Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval England: Law and Jewishness in Marian Legends (review)

The Miracles of the Virgin are short accounts of the Virgin Mary’s miraculous intercessory powers. They first appeared in the early Middle Ages and enjoyed great popularity throughout Europe, usually collected into large compendia. Surprisingly, this stimulating book is the first to examine Marian miracles in a specifically English literary and cultural context.

However, as Professor Boyarin indicates, a discussion of Marian miracles in medieval England is not unproblematic. The huge compilations of Marian miracles so prevalent on the continent, such as Gautier de Coinci’s thirteenth-century Miracles de Sainte Vierge, are virtually non-existent in England. This is despite the fact that the genre is usually accepted to be an English invention, one of the expressions of an intense interest in Marian devotion and liturgy in England in the early Middle Ages. After an early proliferation of compilations of English Marian miracle texts in the twelfth century – by monastics Anselm the Younger, Dominic of Evesham, and William of Malmesbury, and the earliest known vernacular collection, Adgar’s Anglo-Norman Le Gracial – it seems that not much else appears until the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

This apparent hiatus, which is peculiar to England, is often attributed to the wholesale destruction of Marian miracle texts that allegedly occurred during the Reformation. Boyarin takes issue with this assumption, arguing that that there is no lost corpus. Not only were Miracles of the Virgin an important genre throughout the Middle Ages in England but they survived the Reformation more or less intact. The main reason for this, according to Boyarin, was the miscellaneous nature of their appearance. English Marian miracles, of which 171 survive in Middle English, are found scattered in sermons, miscellanies, and legend cycles rather than in dedicated collections, and so escaped the zeal of the reformers. Indeed, she argues that English Marian miracles are characterized by their miscellaneous nature and exemplarity, and as a result are porous and adaptable, able to absorb and expose shifting social and religious contexts.

Why this miscellaneous nature might be the case in England and nowhere else Boyarin attributes to the particular cultural and historical conditions relating to the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 and the growth of the English judicial system throughout the thirteenth century. Miri Rubin and others have noted that English Miracles of the Virgin are marked by a pronounced anti-Semitism. The hermeneutical, or imagined, Jew is a familiar trope in English Marian miracles throughout the period, both pre- and post-expulsion, appearing in narratives such as the Jewish Boy of Bourges, the Blood on the Penitent Woman’s Hand, or the popular Theophilus legend. In all these tales, the Virgin acts as an intercessor to effect a miraculous cure, or rescue from the misguided or evil-doing of Jews, and often converts the Jew in the process.

In the Jewish Boy of Bourges, the Virgin saves a Jewish boy cast into flames by his father as punishment for taking Christian communion. While the father perishes in the same fire, both the boy and his mother are converted. In the Theophilus legend, Theophilus contracts his soul to the devil with the help of a Jewish sorcerer and then successfully prays for Mary’s help to undo the written contract. Boyarin argues that in medieval culture Jews, as keepers of records and accounts, were identified with writing and documents. Similarly Mary, as the bearer of the Word, was seen to have dominion over legalities, embodied in legal documents such as charters. Occupying ‘a liminal space between Judaism and Christianity’, Mary is well positioned to both intercede against Jews and convert them.

One of Boyarin’s main points is that the Mary that emerges from these English miracles is not always the familiar gentle and benevolent Virgin of mercy but a stern judge, a fierce and learned advocate able to battle demons and penetrate hell...