the tide, he was duly slain by two warrior saints sent for the purpose from heaven – a legend which had sufficient vitality eventually to find its way into the Ethiopic Miracles of the Virgin Mary, with Julian transformed into a gigantic artisan named Gôlyâd, who threatens to destroy a monastery and is slain by a martyred knight raised by Our Lady to that end. On the pagan side we have the well-known story of how Serena, wife of Stilicho and favourite niece of Theodosius the Great, took a necklace from the image of the Great Mother for her own adornment and mocked and humiliated an aged vestal virgin who denounced her. At a later date, when Alaric the Goth threatened Rome, Serena was suspected of treachery and strangled. To the pagan historian Zosimus her fate was the reward of her impiety, and it seemed fitting that the neck which had usurped the goddess's ornament would at the last be encircled by the executioner's rope. The factual truth of these stories is not, for our purposes, important. What matters is the witness that they provide to the mythological – or, if you prefer it, the theological – interpretations which were early given to the victory of Christianity.

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

Aethiopica ◽

10.15460/aethiopica.2.1.533 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 2 ◽

pp. 53-68

Author(s):

Veronika Six

Keyword(s):

19Th Century ◽

Virgin Mary ◽

River Nile ◽

Local Background ◽

Miracles Of The Virgin ◽

The 19Th Century ◽

The Relationship

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.

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