Representing Wonder in Medieval Miracle Narratives

In a certain sense, Christian miracle narratives can be considered as early precursors of the modern fantastic. Many of the motifs referred to in nineteenth-century fantastic tales and novels are already to be found in medieval miracula and mirabilia: strange natural phenomena, werewolves and revenants, the battle between good and evil. Obvious parallels can also be found on the level of structural configuration, such as the reproduction of certain narrative patterns in the French novella.¹

While the fantastic has been more or less defined as a distinctive genre, its main medieval precursor, the merveilleux chrétien, is a more heterogeneous phenomenon. It seems appropriate to consider it as a flexible set of patterns and themes, appearing in different sorts of texts and in different pragmatic contexts, such as hagiographies, sermons and miracle collections. Miracles can be functionalized as an argument for Christian belief, as a proof of the sanctity and the virtue of a person or a relic, or as a didactic means in order to impress and to convince an audience of a theological message. Thus, miracle stories do not constitute a genre, but rather a set of textual elements, susceptible of appearing in different textual and pragmatic contexts.² They cannot be read without explicitly taking their function within a larger textual ensemble into account.

Another important difference between modern and medieval tales of the supernatural concerns the opposition of (modern) fiction and (pre-modern) non-fiction: fantastic tales are based on the principle of narrative verisimilitude. Todorov's hésitation³ would not be conceivable without the category of the implicit reader following the mysteries and peripeties of the story, vacillating between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the related events. The hésitation indicates a textual effect and therefore first of all concerns not the character on the diegetic level, but the reader. That is completely different in medieval miracle narratives: as non-autonomous components of a non-literary discourse, miracles are not subject to the logic of verisimilitude but rather to the logic of the exemplum. There are no "mysteries" aside from the ones explained in terms of theology. Furthermore, these texts do not have an implicit reader:⁴ signification is made explicit. It is not necessary to search for it by interpreting a textual structure. Accordingly, unlike the hésitation and the thrills coming along with it, wondering is named explicitly, but can hardly be described as the effect of a textual structure.⁵

In what follows I would like to examine how miraculous events and the feelings they arouse (astonishment, wondering, terror, delight) are represented in two different hagiographic texts, Virtutes sanctae Geretrudis and the Libellus de miraculo sancti Martini, and also the De miraculis libri duo by Petrus Venerabilis. But before commencing with this, the central notions of this line of argument shall be commented on: what is a miracle in the Middle Ages, and which are the text types it appears in?⁶ For marvels and miracles are not reduced to merely textual existence, they are phenomena people believed in. While the modern merveilleux is an esthetic category, the medieval merveilleux is a "mental category,"⁷ and has been discussed and problematized as such.

Miracle and Wonder

Broaching the issue of saints, miracles and relics, but also of ghosts and revenants, we have to recognize that, in the Middle Ages, believing in these phenomena was absolutely normal and a part of everyday life.⁸ Natural phenomena, madness, battles, catastrophes, healing processes—everything could be interpreted as the intervention of God, and all these cases can be found in miracle narratives. From a present-day point of view, miracle narratives resemble fabulous imaginary productions, but in their contemporary context they were considered as true stories. The fact that it was also possible to criticize a miracle as unbelievable⁹ is nothing but a proof of the truth-claim of these texts, written and told by churchly authorities (church fathers, theologians, bishops, abbots, simple priests).

As in the Middle Ages there are no clear borderlines between notions such as "world" and...