The Materiality of Middle English Anchoritic Devotion

Anchorites and their texts, such as <i>Ancrene Wisse</i>, have recently undergone a reevaluation based on material circumstances, not just theological import. The articles here address a variety of anchoritic or anchoritic-adjacent texts, encompassing guidance literature, hagiographies, miracle narratives, medical discourse, and mystic prose, and spanning in date from the eighth through the fourteenth centuries. Exploring reclusion and materiality, the collection addresses a series of overlapping themes, including the importance of touch, the limits of religious authority, and the role of the senses. Objects, metaphorical and real, embodied and spiritual, populate the pages. These categories are permeable, with flexible and porous boundaries, demonstrating the conflation of ideas, concepts, and manifestations in medieval materiality. In fact, the permeability of these categories demonstrates how materiality can reshape our approach to medieval texts. It leaves room for directions for future study, including the application of material analysis to previously unstudied objects, spaces, and literary artifacts.

Holy Infirmity and the Devotees

The final chapter of the book focuses on the saintly candidates’ devotees and their various encounters with the infirm saint, as well as the attempts and prospects for healing holy infirmity. It also analyses the cultural significances of holy suffering. While the devotees gave varying meanings to saints’ infirmities, they did not directly overlap with the documents we have of their own suffering. Saints valued and cherished their own infirmities, but they also helped, even medically, those of their devotees who were ill or suffering. At the same time, it is likely that the culturally internalized narratives of the benefits of infirmity and the valorization of suffering had a therapeutic function in the same way as miracle narratives.

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.

The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto

In 1295, a house fell from the evening sky onto an Italian coastal road by the Adriatic Sea. Inside, awestruck locals encountered the Virgin Mary, who explained that this humble mud-brick structure was her original residence newly arrived from Nazareth. To keep it from the hands of Muslim invaders, angels had flown it to Loreto, stopping three times along the way. This story of the house of Loreto has been read as an allegory of how Catholicism spread peacefully around the world by dropping miraculously from the heavens. This book calls that interpretation into question by examining historical accounts of the movement of the Holy House across the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century and the Atlantic in the seventeenth century. These records indicate vast and voluntary involvement in the project of formulating a branch of Catholic devotion. The book surveys the efforts of European Jesuits, Slavic migrants, and indigenous peoples in Baja California, Canada, and Peru. These individuals contributed to the expansion of Catholicism by acting as unofficial authors, inadvertent pilgrims, unlicensed architects, unacknowledged artists, and unsolicited cataloguers of Loreto. Their participation in portaging Mary's house challenges traditional views of Christianity as a prepackaged European export, and instead suggests that Christianity is the cumulative product of thousands of self-appointed editors. The book also demonstrates how miracle narratives can be treated seriously as historical sources that preserve traces of real events. Drawing on rich archival materials, the book illustrates how global Catholicism proliferated through independent initiatives of untrained laymen.

Food

This chapter begins with a section entitled A Proto-Miracle: Manna from the Desert, which is designed to set the scene for the miracle narratives which follow. The production of manna in the desert by Moses is a miracle narrative common to both the Qur’an and the Old Testament. After this initial section, the chapter goes on to examine the feeding of the 5000/4000 in the New Testament and then the Eucharistic miracles which have been claimed by the Christian tradition in both the medieval and modern age. Such miracles may be compared with that outlined in the next Islamic section which draws on the fifth chapter of the Qur’an, in which Jesus is challenged by his disciples to send ask God to send down a table from Heaven laden with food. Other Islamic miracles drawn from the hadith literature are itemised here. At the end of the chapter a number of metathemes and metamotifs are identified including hunger, testing, manna, bread and Eucharist.

The Mimetic Paraphrase

The mimetic aspects of speech, the spoken word, and dialogical exchange that distinguish the miracle narratives of the first half of Erasmus’s Paraphrase on John constitute a unique implementation of Erasmus’s reader-oriented Philosophia Christi. They efficiently apply the poetics of speech that characterize the theology of Christ’s inverbation in John 1:1 to the genre of the paraphrase for the sake of imitatio. The Erasmian paraphrase reveals itself as the ideal textual medium to exploit the transformative capacities of the incarnate Word and its poetics of speech and verbal transmission in order to perform the gradual acquisition of faith in the individual reader’s mind and, by extension, in the sphere of thought and action of the imagined listeners in the paraphrase’s homiletic community. Moreover, these examples illustrate the remarkably literary notion of mimesis in Erasmus’s paraphrastic text.

Die Semeia [tekens] in die Evangelie volgens Johannes

Die semeia in die Evangelie van Johannes word eerstens geanaliseer in verhouding tot soortgelyke wonderverhale, veral in die sinoptiese evangelies en ten tweede in verhouding tot die breër Johannese narratief. Duidelike ooreenkomste met sommige van die sinoptiese wonderverhale word bespreek. Dit lei tot die bevraagtekening van die sogenaamde ‘semeia-bron’-teorie. Opvolgend op hierdie diskussie word Johannes se eie interpretasie van die wonders nagegaan. Daar word veral aan die vervlegting van die wonderverhale met die teologie van Johannes aandag gegee, veral ten opsigte van die verhouding tussen die Vader en die Seun, geloof, die menslikheid van Jesus en die lyding van Jesus.The Semeia in the Gospel according to John. The semeia in the Gospel of John are analysed, first in relation to other similar miracle narratives, especially in the synoptic gospels, and secondly in perspective of the broader narrative of John’s Gospel. Clear links with some of the synoptic miracle narratives are discussed, questioning the ‘semeia source’ theory. This discussion is followed by a consideration of John’s own interpretation of the miracles, exploring the interwovenness of the miracle stories with the theology of John, especially regarding the relation between the Father and the Son, the humanness of Jesus, the passion of Jesus and faith.