 Table of Contents (.pdf) | The Politics of Salvation: Gonzalo de Berceo’s Reinvention of the Marian Myth Year of publication: 2011 106 pages ISBN: 090223868x £17.00  Purchase this volume The mythology of the Virgin Mary is one of the most powerful and popular themes found in the literature of the Middle Ages. The miracles of the Virgin appear in a wide variety of texts written for a diverse audience. The focus of this book is the contradiction between rigid ideology and popular spirituality as demonstrated in one of the most famous collections of Marian miracle tales of the Spanish Middle Ages, Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora. This study demonstrates how this collection of miracle tales, often defined as merely didactic, actually speaks to a reformist agenda. The Milagros de Nuestra Señora, seemingly conservative in its support of the mythology of the Virgin Mary as an aid to the Church’s interests in making itself indispensable in the lives of the laity in thirteenth-century Spain, actually reveals lacunae in the Church’s didactic programme. By negotiating those spaces between the Church’s socio-economic, cultural, and political agendas and the desires and needs of the people, Berceo discloses covert mythologies that we could call counter-cultural. |
