Allegorisation in Mary’s Miracles as a Sign of “the New Sensitivity” of the Middle Ages
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15291/csi.4896Keywords:
allegorisation, folk literature, functions of miracles, medieval poetics, new sensitivityAbstract
The paper analyses the stories about Mary’s miracles published in the collection Mirakuli slavne deve Marije (Senj, 1508). The analysis focuses mainly on themes, motives, and ideas. By recognising the allegorical meanings of individual stories and the collection as a whole, miracles are reinterpreted as a special medieval literary genre, thus attempting to affirm their value not only within the framework of folk theology and literature inspired by folk sermons, but also concerning their aesthetic characteristics and new spirituality, s well as “new sensitivity” of the Middle Ages (term used in Dürrigl 2013) potentially interesting to readers of the twenty-first century. The theoretical background of the paper comes primarily from literary studies, explaining the poetic features of miracles and insights that reveal the multi-layered nature of allegory. Since allegory encompasses and arises from other disciplines such as theology and biblical exegesis, and since it concerns Mary’s miracles, the paper partly relies on medieval and contemporary church documents on the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the history of salvation. The paper aims to analyse the power of allegory as a figure and literary genre in the context of the new medieval perception of God, showing that allegorisation, as the process of assigning allegorical meaning, combines ethical and aesthetic components. Consequently, these short texts – hitherto perceived as examples of naive, entertaining, and somewhat bizarre, religious literature – also show the potential for discovering and experiencing a beautiful, harmonious, picturesque, and imaginative literary and artistic world.
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