[10] In the eighth century, Moslems from Africa rapidly conquered most of Iberia. Over the succeeding seven hundred years, the Christian monarchies of Castile, Navarre, and Aragon slowly regained sovereignty over the peninsula, and by 1400 only the kingdom of Granada was under Moslem control. Castile's overall prosperity in the fifteenth century can be measured by the kingdom's expansion southward and overseas. For all but the front-line populations of central Andalusia, then, life in Castile was securely Christian. But it was not altogether peaceful. In the first half of the fifteenth century, the king of Navarre, allied with dissident Castilian nobles, made regular raids into New Castile, operating from forts near Guadalajara.

Individual Castilian monarchs had gained power and wealth in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and built royal fiefs governed by military orders in New Castile. Royal power was limited, however, by a small number of noble families who controlled vast, fragmented domains in the north and central parts of the kingdom. Other centers of wealth and authority included cities such as Segovia, under whose jurisdictions fell numerous surrounding villages; dioceses such as Toledo with substantial patrimonies; and certain monasteries such as Guadalupe with extensive landholdings and large flocks of sheep.

Wool was Castile's chief export, and its large transhumant flocks were administered by an association of herdsmen under royal protection. Some of the wool from the Mesta flocks was woven in Spain for local use, as was almost all of the wool from village flocks. Woolen cloth production in fifteenth-century Castile was widespread and decentralized. In almost all of the towns and villages where apparitions took place, there were sheep, shepherds, carders, and weavers.

The settlement type can still be seen in Castile's densely packed nuclear villages and towns. From figures in sixteenth [11] century records it would appear that in the fifteenth century most settlements north of Toledo and south of the Cantabrian mountains ranged from ten to sixty households. Those on the plains of New Castile, south of the Tagus River, were substantially larger, some of them essentially rural settlements with what for the time were urban-sized populations of 500-1,000 households.

The modern distinction between city and country is difficult to apply to fifteenth-century Castile. There were towns of 5,000 inhabitants that were farming communities; and there were smaller communities with large contingents of artisans that were much less agricultural. In many of the hamlets around Toledo, Segovia, and Cuenca, cloth production predominated; others specialized in tanning and carting. Certain rural towns served as headquarters for the large feudal families, with a small court, bureaucracy and archives, and perhaps a family-supported convent. It was in this kind of mini-city--Escalona (Toledo), Pastrana (Guadalajara)--that some of the unorthodox religious movements at the beginning of the sixteenth century were nurtured. The towns from which the military orders administered their territories, Uclés (Cuenca), Alcázar de San Juan (Toledo) and Daimiel (Ciudad Real), had a similar structure.

The most socially complex were the diocesan seats. Toledo, Valladolid, Segovia, and Burgos were the largest towns of central Castile, rich in industry and convents. On a second level would be the smaller commercial centers, also diocesan seats or vicarates, of León, Avila, Alcalá, Talavera, Cuenca, and Jaén, all with populations of from 10,000 to 15,000 persons.

The visions studied here took place in settlements representative of the region. Some occurred in the poorer hamlets in mountainous regions where sheepherding was a prime occupation (Navalagamella) or was combined with cloth production (Navas de San Antonio). Most of them, however, took place in the mixed economy of the richer farmlands, where livestock raising was combined with vineyards and grain fields. These ranged in size from small villages in the north (Santa Gadea, Escalona in Segovia, Cubas) to larger agro-towns in La Mancha (Quintanar de la Orden, Santa María de los Llanos, El [12] Toboso) where significant numbers of the population may have been engaged in cloth production, and two small diocesan cities--Jaén and León.

Although Jews are nowhere mentioned in the vision episodes, and certainly there is no hint that any of the seers were conversos, our view and interpretation of the visions are inevitably colored by the persecutions that were going on in the region. Antisemitic sentiment had slowly increased from the mid-thirteenth century on, and the Jewish quarters of Castile were assaulted in 1391. In the following years, Saint Vincent Ferrer and other mendicant preachers were responsible for the coercive conversion of Jews in Castile as well as Catalonia, but many were converts in name only. When some monarchs protected the converts, these privileges were resented. There was a popular movement against converso merchants in Toledo in 1449, and brutal persecution of crypto-Jews began in the 1470s, first with diocesan investigations, then in 1483 with the new Spanish Inquisition. Unconverted Jews were formally expelled in 1492, but persecution of converts continued through the eighteenth century.

From the documents referring to visions, we get glimpses of what the ordinary, sacramental, religious life of country people was like. Villages were generally coterminous with parishes. In some there were a number of clergy, in others simply a substitute placed by the titular priest, who lived in the city. In general the farther north on the central meseta, the more clergy relative to population. This rule of thumb applies today, in the sixteenth century, and probably held in the fifteenth century as well. ⁽¹⁾ Some of the largest towns of La Mancha had only one parish.

Formal religious practice of laypersons was probably similar to that today. The wife of a carder in Quintanar de la Orden in 1523, Francisca la Brava, was considered to be of average devoutness by her neighbors. She normally attended mass, except in bad weather or when she had to care for her children; she fasted half of the days of Lent (this may be above average), the vigils of feast days, and a few of the tempora (the days at the beginning of the four seasons). She confessed and received [13] communion once a year, and knew three prayers well: the Ave Maria, the Pater Noster, and her own bedtime prayer. All of the seers who were asked what prayers they knew, including not especially devout eight- and nine-year-old boys in Catalonia, knew the Ave and the Pater, but even a girl known for her devoutness knew little else.

Sacramental religion attracted only part of the people's religious attention. As in all of Christendom, Iberian villages and towns had their special places, times, and techniques for getting in touch with the saints. Each had a set of particular saints they were accustomed to call on for help, and who sometimes called on them.

This set of saints was usually a combination of specific local saints, who served as general protectors for the community, and specialized saints who were venerated widely because of their special expertise. The general protector might be a specific image of Mary or Saint Anne (like Our Lady of Batres) or the body or relic of a saint (like Saint Macarius, of Boadilla del Monte). Only rarely would it be the titular saint of the parish church. The specialized saints might include, in fifteenth-century Castile, Sebastian (for the plague), Quiteria (for rabies), Anthony the Abbot or Anthony of Padua (for livestock), and Blaise (for sickness). But each town would experiment with different helpers and different specialties, coming up with its own unique, provisional, pantheon.

If they were identified through images, the most powerful protector saints would most likely be venerated in shrines in the countryside. If they were identified through bodies or relics, they would be kept safe from theft in parish churches or monasteries. The rural shrines, most of which survive today, were situated in particularly striking locations: near holy springs; on the sites of old castles; in parish churches of abandoned towns; or at fords in rivers.

Mary was the most important saint in terms of the number of images and district or regional shrines. As the use of images spread through the West in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Mary's popularity as a helping saint gradually eclipsed most of the great healing shrines based on the bodies and relics of [14] martyrs, hermits, and holy bishops. First in cathedrals and monasteries, then in rural chapels, Marian shrines became the centers of practical religious devotion based on vows. The network of Marian shrines popular in present-day Spain was by and large in place by the end of the fifteenth century, except in Galicia, where the cult of other saints held out the longest and is still strong today.

Communities contacted their saints most in times of crisis. But the relations in crisis, if effective, would be transformed into annual, calendrical devotion. ⁽²⁾ For example, when a town feared the approach of the plague, it might vow to a saint that if the town was spared it would observe the saint's day. In 1575 most towns and villages in New Castile observed at least three or four of these specially vowed days. The vows were made solemnly by the government of the village, usually in public assembly, and often transcribed by notaries as a formal contract. Penalties for households who did not send a member to the saint's procession or persons who worked on the day, would be specified. By canon law such vows were binding on the village in perpetuity, unless dispensed by the bishop. In fact, from the early sixteenth century, if not before, the bishops of Castile dispensed these vows, but the villagers, responding to a higher law, generally observed them anyway, sometimes at the expense of the holy days ordered by Rome or the diocese.

Village relations with saints, then, were a series of obligations, many of them explicit and contractual, not unlike their obligations to secular lords. They involved the villagers' sacrifice of work time and offerings. They also involved the religious regulation of eating, often a combination of fasting on the saint's vigil and consumption of animal protein in public feasts, called caridades, on the saint's day or the day the saint helped them. These laws of consumption seem to be an extrapolation from Lenten fasting and Easter feasting, the honoring of a chosen saint's death and glorification.

Apparitions were one of the ways that new saints were brought into this system or devotions to old saints were revived. Community pantheons were always in a state of flux, with [15] saints losing or gaining popularity according to their efficacy and national and international fashion. Saints were brought in in other ways. The most common was probably trial and error: saints were asked for help serially and the one that worked gained in devotion. Another way was the propagation of devotion to a given saint by local holy people, whether hermits or preachers.

Some kinds of initiatives seemed to come from the saints themselves. Even without appearing, saints constantly communicated their availability and benevolent interest through the obscure language of signs. This language might involve what some people call coincidence: a striking portent on a given saint's day. Or it might be a striking miracle worked by a saint to whom no one was paying attention. Or the signs might be provoked, in the form of lotteries--seeing which saint's candle burned longest or which saint's name was drawn three times from a bag.

To the villagers, then, both communities and saints were reaching out to communicate with one another. By use of assorted petitionary procedures and the alert observation of the correspondences and conjunctions of abnormal events, times, and places, villagers continually contacted and identified their celestial advocates. Apparitions, of course, were an unequivocal solution to this problem. Frequently they not only showed who the saint was but also solved the difficult riddle of exactly what the saint wanted. For communities involved in a relentless series of epidemics and crop failures, this was a matter of life and death.

Around the most venerated images and places in the countryside oral traditions formed that explained why a given image or place was powerful and helpful. These local traditions or legends would have been known by village visionaries. The local legends of Catalonia and Castile shared a basic pattern and are most easily discussed together. Unfortunately they were not recorded systematically until the seventeenth century in Catalonia and the sixteenth century in New Castile.

From 1651 to 1653 a Dominican from Girona, Narciso Camós, [16] personally visited all of the major Marian shrines in Catalonia. In addition to describing each shrine image in detail and listing the towns that annually visited the shrine, he carefully noted the story told about each shrine's origin. His book devotes separate chapters to each of 182 different shrines, largely located in isolated chapels and convents. In addition he listed 420 parish churches, 83 additional convents, and 333 additional chapels dedicated to Mary. His survey was published in 1657; its most recent edition was in 1949. ⁽³⁾

What were the shrine legends when Camós made his survey? First of all (and this encourages trust in his reporting) about a quarter of the shrines (45 out of 182) had no legends. Pious Camós "supposed" that the origin of these shrines was miraculous, but unlike some of the chroniclers of Castile, he did not make up legends. For the 137 shrines for which he gave legends, all but twelve of the stories fall into one of two categories--the miraculous discovery of images (111 cases); and apparitions (14 cases). In six hybrid cases, an apparition led to the discovery of the statue.

The Catalan discovery legends essentially follow the Monte Gargano pattern. Through the mediation of male domestic animals, especially oxen or bulls, a herdsman is alerted to the presence of an image in a wild location: underground or in a cave, in a tree or some wild plant, or in a spring. The herdsman or the priest and townspeople try to take the image to the parish church, but it returns by itself to its hiding place, and eventually a chapel is built for it there. The accompanying tabulation indicates the frequency of each step in this process, among the 117 finding legends.

Statistics compiled from legends reported by Narciso Camós in Jardín de María, a survey of 182 shrines made 1651-1653 in the dioceses of Tarragona (22), Barcelona (30), Girona (19), Tortosa (9), Lleida (12), Urgell (33), Vie (15), Elna (15), Solsona (15), and the Priories of Ager and Meya (7). There is little significant difference in the distribution of legend types or motifs among the different dioceses.
 

[17] LEGEND TYPES OF THE 182 SHRINES

117 Discovery of image

14 Apparition without discovery of an image

6 Other origin

45 No legend given

 

OF THE 117 IMAGES DISCOVERED

95 Human intermediary indicated

22 Human intermediary not indicated

62 Animal indicated location

15 Other signs

40 No signs given

 

OF THE 95 HUMAN INTERMEDIARIES
67 Male herders	1 charcoaler
10 Female herders	1 hermit
4 plowmen	1 slave
4 noble hunters	1 villager
2 female woodcutters	1 peasant couple
1 male woodcutter	1 noble couple
1 carter

 

	young	old	total
male	8	73	81
female	10	2	12
couples	0	2	2
	18	77	95

 

IN THE 62 LEGENDS IN WHICH ANIMALS INDICATED THE STATUE LOCATION
50 Male animals	57 Domestic animals
2 Female animals	2 Wild animals
10 Sex not indicated	3 "Animals"
34 Oxen	3 Dogs and prey
15 Bulls	2 Crows
1 Bull and cow	3 "Animals"
1 Bull and ram
1 Sheep
1 Lamb
1 Goat

 

[18] OF THE 88 OF THE 117 DISCOVERY LEGENDS IN WHICH THE IMAGE LOCATION WAS SPECIFIED
Natural sites: 80	Quasi-societal sites: 8
32 Cave or underground	2 Buried in vineyard
17 Tree	1 In buried chapel
13 Spring	1 Grave in church
7 Plant	1 Fallen house
4 Hilltop	1 Well
3 Other	1 Well in field
	1 Garden
	*but note: 6 of these are underground, and the house was abandoned

 

IN 36 OF THE DISCOVERIES OF IMAGES THE HOLY SITE WAS RECONFIRMED

32 By the image returning to the site

3 By the image becoming too heavy to move

1 By an alternate chapel collapsing

When one considers that these images mediate between the local society and the forces of nature (both in terms of weather, insect devastation, and disease, and the world behind the real world, the world of birth and death), then the legends of their [19] discoveries are explicable. The images of the mother with child, symbol of the creative power of nature within the human body itself, are embedded in the countryside. But not just anywhere. They are located at entry points in nature for matter from other worlds. Trees and mountain tops are connections to the sky; caves and springs connections to an underworld. The shrine images, which serve to transmit the human energy of love, prayer, promise, and gift, and return the energy of nature or God in the form of consolation, grace, and miracle, are discovered in the wild world at logical places for supplication and propitiation of the outside forces.

The intermediaries that locate the images and inform the society are themselves half-wild and half-domestic. Most of the statues are found by animals. But in only five of sixty cases is the animal wild. Three of those five exceptions are wild animals (rabbits and deer) that are followed by domestic animals (dogs), which are in turn leading hunters. Domestic animals that frequent the wilds are a part of nature built into culture. Bulls are perhaps the wildest and least controllable of domestic animals. In households without bulls, oxen, used for plowing, would be the wildest.

Stephen Sharbrough has analyzed the symbolic meaning of bulls in the cult of mother goddesses, particularly the Matronae, in pre-Christian Europe, and believes these Catalan legends hark back to the earlier beliefs. The special relationship that Christian culture created for the bull (at the manger) as in the Apocryphal Gospel of Saint Matthew, he points out, "would be recognized when Christianity moved into regions where the bull held a traditional symbolic role." ⁽⁴⁾

The bull is an appropriate intermediary between culture and nature; so too is the herdsman. Uncultivated monte abounds in all but the richest areas of Spain. It bears a heavy cognitive charge as wilderness, a kind of spatial equivalent to darkness and night. Few people have occasion to enter it--woodcutters, hermits, hunters, charcoal burners, and, most of all, the herders. The herders are the society's interface with nature and know its ways best. They are the most "wild" of the people.

Why are the animals that find the statues, and the people [20] who find the animals, males? While the image that actually works the transformations of culture and nature is female, we cannot forget that it represents divinity. It is not a woman. The intermediary between it and the culture is male, down to the animals, as are most intermediaries between societies in Mediterranean culture. ⁽⁵⁾ Only twelve of the many finders are women, and of these, ten are girls, not women. The proportion is reversed for men--overwhelmingly adult, not boys. The less "womanly" the seers, the more they are likely to be accepted as intermediaries with the sacred. Hence girls more than women, boys more than girls, and men more than boys.

Once the image has been found, the society tries to appropriate it, as if it were a relic that needed to be protected in the parish church. The image refuses. From the shepherd's pouch, from locked chests, from the village church, the image returns to its site in the countryside. Generally if the villagers try to build its shrine away from the difficult place where it was found, it rejects that also. On the Cantabrian coast, from Guipúzcoa to Asturias, this rejection takes the form of the nocturnal moving of construction materials to the discovery site. In France the construction collapses overnight (of this there is one case in Catalonia, in French Cerdegna). The dominant pattern in Catalonia and central Spain is the return of the image.

These returns implicitly instruct the people that in order to deal with nature they must go to it. I believe what was partly involved was a paganization (from pagus, country) of Christianity--a kind of encoded recapitulation of the process by which rural pre-Christian notions of a sacred landscape reasserted themselves over an initially cathedral- and parish-church-centered religion.

Consider the difference between the scenarios of the discovery of saints' bodies and the discovery of holy statues. Both were ways communities obtained protectors. But the relics were usually found in settled areas, often urban graveyards, or perhaps removed from other churches or monasteries. And that, sociologically, is where they stayed. Because relics were mobile, they could be kept at hand, in society. The physical presence of once-human saints provides a society with links to its own [21] moral heritage. In the first centuries of Christianity, as Peter Brown has shown, the cult of saints' bodies was a radical break from pre-Christian religion, whose heroes, once dead, peopled another world. ⁽⁶⁾

The legends of discoveries of statues, although in some ways they resemble the earlier inventio of saints, perform an altogether different task, one appropriate for rural society. ⁽⁷⁾ They serve to explicate, not the society's relation to its history and the Christian world, but rather its relations with nature, and provide a valid intermediary or ambassador. The return of the image to its natural setting is the image saying, "No. I am not a relic; think again. Holy people you can move; I am showing you a holy place. You must face me there."

The preponderance of underground locations for these Marian statues, in particular, supports the notion of Mary's role as successor to mother goddesses dealing with fertility. In the thirteenth century when this transformation was taking place, Alfonso el Sabio, or the theologians around him, made this point at some length in Law 43 of the Setenario--"About how those who worshipped the earth, really meant to worship Saint Mary, if they understood it well." He draws the parallel between the earth that bears fruit and Mary who bore Jesus. His focus was on the fruit, Jesus, just as the Romanesque images Camós described show Mary presenting Jesus, and Jesus with the power. In that theology Mary was the ground from which the good things and the power sprung. The emphasis on the child-God on Mary's lap did not last for long. Mary became the central figure in these shrines. The legends of the discovery of statues in the earth and their worship in caves was a concrete connection between Mary and the earth that matched the symbolic connection made by the author of the Setenario. ⁽⁸⁾

With few exceptions the stories of discoveries of images were reported by Camós as taking place in a remote and unidentified past. Eduard Junyent, canon-archivist of Vie, believed the legends were formed in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, although there is little real proof. ⁽⁹⁾ The legends of Montserrat and Nuria, which include episodes of the discovery of images, existed in the fifteenth century at least. There is a good chance that the [22] legends in Camós already existed when the first documented apparitions took place.

A few of the Catalan discovery legends are combinations of findings and apparitions. Except for the fact that they ultimately involve finding images, they are very similar to the apparitions we can document. Most occurred to single shepherd girls, others to a carter whose wagon became mired and to charcoal burners. The signs that made them believable were the curing of crippled hands, three cases of hands fixed to cheeks, and the talking of a mute girl. The fact that these apparitions involve the finding of statues indicates that they, like the other discoveries, are probably legendary and not historical episodes. If they were "real" findings, there would not have to be an elaborate physical proof, as in an apparition; and if they were "real" apparitions, there would be no statue to be found.

The hybrid legends of apparition-findings suggest that "real" apparitions both in Castile and Catalonia ultimately served the same purpose as the finding legends; they were charters for relations between the village and the natural world. The seers, like the legendary discoverers of statues, were privileged intermediaries who introduced a people to its God, its holy place, and its holy times.

Camós reported fourteen cases of apparitions proper. Three were apparitions to people in battle against the Moors, a motif common in reconquest and Crusade chronicles; three were apparitions of preexisting images in the course of miracles (1348 and 1598, both plague years, and 1620). Two of the others, apparently legendary, were heavenly matins processions similar to the cases of Santa Gadea and Jaén (Our Lady of the Cinta, Tortosa, and Our Lady of Puiglagulla, Villaleóns); and the remaining six, studied below in Chapter Two, were historical apparitions.

Castilian shrine legends were similar to those of Catalonia. Unfortunately in Castile a systematic survey of legends was never taken. The earliest collective source, and the only one uncontaminated by the forgeries of false chroniclers in the seventeenth century, is the responses sent by villages to royal historians in the 1570s. This survey of historical, social, and [23] geographical information covered only New Castile, the area of south-central Spain between the Sierra de Guadarrama and the Sierra Morena. ⁽¹⁰⁾ About 500 villages from this region replied, and about twenty-five of them sent in legends, which were not specifically asked for.

About half of the stories the villages sent in described the discovery of images. As in Catalonia, the discoverers (when mentioned) were men (shepherds, knights, plowmen). Although no oxen or bulls were mentioned, other domestic animals (a dog, horses) played a role. The sites, like those of Catalonia, were outside villages in the realm of nature--underground, in caves, by springs, or in trees. In several legends the image returned to the place where it was found. This pattern applied to other female saints--Anne, Bridget, and Mary the Egyptian, as well as to Mary.

Fifteen apparitions or apparition-discoveries were mentioned in the village reports. ⁽¹¹⁾ Mary appeared in most of the visions, and Saints Blaise, Gregory, Lucy, and Vincent each appeared in one village. In several cases the legend was only vestigial:

They say that Our Lady appeared there [San Pablo, Toledo; Iniesta, Cuenca; etc.]

They say that Our Lady appeared to a shepherd [Almona-cid de Toledo]

It is believed that [Saint Gregory] appeared to a good woman [Fuenlabrada, Madrid]
 

 . . . when a man was plowing on the site Saint Blaise appeared to him; and they say that he told him to plow no more, but rather that they should build a chapel there dedicated to him. [Cubas, Madrid]

The Virgin herself appeared there and ordered the priest and the people of Hontova to build her a chapel where it is now and call it Santa María de los Llanos. [Hontova, Guadalajara]

 [24] . . . and there is also a chapel to Lady Saint Lucy, about which there is a notarized document which says that the glorious saint appeared some time ago to a woman twice and told her to inform and affirm to the town authorities to go to a certain place that she pointed out and dig there, and that they would find a spring, and on the site they should build a chapel called Saint Lucy. The woman reported it to the authorities, and they went where she said and dug down and soon found a spring, and built the chapel there. [Ventas con Peña Aguilera, Toledo]

The boy and his father went to the chancellery (of the diocese of Toledo?) in Ciudad Real and told the story. But when the authorities went to the site, they found nothing, and so they beat the boy and hung him from a tree. The Virgin saw his plight "from the sky" and quickly came down to release him. The boy called the authorities back and pointed out to them both the candles and the footprints left by the Virgin. They believed him and built the chapel. The boy became a priest and was eventually buried in the shrine.

The people of Daimiel gave a vision as the origin of another chapel as well.

 It is said as a certainty that the chapel of Our Lady of Peace was built in the years that there was a great plague in this town, so that by 1507 [e.g. the last great plague year before the questionnaire] it was already built. It was founded in the following manner. A girl named Ana Hernández (later the wife of a citizen of this town named [25] Pero Sánchez Mohíno) was watching some of her father's grain on Saint Barnabas's day, while they were running bulls in town. Our Lady appeared to her to say in town that they should build a chapel there and call it Our Lady of Peace, for then the people would stop dying. The girl replied that they would not believe her; and Our Lady told her that they should dig a well there and they would find a colored tile inside, and by those signs they would believe. The girl told it in town, and the well was dug that is near the shrine at the Puerta del Sol, and they did find the tile. And so the chapel was built, and all this is general knowledge.

On the other hand, I would hesitate to say that "real" visions were common. Most of the apparition stories both in Castile and Catalonia were given as mere traditions ("se dice . . . ") without mention of date or documentation. Their numbers are small to begin with, and doubtless many of them, like the discoveries of statues, were myths. My guess is that real apparitional episodes that led to ongoing devotions occurred in the historical memory of one in a hundred villages in both regions.

The cases presented below, thus, are accounts of unusual phenomena for the seers and for the towns in which the apparitions took place. Scholars have been misled, I think by monastic literature, into seeing the late Middle Ages as a period in which the divine presence was so common it was banal. An analyst of French Christmas plays written by priests, in which shepherds react to the apparition of the Angel Gabriel "simply filled with great joy" extrapolates to the culture at large--"there is no emotion, or at least no doubt when confronted with the [26] supernatural"--to confirm Lucien Febvre's dictum, "for the men of the sixteenth century there was no mystery." ⁽¹²⁾Shepherds in a play are one thing. Real shepherds face to face in the fields with the supernatural were something else. For the people who had these visions, they were not at all banal. They experienced terror and awe as well as joy, and doubt as well.

Legends become banal by repetition and replication. But when they suddenly become incarnate in real events, when they are experienced by neighbors or countrymen, the well-known mythic referents heighten rather than dampen emotion. This happens to even casual participants in rituals and dramas. How much more so when persons are surprised by a real epiphany.

Precisely because these visions were so out of the ordinary-- something on the order of an earthquake or a volcanic eruption--they were documented, and the documents were preserved and recopied over the years.

The two oldest apparitions for which documents are known are more similar to each other than to any of the later cases. The first supposedly took place in 1399, the second in 1430. Santa Gadea del Cid is a small village near the border of Álava in the present-day province of Burgos. There a shepherd boy claimed before priests, village authorities, townspeople, and notaries that he and his companion saw the Virgin Mary. The earliest extant transcription is a large parchment in the National Historical Archive in Madrid made sometime after 1471. Since of all the cases I have studied, it is the most allegorical, and since it may have served at some time to buttress the shrine's claims on and independence from the monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, one must entertain the possibility that the apparition story was concocted years after it supposedly took place. On balance I tend to think not, but readers can form their own opinions by reading it in its entirety.

seers: Pedro, son of Yñigo Garda de Arbe
    ]uan, son of Juan de Enzinas
place: Santa Gadea del Cid (Burgos)

1) Tuesday, March 25, 1399 Pedro and ]uan found a honey tree while tending sheep,

2) Wednesday [March 26], they returned late at night to gather the honey and wax, and saw a bright lady and a procession.

3) Thursday [March 27], Pedro alone saw Mary, who explained the previous vision and gave him instructions for the town.

4) Sunday night [Easter, March 30], Mary appeared with monks and had Pedro beaten for not delivering her message. The neighbors were aroused by Pedro's cries, and he asked to have a town meeting convened, where he told his story.

The notarized version of his testimony was made Monday, April 20, 1399.

In my translations of documents I have divided them into sentences and paragraphs, modernized the spelling of proper names and added quotation marks. I have also attempted to mitigate the legalese, cutting back on repetitions and transforming the adjective dicho ("said") into "that," "the," or omitting it entirely. For the sake of clarity I have occasionally capitalized pronouns referring to Mary, and for the sake of brevity I have sometimes omitted preliminary and final matter of a legal nature, which can be read in the Spanish texts in the appendices.

This is a copy of testimony taken in the town of Santa Gadea as written on parchment and signed by a notary public.
 

[28] In Santa Gadea, Sunday, April 20, in the year of the birth of our saviour Jesus Christ 1399. (14) This day in the church of Saint Peter of the town of Santa Gadea in the presence of Ruy Martines and Juan Pérez de Río, parish priests of the church; the other clergy and cabildo; the alcalde Diego García de Arbolancha; the procurador; the governors; the council of the town gathered by ringing the bell; in my presence, Juan Martínes of Santa Gadea, scrivener and notary public for our lord the King; and the witnesses whose names are written at the end of this testimony; there appeared a youth from this town named Pedro, the son of Yñigo García de Arbe, a citizen of this town.

He said that on the day of Saint Mary of March of this present year he was watching his father's sheep with Juan, the son of Juan de Enzinas, in the jurisdiction of this town near a church called Sant Millán. In an oak tree in the cemetery of the church they found a hive of bees, and through an opening in the trunk they saw much honey and wax. They agreed that on Wednesday of Holy Week, once their flock was stabled in town and their parents had gone to the matins ceremony, they would come to gather the honey and wax from the tree.

When the day came they set out to do it. When they went to the oak and began to take out the honey and wax, they saw many people with white garments gathered around a very big hawthorn tree, holding three lights that lit up everyone quite clearly. And they saw a lady on top of the hawthorn tree who shone brighter than the sun, so they could not look at her without being blinded. And then they heard a voice from the people there calling out, "Come to matins (Venit a la tiniebras)"; and at this call there appeared from the direction of Santa María de Guinicio a great number of people as if in a procession in white garments; and most of them wore red garments with white stripes on top, and many other colors. They carried in their hands branches like palms and two torches that lit up the entire procession as if it were daytime. This procession [29] came to join the people around the lady; and the brightness went up as far as the sky; and around her were three torches like big candles, so powerful they lit up all of the landscape; and it seemed that they went up as far as the sky. And they heard singing, like priests chanting the hours, and frightened by the voices they stopped gathering their honey and fled toward town. When they reached the flat place that is halfway, they looked back and saw all the lights join in one; and the singing went up to the heavens, so much that they did not dare go back.

The following Thursday Pedro was keeping the sheep of his father, Yñigo García de Arbe, near the same spot in the village territory. Suddenly there appeared to him a lady so resplendent that he could not look at her directly, but only in parts. She told him he should tell of his vision to the parish priests, clergy, and council of Santa Gadea. And that people everywhere should know that she whom he had seen on the hawthorn tree was the Virgin Mary glorified in person; and the people he had seen around her were the angels of heaven, that very pure company. And that they should know that her coming was willed by her precious son, the redeemer of the human race. And that at the time of the destruction of Spain there had been a town at that place called Montañana la Yerma and a church in my name in which, and in whose cemetery, refugees from said town of Montañana la Yerma were forced to take shelter from a great onslaught of infidels. In the church and cemetery they were surrounded and taken by force of arms; and because they would not convert to their religion, they were all martyred by beheading, and the entire church and cemetery and its surroundings were bathed in the blood of the glorious martyrs.

And since the memory of this mystery was dying, at the constant and assiduous urging of the martyrs and virgins who perished there long ago and at their supplication, my glorious son, redeemer of the human race, had to give in to their prayers. It was his will that I come glorified in person with the angels to celebrate the office of matins of [30] Holy Week and that those glorious souls be present with me to visit the bodies that on a day like this one they had left behind.

Just as God the Father came to Moses in the briarbush, which was not consumed by fire for the good of his people, so I was sent in the hawthorn for the good of the souls and bodies of the faithful of the human race. You will find that the hawthorn is not burned or damaged in any way; it will serve as medicine for the diseases that people have here[?]. The voice you heard calling to matins was that of the Angel Saint Michael. Just as he was present in that place to receive the souls of the glorious martyrs and take them to glory at the time of their martyrdom, so his was the voice that called them into being to celebrate that solemn office, and our lord saw fit that they should respond quickly in the form of a very glorious procession, as you saw. One of the two torches they carried signified the crown of holy martyrdom, and the other the virginity of the many virgin girls who had perished there. The other three torches you saw around me signified the three persons of the father, the son, and the holy spirit. The voices you heard were the sweet voices of the angels who performed the office. And when at the end of the ceremony the torches were consumed in one it signified the unity with which we all went up to glory, each to his established seat and place.

I order you to explain that this place is holy and occupied by the many relics of the bodies that perished here by martyrdom. I also order you to say that it is the will of my glorious son that a monastery and church of the order of Saint Benedict be built to revive the memory of this secret. You must say that all the people who come or send their help or alms to build the church and monastery and support the monks who will live in it will have remission of their sins. Their souls will be in the company of the said martyrs, and their bodies and property will be helped and protected whenever they commend themselves with great devotion to me. In memory of my apparition in this hawthorn tree [whoever] carries a depiction of my apparition [31] on his person will be freed from the power of the devil, and the devil will be powerless to harm him when he sees my emblem. Also, if carried with great devotion, it will ward off pestilence and all disease. I also order you to tell the parish priests, clergy, alcalde, procurador, and governors of the town of Santa Gadea gathered in council that, if they want their town and its people to prosper and their souls to grow in grace, they should immediately clean out the weeds and brush in and around the church where you had the apparition. Let them know that just as the harshness and wildness of the place has led to anger and thefts, so it will become a place of refreshment for the body and health for the soul. If they want to have their just desires met, they should begin to build the church and the monastery. As long as they do so, and they put their devotion into practice, things will improve for them and for all the towns and people wherever they are from.

I order you to keep on declaring this publicly to the parish priests, clergy, alcaldes, and governors of the council of the town of Santa Gadea and to all the districts and regions for the remainder of the short time you have to live. You must take as your name Pedro de Buena Ventura (Peter of Good Fortune), for truly you deserve it. And you must tell your companion Juan that he should soon take up the arms of the knights of the blessed virgin Saint Catherine, for he will die in them. His end will come nine days after he arrives at the grave of Saint Catherine from Jerusalem. I order you to make this known at once. Do not delay out of timidity, or else in my presence you will be punished as you will see. And with this she disappeared.

Out of timidity and fear he would not be believed, Pedro did not mention the apparition to anybody. The following Sunday night at the hour of the second cock crow, when Pedro was in bed near that of his father, the Virgin Mary came to it in the form that he had seen her the previous Thursday, and she brought with her two torches and two men dressed as monks. One of them took him by the arm and pulled him out of bed, and the other took his belt and [32] struck him many blows and wounds. Neighbors heard his loud cries and got up, especially the alcalde Diego García de Arbolancha and his household. With others of the neighborhood they called out loudly at the doors of Yñigo Garcia's house. No one answered them, and because of Pedro's cries, they knocked down the doors of Yñigo Garcia's house. When they went up the stairs, they saw the house was as bright as at noonday, but the brightness ended when they got to the top. With the candles that the women carried they found Pedro lying in shock (muy fatigado) with many whip marks on the floor of a room.

At this point Yñigo García, his wife, and the other people in the house were roused. [Yñigo] angrily demanded what they wanted in his house at such an hour and in such a way. Diego García de Arbolancha replied that they had come to help the youth because he had been treated with great cruelty. The father replied that nothing of the kind had ever taken place in his house. Then Pedro spoke up and said that neither his father nor anyone else in the house was responsible and asked them, and in particular Diego García de Arbolancha in his capacity as alcalde, to order the parish priests and clergy and governors and council to gather in the church, and that he himself be carried there so he could declare what had happened. When the sun came up the mayor did this, and after the entire town had gathered Pedro was brought in. They all saw the welts and injuries, and he himself told them all that has been told above.

I the scrivener bear witness that I have seen the marks and wounds on Pedro and heard from his own mouth all the testimony given.

A bull of indulgences obtained in 1404 from the Avignon pope, Benedict XIII, implicitly supports the apparition story, for it states that pilgrims were especially numerous on what would [33] have been the anniversaries of the visions; ". . . it is believed by the faithful that many noteworthy miracles are being performed, and every year a multitude of faithful Christians gather out of devotion on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of Holy Week." (15)

The Virgin had not merely asked for a shrine; she wanted a Benedictine monastery. The chief promoter of a monastery was a priest, Ruy Martines, listed as present when Pedro gave his testimony. In 1406 he secured an agreement with the prior of the powerful Benedictine monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, located about seventy km. to the south. San Millán would cede property in villages surrounding Santa Gadea to the new monastery, and the prior of Santa Gadea would sit in the San Millán chapter. The Santa Gadea priests then secured papal permission to found the monastery. Benedict XIII's bull, dated 1406, mentions the "maravillas" and "virtudes" that have already taken place at the chapel, and grants indulgences to those who help build the monastery and maintain the monks. (16)

When the priests came back to San Millán with papal approval, the San Millán prior went back on his word; the dispute was arbitrated in 1410 by the prior of another monastery, San Juan de Obarenes, in favor of the Santa Gadea priests. In the documents of this dispute, there is no mention of an apparition, although the chapel is described as "recently founded." If the apparition did, in fact, take place, it was not considered something that would sway the prior of San Millán in a legal dispute.

In sum, a monastery was set up within a few years of the supposed apparition after marvels and miracles had taken place on the site, by a priest listed as present at the telling of the vision. Pilgrims were coming especially on the anniversaries of the apparition days. The earliest extant version of the apparition document was made some time after 1471.

Whether it is a true vision or a pious forgery, the apparition story is rich in mythic references. There is the obvious parallel to the drama of Holy Week. The shepherds are named Pedro and Juan, Peter and John, the two most beloved apostles. Pedro, by not telling his story, denies his lord, and after the second rooster crow on Sunday morning, which is Easter, he is forced [34] to confess. But this is a revised version of the Passion, one appropriate to late medieval Europe. It is Mary, not Christ, whom Peter denies. The drama of rejecting and then accepting the epiphany of Mary and the martyrs is played out over Holy Week. The establishment of a new shrine with local protectors is a kind of replication of Christ's rejection and his eventual triumph on the Cross.This kind of modified replication is found in many of the earlier shrine legends. Statues were supposedly found by oxen or shepherds after strange lights and music showed the way. All of these items parallel the story of the birth of Christ; and, indeed, these are generally statues of Mary holding the Christ-child. But it is Mary herself who is referred to as being found, at least as the stories were told from the sixteenth century on. The gospel was replayed in local mythology with Mary, not Christ, at the center. Each village becomes a Nazareth.

Allegorically, Pedro is not only one of the shepherds to whom the angels announced the birth of Christ and Peter the Apostle who denies his God, he is also Moses, to whom God appeared in the burning bush.

Mary tells Pedro that his friend Juan should take up the arms of Saint Catherine, and that he would die within nine days of arriving at her grave from Jerusalem. The alleged relics of Saint Catherine in the Sinai desert are in a monastery built by the Emperor Justinian on the site of the burning bush, at the foot of the mountain where Moses received the tablets of the law. This monastery was dedicated to Mary until the early fourteenth century, when it became known as Saint Catherine's. In the fifteenth century the memory of the previous Marian dedication was still alive to the pilgrims who came from Western Europe. (17)

A ninth- or tenth-century icon at the shrine appears to show Mary surrounded by the burning bush holding the Christ-child, who presumably represents the God speaking to Moses in the verses of Exodus. (18) By the fourteenth century, there was also a legend of a separate apparition of Mary to the monks. (19) The apparition at Santa Gadea borrows aspects of the apparition of Mary, and the reference to the burning bush of the shrine in the Sinai.[35] Again, as with the Passion and the Nativity, there has been a transformation. In the burning bush God speaks to Moses; and in the earliest iconographic representations Mary merely presents the Christ-child, who presumably speaks. But our apparition text makes no mention of a child. Mary refers to her son as the one who makes decisions, but she speaks for him, and she alone appears to Pedro and Juan, another instance of the Marianization of biblical patterns.

The symbolism of the hawthorn (the earliest blooming tree) as the burning bush, and the use of the biblical story as a pattern for medieval legends of apparitions of Mary was common in France. The great Gothic church of Notre Dame de 1'Epine, outside of Châlons-sur-Marne, is one of the most prominent shrines of France. It was built at the same time that the shrine of Santa Gadea came into being--the first decade of the fifteenth century. E. Misset has shown that the French shrine was constructed by Canons Regular of Saint Augustine of Saint Victor, possibly because their foundation was ratified there. Hugh of Saint Victor, Richard of Saint Victor, and Adam of Saint Victor all devoted attention to the symbolism of the hawthorn in relation to Mary. For Hugh of Saint Victor she was the flower blooming out of the thorns of the Jewish race; in a later formulation the bush that burns but is not consumed is the perpetual virginity of Mary before, during, and after giving birth to Jesus. (20)

Notre Dame de 1'Épine has a legend remarkably similar to that of Santa Maria del Espino. On March 24, 1400 (virtually the same day, a year later), two shepherd boys saw Mary on a brightly lit tree. They fainted; when they awoke they found a statue in the tree. Villagers, drawn by the light, came in procession. Misset speculates convincingly that the legend, first mentioned in 1633, arose from a misinterpretation of an engraving and a stained glass window, which showed Moses in two poses before the burning bush. The misinterpretation was that it was not Moses twice, but two shepherds. (21) As recent iconographic evidence from the Sinai suggests, the image of Mary in the hawthorn or burning bush may not be a metaphorical invention of twelfth-century theologians, but rather [36] an emblem of Marian devotion at the shrine to the burning bush in the Sinai, which the theologians later explicated. The Santa Gadea story, although it is late, points that way.

The Spanish story existed at least a century before the French legend of Notre Dame de 1'Épine was published and may have informed it. Could the Spanish story also be a misinterpretation of iconography? Obviously not. If the apparition document is untrue, then it was a deliberate forgery, one in which care was taken to have the visions coincide with the dates on which pilgrims arrived as early as 1404, and to include the name of the shrine's chief promoter as a witness. The Santa Gadea document with its explicit reference to the shrine of Saint Catherine indicates at the very least that there was more conscious use of imitative apparitions in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, possibly based on travelers' reports from the Sinai. One wonders whether a shepherd boy could have been so well informed about what was a very remote shrine. But the replication of apparitions such as those of Fatima and Lourdes today by children 8 to 13 years of age should alert us to the possibility of imaginative assimilation of legends by children in earlier times.

Another source for the Espino story is the kind of vision that led to the founding of monasteries. One of the earliest of the genre is the vision of Mary with handmaidens seen by a shepherd on the site of Evesham Abbey. The shepherd informed Bishop Egwin, who prayed, went and looked, and was blessed by the Virgin. The apparitions supposedly took place in 709, and the story was probably written sometime in the same century. (22) In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the monks of Saint Catherine's told pilgrims of an apparition of Mary there. When a chapel (not the main monastery) was going to be moved from one spot on the mountain to another where there would be more food and fewer fleas and lice, Mary appeared to assure the monks there would be no more pests and send them two camel-loads of food. (23) Stories such as these were part of the culture of fourteenth-century Europe and would have been heard as exempla in sermons.

The Santa Gadea apparition is a creative combination of two kinds of legends--the Marian apparition, in this case ultimately [37] derived from the apparition of God to Moses in the burning bush, and the invention of the bodies of saints. Although the former takes precedence, the latter--the "invention" of the martyrs of the abandoned parish church--is also very much present in Pedro's story, and points us back to the forerunner of the Spanish Marian legends and apparitions.The invention of the bodies of saints is best exemplified in Spain by that of Saint James of Compostela in the ninth century. Such discoveries, which answered the need of bishoprics and towns for sacred relics and local sacred protectors, and which channeled peasants' promises and devotions into urban coffers, were frequent in Spain as late as the thirteenth century. (There was a new outbreak in Andalusia in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.) The inventions were often preceded by some of the same signs that occur in the Santa Gadea vision and which continue in the later, purely Marian apparitions, such as lights and celestial music.

According to the Siete Partidas, a comprehensive codification of civil and canon law compiled under the direction of Alfonso X of Castile around 1248, miraculous shrines based on discoveries of relics were being founded then, also. (24)

 Some men fraudulently discover or build altars in fields or in towns, saying that there are relics of certain saints in those places and pretending that they perform miracles, and, for this reason, people from many places are induced to go there as on a pilgrimage, in order to take something away from them; and there are others who influenced by dreams or empty phantoms which appear to them, erect altars and pretend to discover them in the above named localities.

If relics could be located by visions or dreams, so could statues and crucifixes. As we will see, this kind of legend was part of the common culture of the late medieval period. The miraculous finding of statues, as at Montserrat, Guadalupe, Peña de Francia, Nuria, virtually all of the great Marian shrines of late medieval Spain, are based on a simple switch in the previous scenario from the finding of saints' bodies to the finding of images. If these stories were legendary, they in turn inspired or informed the way other statues were "discovered."

Such a case, near Nieva (Segovia), may have occurred shortly before the Santa Gadea visions, for there are certain disquieting resemblances. In these early visions it is difficult to tell legends from real episodes. For Santa Gadea there is a document that may or may not be legitimate. For the apparition/discovery of Mary near Nieva, no document exists. There, a shepherd named Pedro supposedly had a revelation around 1390 to tell the bishop of Segovia to look for a statue of Mary hidden underground. When the statue was eventually found, the shepherd was known, like the Pedro of Santa Gadea, as Pedro de Buenaventura. Which story came first?

The shrine of Santa María la Real de Nieva definitely existed first. The original bulls of the Avignon pope Clement VII that permitted its founding and granted indulgences for persons contributing to it are dated February 25, 1393. Like the 1404 bull for Santa Gadea of Benedict XIII, they mention an influx of pilgrims to the site, in this case because of miracles worked not only by the Virgin Mary but also by Saint Anne. The site was donated by Queen Catalina to the Dominicans in 1399, and they administered it as a monastery shrine and parish until the nineteenth century. (26)

Alonso de Venero, writing around 1550, said the church was [39] built "at the intercession of the image of the Virgin Mary that was found in the same place." (27) The apparition story may have been considerably elaborated after 1564, when the body of the lucky shepherd was rediscovered intact in the church. So it is impossible to say which Pedro de Buenaventura existed (as a person or as a legendary invention) first. Both were supposed to have ended their lives in service to the shrine they were instrumental in founding.

The shrine of Santa Maria del Espino of Santa Gadea is supposed to have started with an apparition, pure and simple. The story for Nieva includes in addition the finding of a statue and thus is much closer to the archetypal Castilian legend of the time, that of Guadalupe.

In 1399 Santa Gadea del Cid was no longer threatened by Moors. They had not been there for 300 years. It was, however, harrassed by bandits precisely from isolated buildings like the abandoned church in the countryside that was the site of the apparition. Doubtless it had also been threatened by the plague. The apparitions of Mary addressed these needs. The hawthorn would cure illnesses; a depiction of the apparition would be protection from the devil. But there was a condition. The abandoned church in the countryside was messy symbolically and spiritually as well as overgrown with brush and a social nuisance. In more ways than one, it had to be cleaned up.

Churches were places where pieces of saints were kept. The villagers, spiritual as well as physical heirs of abandoned communities in their jurisdiction, were responsible for spiritual obligations such as corporately contracted promises. A church that was once sacred had been desecrated. Were there also any obligations the living did not know about? What of obligations to the dead, masses for their souls. A parish church is also the site of a graveyard. Abandon a parish church and one abandons the dead.

The extent to which people in Spanish villages observed obligations to abandoned parish churches is evident in the 1575-1580 relaciones topográficas of Philip II; village after village reports processions to isolated churches in the countryside that were once the parish churches of villages abandoned because of [40] plague or drought. Even today, many isolated shrines are remembered as having once been parish churches, although by and large there is much less sense of corporate duty to distant ancestors and heavenly helpers.

Whether or not the village of Montañana la Yerma was overrun by Moors, thus, such a story had a clear physical and spiritual referent in the minds of the people of Santa Gadea: the abandoned church of San Millán. If the village council cleaned out the weeds and brush from the church their town would prosper and their souls grow in grace.

If the devil was the enemy once the Moors were far away, the Moors remained as an historic "other." They were perhaps a present enemy as well, for men from all over Castile were periodically called south to do battle until 1492. Santa Gadea itself came to bear the name of Castile's most famous warrior, El Cid.

The threat of the Moors was a live one in Jaén, 650 km. to the south of Santa Gadea in northern Andalusia. There, on the night of June 10-11, 1430, two men and two women saw a ghostly procession, similar to that of Santa Gadea. Two days later they recounted what they saw to the vicar general of the diocese, and the original document of their testimony that he had drawn up is in the archive of the parish church of San Ildefonso. The text was first published in 1639, when new marvels in nearby Arjona and Baeza seemed to threaten Jaén's supremacy in miracles. (28)

In 1430 Jaén was near enough to the Moslem-Christian frontier that Moorish raids occasionally came up to the walls of the city. (29) The residents who did not live within the inner walls of the city lived in constant fear of attack. The vision took place in a suburb, and was related to those fears. As with the apparition of Santa Gadea, the procession of Jaén was dense with symbolism; but in contrast to the earlier vision, at Jaén Mary gave no explication.

On Tuesday, June 13,1430 the four seers "put their hands on the cross and swore in the hand of the judge by God, Saint Mary, the sign of the cross that they physically touched, and the holy gospels wherever they might be" to tell the entire truth. Juan Rodríguez de Villalpando first questioned informally the seer who had the most complete view of the procession, Pedro, son of Juan Sánchez. Then he took formal testimony from:

1) Pedro, son of Juan Sánchez
2) Juan, son of Usenda Gómez
3) María Sánchez, wife of the shepherd Pero Fernández
4) Juana Fernández, wife of the shepherd Aparicio Martínez

TESTIMONY OF JUAN

Juan, son of Usenda Gómez, resident in Jaén of the parish of San Bartolomé, a witness received by the judge regarding the above matter, said under oath that last Saturday night, June 10 of the present year, at what seemed to him to be midnight, when he was sleeping in the district beyond the walls near San Ildefonso in some houses belonging to Alfonso García with three others in a bed, in the middle next to Juan, the miller's son, who was on the side by the door, this witness awoke and saw that there was a light in the house as if from a candle, and thought it was daylight. Then he heard dogs barking--there were seven hunting dogs outside the house--and many other small and big dogs who sounded far away. This witness thought it was already day since there was so much light, and he arose in his underclothes and opened the door a little, staying inside the house and looking out with his head between the door and the wall.[42] He saw five crosses come one after another as is the custom in processions. The crosses were like those of Jaén, all white, and were carried by five clean-shaven youths. At the end of the procession of the crosses went a lady dressed and wrapped in white clothes and a kind of mantle, and it appeared to him from her shape that she was in a bed, or on a dais or a large chair that appeared to be of silver, and that she was half a cubit taller than everyone else, but nobody carried the lady, who walked very slowly. From this lady issued so much brightness that she shone as the sun shines at its zenith on a clear day, so that the entire street could be seen. This lady wore behind her a train as much as three arm-lengths long and carried on her right arm a small baby about a year old, which to him appeared very beautiful, dressed all in white, and on her head she wore something white.

No one was nearer to the lady than the length of her train. After her it seemed that there came priests on both sides, as in a procession; in the middle of the street there was no one except for the priests on both sides as in a procession. There were about ten priests--he knew they were priests because they were tonsured and prayed as they walked--but he did not understand a word of what they were saying. After this procession of priests there followed a hundred persons, armed and dressed all in white. Their weapons could be heard, and they seemed to carry lances.

This witness did not wait until all had passed by, but quickly got inside and pulled his head in and closed the door behind him. But he did see the last of the people in the street and that no more people were coming. He closed the door well and tried to wake up Juan, who was in bed, but he could not. And he thought about it and called Pedro, son of Juan Sánchez, and said to him, "Pedro, see if you can figure out what is going on, for there are some people dressed in white and a lady going by in the street." And Pedro got up and put on his nightshirt and went into the yard. This witness put on his clothes and lay down on [43] a bench in the houses. At first he sat, thinking about what he had seen, and then he lay down. For a while he stayed awake, then he fell asleep, so when Pedro went back to bed he did not see him.Asked if when he saw those people he took pleasure or fright, he said that when he saw the crosses he thought they were in a procession; and after he saw the people in white he saw that the brightness was not the brightness of day, but rather of another kind. He was thereby in doubt and had neither pleasure nor fear, except that when he first went outside the brightness seemed to warm him, although not as much as the sun.

Asked when he talked about it afterwards, he said that when he got up in the morning he told the woman of the house and the others there, and that Pedro was there and said he had seen the same thing.

Pedro, son of Juan Sánchez, housekeeper of the wife of Ruy Díaz de Torres, resident of Jaén in the parish of San Ildefonso in the district beyond the walls of the very noble city of Jaén, a witness received by the judge regarding the matter described above, said under oath when asked the appropriate questions that last Saturday, June 10 of the present year, not long before the clock struck midnight, this witness was sleeping in a bed in the house of Alfonso García, which is in the same parish near the church of San Ildefonso, and that Juan, son of Usenda Gómez, citizen of this city, normally slept with him. This witness woke up and saw that the street door of the compound of houses was open and that Juan came in quickly and slammed and barred the door, threw himself down on a bench as if frightened, and in that position said to this witness, "Pedro, get up and look at all the people." And this witness said, "Where are they going?" And Juan told him, "They are going up there toward San Ildefonso."

This witness then got up in his nightshirt, went out into the yard, and by way of a low wall got out on a higher [44] wall of the houses, from which he could see very well the entire street and the back of the chapel of the church of San Ildefonso. When he looked over the wall he saw going toward the church on the upper street seven crosses, one behind another, which were like the crosses of the city, carried by seven men dressed all in white from head to toe. On both sides of the crosses walked about twenty persons similarly dressed in white to their feet as in a procession, praying.

At the end of this procession went a lady taller than the other people and dressed in white garments with a train as long as 2 1/2 or 3 arm-lengths. She walked alone behind the procession, and this witness did not see her face, but it seemed to him that so much brilliance went out from her face that it shone brighter than the sun. And everything was so bright that the houses of the neighborhood could be seen, the tiles of the roofs, the church, and everything as if it were noontime. It was so bright that it blinded this witness as if or worse than if he looked straight at the sun. This lady carried in her arms a small baby dressed in the same way in white, and he did not see anything else the baby was wearing, and she carried it in her hand with her right arm only.

Close behind the lady's train came about three hundred people, men and women, the women near her and the men behind, all dressed in white and grouped together, not lined up as in a procession. After these people came about a hundred armed men all in white. Their weapons could be heard one against another (that is how he knew they were armed), and it seemed to him they carried something like lances on their shoulders. All these people who went behind the lady walked silently and very slowly, so that when this witness got on top of the wall the procession had not yet reached the church. There would be a distance of the throw of a fist-sized stone from the house to the chapel of the church.

Against the back outer wall of the chapel he saw that a great altar as high as a lance had been erected, and it shone [45] very brightly and was very dignified and elegant, with white and red hangings on the entire wall above it. He saw that about twenty persons dressed in white were singing, and their voices seemed weak, like those of the sick after they recover from sickness. This witness did not see the faces of any of these people, but at the altar he saw no one dressed like a priest. He did not even see anyone go to the altar, or anyone tall enough. When the people reached the top of the rise near the chapel, the lady and all the other people sat down, and it seemed to him that so many people were there that the hill was covered, and that it could accommodate more than (30) persons. When they arrived, this witness could no longer bear to look at such a bright light, and he lay down on the wall and did not look at the people, although the wall and its environs were well lit by the light emanating from the lady.

After a while when his eyes were rested and he recovered his sight he looked again at the lady and the other people. He saw she was seated, wearing clothes that shone as if she was a silver image, and the other people were seated. Those who were singing were standing on both sides of the altar. The lady was seated near the procession, and all the other people were close around behind her. This witness, after he had seen the people seated in that way and his eyes had recovered their sight, began to get down from the wall, and got down the way he had gotten up. He would have gotten down before, but he could not see very well, and so he was afraid to. He was on the wall for about a half-hour; when he climbed up, the clocks were striking twelve, as he said, and when they finished ringing, the church of Santa María and some of the other churches rang for matins. And when these people were coming he heard many dogs barking behind them.

When asked if he was frightened or pleased or what he felt when he saw these people, he said that, when he first [46] saw the people, he felt pleasure in his heart as he would in seeing anyone, and that as soon as he saw the soldiers he was frightened. He thinks his pleasure was because every night in this district outside the walls people fear the Moors, and as soon as he saw the procession, the people, and the crosses, he was relieved, for if those people were safe from the Moors, so was everybody else outside the walls. But when he saw the soldiers he became afraid and unsure. When he came down he went to sleep, said nothing to anyone, and slept almost until dawn. When daylight carne he went out to see whether the people had left any footprints or traces, and he found none.Asked when he told about it and where he first mentioned it, he said that on his return from looking in the cemetery for footprints, before entering the house [he was present as] Juan was speaking with Miguel Fernández de Pegalajar about what had happened, saying how he had seen five crosses go by and other people who went in a procession. At that point this witness declared, "I saw it all." Juan's face was very yellow when he got up in the morning, and this witness said to him, "Why are you so yellow?" And Juan said to him, "From the fright I got last night." And they asked him on the following Sunday what he had seen, and he told what he had seen.

He also said that the previous Wednesday, about midnight, he woke up and heard a voice tell him, "Do not sleep and you will see good things." And that Thursday after falling asleep he awoke and heard a similar voice; Friday he heard nothing; and Saturday he saw what he has recounted.
 

María Sánchez, wife of Pero Fernández, shepherd, citizen of Jaén in the parish of San Ildefonso, a witness received by the judge regarding the above matter, said under oath that last Saturday night, June 10 of the present year, she was in the houses of her compound on the main street that leads to San Ildefonso in the district beyond the walls [47] of this city. Between eleven and twelve, when she got up to get water for her son who was sick, she saw a great light inside her houses, which seemed to be shining like gold in sunlight. The witness thought it was lightning and was afraid and got down on her knees on the ground and looked out into the street through a wide crack between the doors of her compound and saw that a lady was passing by in the street dressed in white clothes [decorated] with bright white flowers that stood out in the cloth. It seemed to her that the mantle the lady was wearing was lined with silks the color of sunflowers. She was carrying a baby boy on her right arm held by the left, and the child was wrapped in a cloth of white silk. She was more than a cubit taller than the other persons, and the baby appeared to be about four months old and well fed.

On her right was a man who appeared to be like the image [or depiction] of Saint Ildefonsus in the altar of the church of San Ildefonso. He was wearing a stole around his neck and carried a book in his hand, and he wore the stole as priests do to say mass and carried a maniple in his hand with the book with a white cover open in both hands as if he was holding it in front of [the lady] so she could see it. On the other side of the lady walked a woman like a beata, a little behind, and she did not know who she was.

All the brilliance issued forth from the lady's face; and on seeing the lady and the brilliance she suddenly took fright. Afterward she realized that it was the Virgin Saint Mary and she saw a crown [or halo] on the lady's head, as portrayed in the altar of the church. She recognized her because of what she has said, and because she was very similar to the image of Our Lady in the altar. Saint Ildefonsus also had a crown [or halo] on his head and a tonsure wide and open like a monk's, as portrayed in the church. After the lady, came people all dressed in white. She saw no crosses or candles, just the brilliance, and after [the lady] had gone by, it was as bright in her houses and the street as when [the lady] was going by.

Because she was alone, she did not dare open the door [48] to see more, but instead went back to her room, for there was no man with her, just two children, one about eight years old and another about four. The lady and the other people went as if in a procession from the church of San Ildefonso toward the city. When she was in her room she was much comforted, and then she heard the clock strike twelve, and when it finished the bells rang for matins. And this witness said that at the time she heard singing, but it did not appear to her to be singing of this world, and when she heard it she was very relieved and comforted.

Juana Fernández, wife of Aparicio Martínez, shepherd citizen in the parish of San Ildefonso, a witness received by the judge regarding the matter described above, said under oath that she was in her houses, which are in the parish of San Ildefonso in front of the cemetery, last Saturday night, June 10 of the present year, after the first sleep but before the rooster called. She got up to go into the yard of her houses because she had diarrhea (pasyon en las tripas) and had gotten up three times already.

In these circumstances she saw a sudden great brilliance near the back of the chapel of the church of San Ildefonso. At first she thought it was a lightning bolt, but then decided it could not be because the light was so strong, resplendent, and continuous. As she pondered this, she saw between the doors of her compound a lady coming with many other people from the direction of the pottery works up the street toward the chapel. It appeared that the lady carried in her arms at her breast an object, but she could not see what it was; and it seemed to her that the brilliance shone forth from her face and the object. They came as in a procession over the muladar (31) near the chapel, and behind [the lady] came other people dressed in white. It seemed that some of them carried staves upright in their hands, but because the sill of the doors to her compound is [49] low, she could not see if they were crosses or scepters or what they were. This brilliance did not seem like that of the sun, the moon, or candles, but rather was a brilliance she had never seen.

When this witness saw it she fell down, paralyzed with fright, and began to tremble all over. And because she was blinded she turned toward the wall with her back to the light and stayed there a while. Then she got up and felt her way along the wall to her room. The brilliance continued. Before, when she was looking, it appeared that the lady stopped behind the chapel, and hence she lost sight of her, because she could not see that from her house, but the brilliance remained. And this witness out of fear went to bed with her husband, and a child was with him, and she moved it and lay down trembling beside her husband.

Asked if the people went in a procession or in a group, she said that, because she was afraid, she did not notice, except that many people came dressed in white. Closest to the lady came two persons, although she could not tell if they were men or women, one on one side, one on the other. And the lady appeared to be taller than the others. Soon afterwards she heard matins ringing. It appeared to her that the lady and the other people came very slowly in procession.

Three of the viewers specified that the blinding light issued from the lady's face, but for all of them the light itself was what first attracted their attention. Two of them, Juan and Juana, said that the light was not one they had ever known and was unlike that of the sun or the moon. The women at first thought it could be lightning, but rejected the idea as the light was [50] continuous. The light remained after the lady had passed, and Juan said he felt warmed by it.In terms of the direction and time of the procession, three were in agreement. Pedro, Juan, and Juana all saw the procession go up the hill to pause at the open space behind San Ildefonso and heard the bells ring for midnight and matins. But Maria Sánchez, who lived on the street joining the city and San Ildefonso, saw the procession going by her house in the opposite direction--away from the church toward the city, before midnight struck.

In terms of the composition of the procession, Pedro and Juan, on the one hand, and Maria and Juana, on the other, appear to have partially coordinated their stories, but the overall picture is quite confused. Pedro and Juan both saw men dressed in white carrying crosses, a lady, priests who were praying, and armed men, and heard dogs barking. Pedro saw seven crosses, Juan five; for Pedro a total of twenty priests walked on both sides of the crosses in front of the lady, for Juan the crosses went in front of the lady, but the priests (only ten of them) followed her. Both of them saw that the lady wore a train about three arm-lengths long, but only Pedro saw that she was followed by a large group of people, women first, then men. Both saw about 100 armed men bringing up the rear, and both were frightened.

Pedro specifically said that no one was near the lady. Both Maria and Juana placed two figures near her. Juana could not see who they were, but Maria identified one as Saint Ildefonsus and the other as a beata, or nun. (32) Maria saw a group of people following Mary, and Juana saw men carrying pole-like objects, which could have been crosses or lances.

Discrepancies like these are not important if our task is not to see whether Mary actually visited Jaén that night, but rather to understand what this story meant to the witnesses and townspeople. Certainly the discrepancies did not stop the people from eventually taking the whole matter very seriously. Our Lady of the Capilla is now the patroness of the city, and from the sixteenth century on she has been turned to for help in major disasters. (33) To the witnesses, however, the meaning of their visions was not so clear. Three of them thought they were [51] seeing some sort of religious activity, identifying priests at prayer. Pedro was the only one who saw an outdoor altar behind the church, but both he and Maria heard singing. Only Maria offered an explicit identification of the lady as Mary and pointed the way to the meaning that the people of Jaén subsequently assigned to the episode. Her interpretation, however, was consistent with the testimony of the other witnesses.Maria saw the lady as Mary because she was like an image in the altar of the Church of San Ildefonso. The present image of Our Lady of the Capilla is almost always covered by a robe, but a 1950 monograph on the devotion includes a photograph of the image undressed. (34) The statue appears to be from the fourteenth century or early fifteenth century. Mary wears a gold robe with white daisies; she is standing and carrying a child. The back of the image is broken off, as if it had been part of a reredos and was removed. María Sánchez described white flowers on Mary's dress. Possibly, the present statue was once part of a reredos and was broken off, after the visions, to be venerated in a special chapel.

María Sánchez also claimed to recognize Saint Ildefonsus, the seventh-century bishop of Toledo noted for his Marian writings, walking next to Mary and showing her a book. She recognized him, too, from his image in the church. The combination of Mary and Ildefonsus inevitably leads to the early legend of Mary bestowing on Ildefonsus a chasuble. The story as told in the life of Ildefonsus by the monk Cixila in the ninth century is as follows: (35)

 For the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, Ildefonsus had composed a new missa, the seventh in number, and when he was going to the Church to celebrate the missa, preceded by the clergy with lighted torches, the portals of the church opened and a heavenly splendor shone round about them all. Whereupon the clergy dropped their lamps and fled; but Ildefonsus remained among the choirs of the Blessed. Then he saw the Heavenly Queen sitting on the ivory throne where he as bishop was accustomed to sit whenever he preached to the people. And she addressed [52] him with these words: "Hasten, loyal servant of God, to receive from my hand a gift I have brought you from the treasure of my Son; you may wear this vestment only on my feast days, and because you have remained in this life with the vesture of glory, in the life to come you shall enjoy with other servants of my Son the realm of glory."

Our witnesses, living as they did in the parish of San Ildefonso, appeared to know the story. Juan saw the lady traveling on her feet but also, strangely, on some kind of a platform, perhaps the throne in the legend. Pedro, who viewed the ceremony behind the church, saw an unearthly choir, an elaborate altar, and Mary seated on a throne. That what was involved in the matins ceremony was a heavenly, not an earthly choir was made clear both by Pedro (who thought the voices were weak like recently recovered sick people) and Maria (for whom "it did not appear to be singing of this world"). Pedro did not see Mary give the vestment to Saint Ildefonsus (would that be the cape lined with silks the colors of sunflowers Maria saw?); in fact he says the lady walked alone, hence without the saint altogether.

All in all, the visions seem to be informed in part by the legend, but they do not reproduce it. Instead, like the Santa Gadea story, they are inventive, using elements from the legend, together with elements from Jaén ceremonial, as the mind makes creative combinations from known elements when dreaming. Both Juan and Pedro remarked how the carrying of the crosses and the crosses themselves were similar to standard Jaén processions in which every cross would stand for a parish.

Such a visit would logically resemble two kinds of ceremonies [53] familiar to any resident of Jaén. Undoubtedly, like other Iberian cities of the time, Jaén held daytime petitionary processions to invoke divine assistance, whether for health, rain, or victory. Barcelona processions in 1425 and 1427, for instance, also included crosses of parishes, clergy dressed in white singing the litany, major relics or statues, and, bringing up the rear, the people. The second kind is the city's solemn reception of royalty. Such an entrance would have taken the form of a Corpus procession and would have included stops at specially decorated sites, like the improvised altar behind San Ildefonso. (38)

The presence of armed men is another innovation in keeping with local conditions. Pedro saw them as protection for the procession, and the very fact they might be needed frightened him. But his own evidence that all were dressed in white might indicate that all in the procession belonged to the realm of the dead, the realm of heaven, and the soldiers might also be seen as martyrs who died in the crusades against the Moors, and who perhaps were buried in that cemetery, as with the martyrs of Santa Gadea. In this, the entire vision evokes the processions of souls of the dead said to be seen until recent times in Galicia.

Later interpreters saw the soldiers' presence and the apparition as a whole as a sign that Mary would protect the city in the future. This message of special Marian attention and protection, building on the legend of the Descent to Toledo and the liturgical customs of the city, would have been very welcome to a jumpy frontier city. Just as Mary came to Toledo to single out Ildefonsus for attention, and in the process honored the city itself, so Mary came to Jaén, perhaps introduced by Ildefonsus, to defend the city from Moors.

The city of Tortosa, at the mouth of the Ebro River, also has a tradition of an apparition that appears to derive from the legend of Saint Ildefonsus. There in the cathedral is preserved a holy belt, "la Santa Cinta," supposedly given by the Virgin to a holy priest at a midnight matins ceremony in 1178 (see Figure 5). There is no document for the apparition, and the story may well have been made up centuries later. The holy belt was there as early as 1354 and was used at that time for women in childbirth, like numerous "girdles" or "ceintures" [54] of Mary prized in towns in France, England, Italy, and Flanders. No mention of an apparition comes until a special prayer was approved for it in 1508. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the belt was taken to the queens of Spain as a holy aid in childbirth. (39) One wonders whether the belt might not originally have been a "mide"--a talisman-measurement of some place in the holy land of the kind ordinarily secured by Western pilgrims. The legend is more evidence for the popularity of the original miracle of Ildefonsus.

The apparitions of Santa Gadea and Jaén bear resemblances uncanny for places so far apart and matters of only local importance. Such resemblances, it turns out, are more the rule than the exception. If they appear uncanny, then perhaps our notions about rural ignorance or segmented cultural systems need revision. Both apparitions involve a procession that includes a lady clad in white who gives off a blinding light. The bedazzled seers have to cover their eyes or periodically look away. One seer has to feel her way with her hands along her wall to her room; another has to wait before he feels clearheaded enough to get down off a wall without falling. Seers in both places refer to the light as brighter than the sun.

Both processions are liturgical, take place at midnight, and end with a matins ceremony. In both, the saints and angels are doing things that priests or monks do, and both choirs sound unearthly. Both are outdoors in public, not private, space. Other heavenly matins processions were not uncommon in the Middle Ages. Thirty-three of the miracles mentioned by Caesarius of Heisterbach occur during matins, the office in which it is most difficult to stay awake, that which takes place at the hour of midnight. Although villages did observe matins during Holy Week, it was essentially a monastic ritual, and the motif of heavenly matins doubtless grows out of monastic tradition. This makes special sense for Santa Gadea, where the Virgin calls for a monastery.

The seers, too, are similar. Pedro and Juan are the names of seers in both, and in Jaén, as in Santa Gadea, Pedro is the main seer. In Jaén it is Pedro who reveals, virtually as an afterthought, that he received locutions warning him to stay awake to see [55] good things the third and second nights before the vision. Again there is a reminiscence of Peter, who three times was unable to stay awake in the Garden of Gethsemane. At Jaén it is Pedro who, of all the seers, has the most complete view of the procession. He alone gets a glimpse of the ceremony behind the church. His importance as chief seer is shown by the fact that the judge took him aside and questioned him first informally. In both cases, Pedro is the chosen one whose testimony gives impetus to the shrine or devotion, as Peter founded the Church. It is Pedro's account of the Jaén procession that is considered definitive by later historians. (40)

In keeping with the epoch, both apparitions have in the background as the enemy or the "other," the Moors. In later visions this "other" becomes Christian heretics, "reds," and finally, liberal clergy. Almost always, however, implicitly or explicitly, there is some "other" with an alternative system of belief, against which the seers and the community can affirm their faith in their own gods.

What features distinguish these two stories from later visions? The lady so intensely brilliant does not return to the peninsula until the apparition of Fatima in 1917. In later years there are no more supernatural processions. And by and large the visions get simpler. These two apparitions conform to the efflorescence of symbolism that is associated with the waning of the Middle Ages. In that of Santa Gadea, the symbolism is deciphered, and the Virgin gives Pedro a detailed explication of what he saw. That of Jaén is left for the people to figure out; there is no direct communication, aside from Pedro's premonitions. Both are complex signs, sacred riddles.

The Mary that appears in these two visions is not the benevolent friend of later visions. She is indeed benevolent, but as a hieratic mother goddess rather than a person. The face that sends forth light that blinds is a terrifying image of power. The Marian image is halfway between the enthroned God-mother of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the graceful standing lady of later years. Three of the Jaén visionaries see her walking, but taller by a forearm than everyone else, and Juan sees her paradoxically both walking and seated at the same time. Pedro, [56] who saw her walk, also saw her sit in a silver chair behind the church. At Santa Gadea, where she is (presumably seated) in the hawthorn tree, there are overtones of divinities of trees and pre-Christian cults, as with the fairies that Jeanne d'Arc knew about in a tree in her village. (41)

Perhaps the greatest shock to Catholics versed in the saccharine images of Mary of later centuries is the whipping of Pedro by monks in Santa Gadea, supervised by Mary herself. Punishment, in Catholic popular theology, was thought to be administered by God or Christ, but here is a very stern Mary indeed. It is true, she works through agents, and also that mothers of Santa Gadea may also have had their children punished; but the beating was bad enough to cause an uproar in the town, good evidence that it would not have been tolerated from any parent.

Nor was the beating without precedent in European religious legend. Bede says Saint Peter himself thrashed Bishop Laurence when he was going to abandon his see in England. In that case, as at Santa Gadea, the wounds served as proofs of divine intervention, for when Laurence showed his wounds to the king, the king was converted. Caesarius of Heisterbach, writing in the thirteenth century, told various stories--a nun was cured of her lust for a priest by a clip on the jaw from the Blessed Virgin, "a grievous disease requires harsh medicines"; a sexton was attacked by a cross in his bedroom; and a canon was kicked in the stomach by John the Baptist. The Libro de los exenplos, compiled 1400-1420, contains a story taken from Gregory the Great about the Lord appearing to a priest to give him a message for a saintly bishop. The priest did not dare approach the bishop, and finally during the third apparition the Lord severely whipped the priest, who thereupon went to the bishop, showed him his wounds, and delivered the message. (42)

These attacks are in keeping with a notion of divinity that inspired an awe akin to terror, with whom contact is more to be feared than desired. It is an early medieval notion, one that was changing even as the Spanish visions we describe took place. Divine assault and battery was rare in the late Middle Ages; [57] it occurs in none of the Spanish public visions I know of after Santa Gadea.

Subsequent apparitions of Mary have her seem and act like a human being. The seers do not know who she is until she tells them. She is kind, gentle, and very beautiful. In the Santa Gadea and Jaén testimony, beauty is not mentioned. Glory and power, high wattage, is more like it. The more human and humane apparitions follow shortly after. Is it a coincidence that these two more god-like visions occurred earlier? In any case, the change aptly represents the shift in the image of Mary so clear in the iconography of the late Gothic period.

The village of Cubas is about forty km. southwest of Madrid, just off the road to Toledo. In 1978 it was still beyond the area of urban expansion, with neither chalets nor apartment houses. Visitors who ask there for the convent of Santa María de la Cruz will be met with blank stares. When they explain what they want they are directed to "Santa Juana," a small convent lying in a depression a few hundred meters east of the town by a dirt road. The gently rolling fields around the town are still, as in 1449, used for grain and vines.

More is known about the apparitions in Cubas to Inés Martínez in 1449 than virtually any Spanish apparitional episode until the twentieth century. This is not because it is an important shrine now--it is not a shrine at all--but rather because a copy of the investigations of the visions and the affidavits taken of the subsequent miracle cures is still available. Although the convent was destroyed in the Civil War, the nuns were able to preserve a full transcription of the documents. (43)

In March 1449, Inés Martínez, called Inesica by her friends, was 12 1/2 years old. She was born August 3, 1436. She herself told the judges in the investigation that she normally said 150 Hail Marys and Our Fathers when keeping her pigs, and that [58] she knew two other prayers. The other witnesses confirmed that she was exceptionally devout. She first confessed at age six, and she confessed more often than the other children her age. She first received communion at about age nine. From about that time she had abstained from wine and fasted for half the days of Lent and all the days of Mary. Devoted to Mary, she often prayed at Mary's altar in the morning. If she heard the church bells ringing she went to the church "to see God," even if she had to interrupt a meal. The judges seemed to measure debauchery by behavior at weddings; unlike others her age, Inés rarely attended weddings, and, when she did, she did not dance or sing.

Inés's visions of Mary took place over seventeen days in March 1449. Mary appeared to her a total of six times, always in fields outside the village, as follows:

1) Monday, March 3: Inés was to tell the people to confess for an epidemic was on the way.
2) Tuesday, March 4, and
3) Friday, March 7: Mary pressed Inés to deliver the message.
4) Sunday, March 9: Inés was instructed by village men to ask Mary for a sign, and Mary pressed Inés's fingers into the sign of the cross.
5) Sunday, March 9, later: the climactic vision occurred. The village waited nearby in procession as Mary took a cross from Inés and planted it in the ground to mark a church site.

6) Wednesday, March 19: on her return, Inés had a final vision, in which the Virgin announced another sign.

On April 23 there opened an official enquiry ordered by the archbishop. I have translated below Inés's testimony on March 10, March 19, and April 23.

PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION BY TOWN AUTHORITIES, CUBAS, MARCH 10, 1449

In Cubas, town of the noble caballero Luis de la Cerda, March 10, 1449, in the church of San Andrés in the presence of us, notaries and public scriveners, and of the undersigned witnesses, there appeared Juan González, chaplain, assistant curate in the church; Rodrigo de Arévalo, commander and lieutenant for Señor Luis de la Cerda in his towns of Griñón and Cubas; Lope de Lorbes, commander of Piedrabuena; Juan González and Juan Ferrándes, alcaldes in the town; and a number of other citizens of Griñón and Cubas. They said that Inés (daughter of Alfonso Martínez, pigkeeper of the town, and Mari Sánchez his wife, citizens of Cubas), who was present, claimed that the Virgin Mary spoke to her, and that she witnessed certain things that the Lady Virgin Saint Mary had said to her and done. Because of this, today the clergy and councils of these towns and other neighboring towns made a general procession in honor and reverence of the Lady Virgin Saint Mary and had two masses said at her altar in accord with what Inés said she had ordered. Then the men named above told Inés to tell all she had seen and experienced in the past few days in the presence of us, the notaries and witnesses given below. What Inés said follows.

Inés said that on Monday, March 3 of this year, when she was watching pigs in the area known as Fuente Cecilia, about noon, she saw a very beautiful lady, who seemed to be dressed in cloth of gold, who came to her and said, "What are you doing here, carita?" And that Inés said, "I am watching these pigs." And she says the lady then asked why she fasted for the days of Saint Mary on Fridays. And she replied, because her parents told her to. And then she says that the lady said that she did well, and that she had little to fast this year. And then the lady ordered her to fast on the days on which they fall, that whoever fasted on the days on which they fell earned pardons of eighty thousand years. And she ordered her to tell all the people to confess and put their souls right, for they should know that a great epidemic of pain in the side (dolor de costado) would come, and rose-colored stones covered with blood, from which many people would die. And Inés said she asked the lady if from this epidemic she, her father, or her mother would die. And she says the lady answered it would be as God willed. And when the lady finished saying this, Inés saw her no more.

Inés said she did not dare tell anyone. And that the following Tuesday when she was walking with the pigs in the area known as Arroyo de Torrejón at noon, the lady came to her in the same way she appeared the day before and said, "Daughter, why did you not say what I ordered you to say yesterday?" And Inés said, "Because I did not dare say it for fear I would not be believed." And the lady said, "Pay attention: I order you to say it, and if they do not believe I will give you a sign so they will believe you." And then Inés says she asked the lady to tell her who she was. And she says the lady replied, "I will not tell you that now." And then she saw the lady no more. Inés says she told her father, her mother, and other people in Cubas.

And after this Inés said that on Friday, March 7, when she was watching her pigs in the area called el Prado Nuevo, near the town, the lady came to her for the third [62] time at the same hour, dressed as before, and asked whether she had said what she had ordered her to say. And Inés said yes, that she had told her father, her mother, and other people. And the lady told her to tell it and make it known to the priest and to all the people without fear or dread.

And Inés said that after this on Sunday, March 9, she went to herd the pigs in the area called La Ciroleda, and she says that when she was in the valley on the side of Ciroleda near the town, kneeling with her mouth on the ground offering her prayers to her and asking that the lady appear to her, the lady came to her in the form that she had appeared the other times and said, "Get up, daughter." And that she was frightened and got up at once. And the lady said to her, "Do not fear." And Inés then asked her who she was, and the lady replied, "I am the Virgin Mary." And that she came up to her and took Inés's right hand with the thumb and pressed it and left the hand with all the fingers pressed together and the thumb on top, making a cross, as she showed. All of us who were there saw it. And when her fingers were pressed together, Inés cried out, and the lady said to her, "Now go with this sign so they will believe you, for you will suffer this for their sake. Go to the church. You will arrive when they are coming out of mass. Show it to everybody, so they will believe what you say since you bring a sign."

Inés said she went to the town and the church and arrived when the priest was finishing mass, as the Lady Saint Mary had foretold. When she entered she knelt in front of the altar of the Virgin Mary and declared to the priest and people everything given above. Then the priest, alcaldes, regidores, and omes buenos, with great reverence to the Lady Virgin Mary who had manifested this miracle in Inés, all assembled in a barefoot procession, carrying with great devotion the crosses, lighted candles, and large wax tapers, together with Inés and all the children who could be found in the town. A cross of sticks was brought to put in the place where the lady had taken [Inés's] hand and made a sign out of it. When the procession was moving, beginning [63] to leave the threshing floors and enter the vineyards, Inés, who was in front with the children, turned and told Lope de Lorbes and Andrés Ferrándes, the regidores, who were keeping the children in line, to stop, for she heard the Lady Virgin Saint Mary calling her, saying twice, "Come here." Inés said she wanted to go and see what the Lady Virgin Saint Mary wanted. At that point Andrés Ferrándes, who was carrying the cross of sticks, gave it to Inés, and Inés went off with it. She said when she left the procession the Lady Virgin Mary came and went with her on [Inés's] right to the place where she had given Inés the sign. The Lady Virgin Mary said nothing until they reached the spot, and when they got there she took the cross in her hands and knelt against it. Then she got up and placed it sticking into the ground upright. And she ordered Inés to kneel facing the procession, which would come, and told her to hold the cross there until the procession came, and that they should build a church there called Saint Mary. And she instructed her that they should return with the procession to the town, and that Inés should spend that day and the night until today in the church of Cubas before the altar of the Virgin Mary with some innocent young children (criaturas inocentes}. And that they should say two masses to Saint Mary at her altar, and that they should put Inés beneath the gospels of the masses. And after the two masses they should take Inés to the church of Lady Saint Mary of Guadalupe, where she should remain for two days, and with her they should take four libras of wax to the Lady of Guadalupe. When they return, they should bring Inés to the place where the lady had taken her hand and made the sign. And that as soon as Inés prayed there, the sign would be undone. When she finished speaking she disappeared.

Inés's hand came unfixed at Guadalupe, not on her return, [64] and on March 21, two days after she came back, she was questioned once more before notaries public, this time by the titular priest of the parish, who was probably absent at the time of the first visions.

Subsequent to the above in the town of Cubas on March 21 of the same year, with Inés, a girl (moza niña) of twelve or thirteen years old, present with her hand loose and healthy as she demonstrated in the presence of us Juan González de Roa and Benito Ferrández, notaries, and the witnesses written below, Ferrnand Alonso, Racionero of the Church of Toledo and parish priest of the town of Cubas appeared before us. He asked the girl on her conscience, admonishing her greatly to speak the truth and not the contrary, if everything contained in the above document, which was repeated in its entirety, happened as it said. Inés said that as certain as God is true, everything had taken place the way she said, and she had understood it and said it as given above. Then Ferrnand Alonso asked how it was that she had said her hand was not to come unstuck from the sign until she returned from Guadalupe, and how or why did this not happen? Inés said she had certainly understood it that way, because when she was in Guadalupe, the Prior and friars and the alcalde, after they had examined and looked at her hand, had tried to open it, and they could not believe that she had not been born that way. They had put her in front of the main altar of the church of the monastery of Guadalupe and asked her if the lowest image on the altar of Guadalupe was, or was like, the [image or woman] that appeared to her. And Inés said it was not that one, or like that one. Then they showed her the image of Saint Mary that is higher up on the altar of Guadalupe, which is a small one. And Inés said it was that one for sure. And it was said to Inés that the small image is not covered with gold, nor has such a gleaming face as Inés had said. And Inés said that it certainly seemed very white to her, and covered with gold as she had [65] appeared to her here, and it was for certain the same. And that afterwards the monks, who had put Inés in a room, locked it from the outside, and the girl remained shut in there. And that afterwards (44) the monks came back with the mayor of the town and others. And when they entered where the girl was they told her to hold out her hand. When she raised her hand to show them, they found it well. And Ferrnand Alonso asked her if the Virgin or anything else appeared to her, or if they did anything to unstick it. Inés said that she saw nothing, and they applied no medicines, just that she found her hand loose without seeing or knowing how, and so they returned.

And when they came close to here, Inés says she went on ahead to pray in the place where the sign was given, and when she got to the spot and was praying the Lady Virgin appeared to her. And Inés said to her," Lady, your worship told me that my hand would not open until I returned here. Why did it not happen that way?" And she says that the Lady Virgin Mary told her, "You did not understand because of your haste to question me. That is why I sent you to my House of Guadalupe, so that when you went there it would come undone." Inés says she said, "Lady, may it please you to give another sign so they will believe me, for they do not wish to believe my message from you." And the lady said, "This I can well believe. But do not worry, daughter, for I will give them such a sign, that even if they want to they will not be able to believe, for blessed are those who saw it and believed it (45)," and at once she disappeared.

And this took place on her return from Guadalupe, which was last Wednesday, March 19, in the afternoon, when the Lady told her all that has been recounted this last time. Ferrnand Alonso asked her if the Lady Virgin[66] Saint Mary had said what sign she would give or when it would be. And Inés said she said nothing more, and that she, Inés, did not know what the Lady thought of doing.Ferrnand Alonso asked that an account of all this be given as a signed affidavit as often as asked for from us, Juan González and Benito Ferrándes, notaries. . . .

Both of the declarations were dispatched by the concejo of Cubas to Alfonso Carrillo, archbishop of Toledo. On April 7 he replied from Benavente giving the town permission to build the church and instructing the archpriests of Madrid and Illescas to document the matter more fully.

The new investigation was opened in Cubas on April 23, 1449, by the clerical investigators placing the archbishop's letter upon their heads and saying they would obey him. The Cubas priest presented the witnesses, Inés first of all. With her previous depositions in hand, they led her through her testimony about the four days of apparitions one by one and asked for additional details for each day. Translated below are their questions and her answers. The questions themselves reveal much about the meaning of apparitions in fifteenth-century culture.

Asked by the señores judges who was with Inés on Monday at the time she says the Lady Virgin Mary appeared.
Inés replied there was no one, but that she saw two shepherd boys who were watching sheep a crossbow shot away from her [ca. 450 yds.], Perico, son of Alfonso Ferrándes, and Pasqual, son of El Callejano.
Asked if she noticed whether the shepherd boys were looking toward the place
Inés said the lady was talking [67] she said that they were eating, but she did not notice if they were watching.
Asked if she was afraid of what she saw when the Virgin Mary went up to her,
she said that she was afraid when [the Virgin Mary]went away and she stopped seeing her.
Asked if she brought with her beautiful odors,
she said she did not smell anything.
Asked if the lady wore a crown on her head,
she said she did not see it.
Asked what she wore on her head, and what clothes she wore
she said that she saw her face was shining, and that she wore something like a skirt (saya), and an abrochada in front, and that it was white as snow, and a coif on her head.
Asked if the coif was white,
she said that no, that everything seemed like gold, the coif and the skirt.
Asked if she wore a belt,
she said she did not see it.
Asked if she wore jewels on her hands,
she said she did not see them, but that her hands were white as snow.
Asked if she wore clogs,
she said no, she wore golden slippers.
Asked if the slippers had points,
she said she thinks they were without points.
Asked if when the Virgin Mary left her and, as she says, she was afraid, she went over to the shepherd boys, or what she did,
she said she stayed there and lunched on bread and water.
Asked what she did for the rest of the day until evening,
she said she watched her pigs and again said one hundred and fifty Ave Marias with their Pater Nosters, which she was accustomed to say, and other prayers.
She was asked if she knew the Ave Maria and the Pater [68] Noster. And then the judges had her say them in front of them, and she said them simply (simplemente). Asked what other prayers she knew,
she said two others, which she repeated, and they were of good words and holy devotion, one to the Virgin Mary and the other almost the same as the Pater Noster.
And asked whether on that day she said anything to anyone of what she had seen,
she said that on her way back to Cubas with her pigs, she walked with the shepherd boys, and on the path she asked them if they had seen anything, and they said no. And that she asked them, "Didn't you see at noon today that woman who came to me when you were eating?" And they said, "No, why do you ask?" And she said, "A very beautiful woman came to me and asked me if I fasted on the days of Saint Mary. And I told her I did." And they said, "We didn't see anything; maybe it was a traveling prostitute." And she told them, "I do not know who it was," and they did not pay much attention and went off with their animals.
Asked about the second article in the deposition, that which Inés said that she saw the following Tuesday, in different ways to see if she changed the story she gave before,
Inés did not say anything differently, but repeated the very words contained in the deposition.
Asked by the judges what clothes the Virgin Mary wore on that Tuesday,
she said she saw her the same that day as the day before.
Asked if the Virgin Mary wore an overskirt [or train-- falda],
she said no, that the skirt (saya) was rounded. [The judges asked about the Friday apparitions and Inés repeated the substance of her earlier statements.]
Asked if she was afraid when she saw the lady,
she said that at first when she saw her she was afraid, [69] but as soon as she spoke she had no fear. And when she came up to her, she was afraid again.
Asked how far away from her the Virgin Mary was,
she said she was a little way off.
Asked if she was on foot or kneeling,
she said that both were standing.
Asked what time it was when she came that day,
she said it was about noon.
Asked if she had eaten that day,
she said no, because she fasted that day. [The judges asked about the Sunday apparitions and Inés repeated the substance of her earlier statements.]
Asked in addition by the judges if on that Sunday when she says the Virgin Mary called her and said, "Get up, daughter," if [Mary] came as she had seen her before,
she said yes.
Asked if she came with stockings or bare-legged,
she said she came bare-legged.
Asked if she then was more afraid of her than other times,
she said yes.
Asked if she said any other words besides those contained in the deposition she made,
Inés said that when she got up and said to the Virgin Mary, "Give me, Lady, a sign, because they do not believe me," the Lady replied, "I can well believe that."
Asked if when the Virgin Mary called her the first time,she saw her,
she said no.
Asked if the second time she called her, she saw her,
she said that then she saw her.
Asked if the Virgin Mary came in the path walking, or how did she see her,
she said that she saw her standing in the path where the cross is now erected.
Asked how far away she saw her,
she said the distance of the throw of a stone (tejo). And that the lady was standing still, and Inés went over to her.
[70] Asked if she walked with her,
she said when she got to the lady, then the lady beganto walk, and Inés with her.
Asked if by her walking or in her demeanor or form she appeared to be a woman,
she said yes.
Asked if she was afraid of her,
she said yes.
Asked if her voice was thick or fine,
she said it was very fine and beautiful.
Asked if she was dressed as other times,
she said yes.
Asked if when she went to the place where she planted the cross, she went quickly or slowly,
she said she did not go quickly, but rather slowly, yet they got there right away, and she does not know how they got there so soon.
Asked if she saw the lady leave footprints where she went,
she said no.
Asked if she saw her leave footprints where they arrived,
she said that where they arrived and the Virg