THE LIBRARY OF IBERIAN RESOURCES ONLINE

Apparitions in Late Medieval
and Renaissance Spain

William A. Christian, Jr. 
Chapter Two: Late Medieval Apparitions in Catalonia

The Catalan Context
 

[111] The sacred ecology of Catalonia in the late medieval period was slightly different from that of New Castile. Reconquered earlier, it had a greater variety of divine helpers: more cults of local saints, more relics, more Mediterranean littoral devotions such as the Christ of Beyrouth. The fertile but mountainous terrain made for a more dispersed settlement pattern. This in turn increased the importance of district shrines, usually valley shrines, shared by a number of villages. In New Castile, only in the densely populated region of the Sagra and Maqueda do we see what for Catalonia was common everywhere, intricate networks of processions from different villages to common shrines. In New Castile district shrines brought together individuals from a wide area. In Catalonia they brought together whole communities from a smaller area.
 
In the mid-fifteenth century the major shrine, as now, was Montserrat. Located on a spectacular jagged outcrop in the center of the region, it was a very well-organized devotional establishment that attracted pilgrims from southern France, the Mediterranean islands, and even Italy. Montserrat and Guadalupe were the two poles of Iberian devotion.
 
Our Lady of Nuria, high in the Pyrenees, attracted devotees from the present-day provinces of Girona and Barcelona and what is now French Cerdegna as far north as Perpignan. The zone of devotion can be mapped from the many miracles in its miracle books. Many of those cured, or whose cures were considered worthy of note, were merchants, notaries, or officials of the cities of Barcelona, Girona, and Perpignan. (1)

Another shrine had only recently become popular, the Font de la Salut near Traiguera (Castelló de la Plana). There a statue of the Virgin Mary was supposedly found in a spring in 1438, [112] and shortly thereafter it had acquired papal and royal privileges and was a thriving center for cures (see Figure 1). (2)



 
Historically older, but perhaps slightly eclipsed by 1450, were the relics of local saints in the region's cathedrals. Saint Felix and Saint Narciso in Girona, Saint Eulalia in Barcelona, and Saint Candia in Tortosa were martyrs whose bodies were once accorded the greatest veneration.
 
Pilgrims from Catalonia occasionally went to shrines elsewhere. Catalans went to Rome and Jerusalem, and to the French shrines of Rocamadour, Saint Quiteria, and Our Lady of Puy. Communities in serious straits sent paid romeros to represent them with their petitions to Saint James of Compostela.
 
In central Castile, with the exception of Our Lady of the Cabeza in northern Andalusia, shrines were not located in the mountains, whether those of Toledo or the Sierra de Guadarrama. In Catalonia the dense population even in mountainous regions led to the crowning of many promontories with chapels, especially in the dioceses of Vic and Girona. Much of Catalan devotion is that of people of the plains and valleys going up to the mountains. There is little reverse flow; the shrines of the plains and the coast do not attract the mountain people.
 
Historically, Catalan holy places were probably more likely to have been consecrated by hermits. Montserrat began as a series of hermitages, and the first miracles were worked there quite possibly before there was even an image of Mary. Recent studies have demonstrated that many Catalan shrines exist near or on the sites of early medieval hermitages, many of them caves. This would be an alternate historical explanation for the isolated location of images with finding legends. (3) Much of Castile was still unsettled or unconquered in the tenth and eleventh centuries when eremitism was at its height. One of the most popular Catalan shrines, now as well as in the fifteenth century, is that dedicated to a local hermit, Sant Magí de la Brufaganya, near Santa Coloma de Queralt in the mountains of Tarragona. The shrine of Santa Afra in Girona is also popular. It is dedicated to a prostitute converted by Saint Narciso who supposedly lived as a hermitess until martyred by the Romans. This legendary story, reminiscent of that of Saint Mary the Egyptian, reflects [113] what for many Catalan shrines was a reality--an eremitic origin.
 
The population of Castile increased in the fifteenth century; that of Catalonia declined. If life in Castile was somewhat disordered, its economy was, on balance, healthy and its population thriving. Catalonia's decline has been partly explained by repeated waves of epidemics. As cities were decimated, villagers moved in, especially those heavily burdened by feudal duties, so that in rural areas emigration compounded the depopulation caused by the epidemics. (4) Pierre Vilar characterizes 1380-1420 as a time of economic difficulty; 1420-1440 as a time of relative stability; and 1440-1492, the period of the apparitions studied here, as a time of brutal crisis. (5)
 
On the one hand, whatever the differences between the two kingdoms, the possibility of epidemics was great enough in both to set a tone of constant anxiety, not only for the year-to-year survival of individuals and families but also for the survival of entire communities. No one would have forgotten that earlier plagues, especially that of 1348, wiped out thousands of villages across the peninsula.
 
On the other hand, the frequency and effect of the fifteenth-century epidemics seem to have been greater in Catalonia than in Castile. Certainly Catalonia was closer to the endemic sources in the Near East. In any case, although the Castilian visions involved the threat of epidemics, many of the Catalan visions took place while epidemics were in progress.
 
We know of one earlier supernatural response to the Black Death, high in the Pyrenees in the Valley of Arán. There in 1356 a crucifix in the church of Salardú, probably the same crucifix venerated there now, worked miracles. (6) Doubtless there were spates of miracles in other places, and probably other apparitions instructing people as to preventive or curative measures.
 
EL MIRACLE (LLEIDA), 1458

The first Catalan apparition for which there is documentary evidence is that of Our Lady of the Miracle, Santa María del [114] Miracle, near Riner (Lleida). It occurred in August 1458, in the midst of an epidemic of bubonic plague, to two young boys on the same day their father was helping to bury the child of neighbors. Within a week the chief seer, a boy about eight years old, had also died, but not before he told his story to a diocesan official. The apparition shares the iconographic motif of Mary with a cross with the visions of Inés at Cubas nine years earlier and Joana at Escalona thirty years later. As at Cubas, Mary appeared child-sized.
 
The setting for this apparition is a zone of dry piedmont in central Catalonia where large, semi-fortified farmhouses are dispersed over the countryside. The farmhouse of the seer, still called Cirosa, looks much the same now as it did five hundred years ago (see Figure 8). The hamlets of Riner and Sant Just d'Ardévol were also fortified, and are referred to in the documents as castells. It is a region in which banditry was prevalent, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was known for its conservative Carlism.
 
El Miracle is now an imposing shrine administered by Benedictines from Montserrat. It is about halfway between Cardona, a town wealthy from its salt mines, and Solsona, a market center that in 1592 became the seat of a diocese detached from Seu d'Urgell. El Miracle is one of the ten most popular shrines in Catalonia and has a large collection of votive paintings, some of which date from the sixteenth century (see Map 2).
 



 
*
Chronology

seers: Jaume and Celedoni, aged about 8 and 9, respectively, sons of Joan Cirosa and Constança, his wife.
place: near Riner (Lleida)
 
Thursday, August 3, 1458. There was plague in the area. 

Monday, August 7, Jaume came down with the plague.
Tuesday, August 8.  Thursday, August 10, Jaume died, and the rest of the family and the doctor made depositions.
 
Order of Testimony  On August 8, 1458, officials of the towns of Solsona and Riner asked Jaume Vilar, the representative in Solsona of the bishop of Urgell, to go with them to Riner to investigate "a great miracle." At the farm Cirosa Vilar questioned the child Jaume Cirosa under oath. (7)
 
JAUME CIROSA, AUGUST 8, 1458 Two days later, August 10, 1458, Joan Cirosa, the father of Jaume, testified that he spent the day of the visions helping out neighbors who had one daughter sick and another to be buried. He repeated the story of his boys' visions as they had told him. As he remembered it, the Virgin's message to Jaume was, "Tell your father and mother to tell the people to confess and do penance and make processions devoutly, otherwise it is not worth anything to them, and that if they do this, God will forgive them. You tell them that my son will make them believe, and that there will be neither small or big, four years or older, whom my son will not reap." At the end of his testimony Joan was asked and answered the following questions by the priest.
 
[119] JOAN CIROSA, AUGUST 10, 1458  
CONSTANÇA, WIFE OF JOAN CIROSA, AUGUST 10, 1458  
CELIDONI CIROSA, THE OLDER SON, AUGUST 10, 1458  [122] PERE DELS OTS, THE DOCTOR, AUGUST 10, 1458  Five persons testified: Joan Cirosa; Constanca, his wife; the chief visionary Jaume, Joan's younger son; Celedoni, the older son, both around ten years old; and Pere dels Ots, the doctor. Each boy's vision was recounted three times--by the boy, the father, and the mother. The different accounts coincided in substance, the parents remembering a few additional details from what their children told them previously.
 
The visions occurred at dusk on Thursday, August 3, 1458. Four days later, on Saturday, August 7, Jaume came down with the plague. The doctor received his locution to go to the child's bedside Sunday, August 8. Outside the house he met two neighbor women who thought the child's sickness was connected with his vision experience. Possibly it was the doctor who informed the officials of his hamlet and set the documentation process in motion. In any case, on the same day, August 8, the officials of the two nearest hamlets went to the priest, who came to take the sick child's declaration. On Tuesday the 10th, when they came back with witnesses from Solsona, they were too late. Jaume had died earlier in the day. They took declarations from the rest of the family and the doctor, and the older son, Celedoni, showed them the apparition site.
 
Finding the spirit when going after animals is in keeping with the discovery legends. Celedoni, who saw the child-Mary first, was going after mules; Jaume did not find it when he went to look; but when he went for sheep and was chasing a stray, he saw it.
 
The descriptions the witnesses gave of finding the child show they were aware of the significance of natural conjunctions of wildlife and landscape. They specify that the strange child was near the pool. Later they showed their parents the spot. When the mother, fearful, first went to look, she noted that a hare started up from near her feet. The Virgin went away through a live oak grove, beside some boulders. The doctor could not [124] move past a juniper tree and had his locution by a raboll, a scrub oak. All of these features of the landscape were carefully noted and declared, for children, parents, and doctor all seemed to realize that, from what they said, what was sacred in the landscape would be distinguished from what was profane. And they were right. A stone cross marks the apparition site close to the imposing Baroque shrine, and a small chapel was built where the child-Virgin was last seen, called the Chapel of the Disappearance.
 
The child told the older son her message, but he ran away and did not hear it. The mother was frightened. Of the unknown? Or of stories she had heard about velletas--fairies who could take the form of little girls with golden hair. Two Catalan folk tales reported in the twentieth century are about "the damsel with the golden hair." The younger son was not afraid and listened. He died, his sickness a confirmation of the vision for the women who met the doctor on his arrival.
 
Jaume did not run away from this bright child with the cross. He recognized the crucifix. He had never been to any town or village other than Riner, but there he had occasionally been to church and had seen the crucifix, or one like it, on the altar of Saint Sebastian. Perhaps he had seen it recently, for Sebastian was the protector against the plague. The family and the parish might well have been paying special attention to that altar. In any case, the crucifix presumably remained on the altar after the vision disappeared, a concrete reminder, an image equivalent to the images "found" in the legends. Thus, too, the crosses venerated by Mary in the visions of Cubas and Escalona also remained.
 
Is it coincidence that Celedoni and Jaume saw a God-girl on the day their father went to bury a neighbor's girl dead of the plague, a girl they must have known? One is reminded that Jeanne d'Arc's most frequent divine visitor was Saint Catherine, and Jeanne had had a sister named Catherine who had died.
 
The Virgin never explicitly identified herself as she did in the Castilian visions; but she did implicitly, by referring to "her son." There is no sense of incongruity that a child two or three years old should refer to a son. For this is not exactly a child.
 
[125] Throughout most of their testimony the boys refer to it as "la cosa," the thing. In addition, it had long hair like a woman.
 
In fact there was a scriptural basis for the appearance of Mary as a child who acted like a woman. According to the Apocryphal Gospels, Mary was a very mature three year old when she was taken to the temple to be reared by her parents--"and when she was three years old, she walked with a step so mature, she spoke so perfectly, and spent her time so assiduously in the praises of God, that all were astonished at her, and wondered; and she was not reckoned a young infant, but as it were a grown-up person of thirty years old." (8)
 
The message of this child-woman was not unlike that of the great missionaries of Catalonia, especially Saint Vincent Ferrer, who had been active in the district thirty years before: confession, conversion, and devout processions would earn God's help. Disbelief would lead to certain, terrible punishment. All people four and older would be harvested, an apt image for a child coming from a wheat harvest. Most of the Castilian apparitions ask for direct worship and veneration and the establishment of a shrine, the kind of concrete contact with a given saint in a given place characteristic of much of rural religion. Several of the Catalan apparitions, like this one, ask for more--for conversion and penance, for a public confession of guilt and reparations. Here there is no request for a shrine. The emphasis is upon the crucifix, and the solution to the plague is in the redemptive procedures of penance.
 
The Catalan legend most similar to the vision of El Miracle is that of Our Lady of Carramia of the village of Abella de la Conca in the same diocese (Urgell) about eighty-five km. to the northwest. There, Camós reported, a herding girl also had a vision of a "noble and beautiful girl." Her message was simply to tell the village councillors to build a shrine on the site, and, as a proof, the girl's hand was fixed to her cheek. The councillors found an image on the site. (9) At El Miracle the message was more severe.
 
As in the Castilian apparitions, the gestures carry the most symbolic weight. At the start of the Cubas investigation, the investigators placed the archbishop's letter on their heads and [126] promised to obey it. At Cubas the Virgin planted the cross with her hands, just as at Monte Berico in Italy she had used a cross to mark off the plan of the church. Here the Virgin-child handed Jaume the cross, kissed his hand, then took the cross back. Kissing his hand, as if he were a bishop or a saint, seems ominous in retrospect. Was it the kiss of grace, of death, or both? Giving him the cross would appear to symbolize pointing out the crucifix to the people as a special aid and an indication of the penance they would have to perform, imitating themselves the trials of Christ. In any case the chosen one died, like Pedro de Buenaventura of Santa Gadea and his friend Juan, both of whom were told they must die soon. Indeed, Jaume's death itself was the proof of the story; surely he had nothing to gain on his deathbed by lying.
 
In sum, the cross, the threat of epidemic, the appearance of Mary as child, and the premature death of the seer, if they did not come to Catalonia directly from Castile, shared with Castile and northern Italy a scenario common to fifteenth-century rural culture.
 
 
JAFRE (GIRONA), 1460

On September 15, 1456, the bishop of Barcelona received a dispatch from Pope Calixtus III telling of a great victory over Mohammed II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire. The Christian troops, the pope wrote, were led by Friar John of Capistrano, "at the counsel and instigation of a pilgrim," who gave him a shield with the sign of a crucifix on it. When the battle was over the mysterious pilgrim had disappeared. The bishop had a Te Deum sung in the Barcelona cathedral, and the news was put into the municipal record book. (10)
 
Four years later, two years after the visions at El Miracle, Catalonia had its own mysterious visitor, at whose instigation a cross was erected and a new shrine started. It still exists today, a small chapel on the outskirts of the village of Jafre on the road from Girona to the resort town of Estartit. The road follows the north bank of the Ter River through fertile farmland, and Jafre is about halfway to the coast. The chapel, which has in its courtyard a spring with a metal cup on a chain, gives little indication of its heyday as a healing center in the 1460s (see Figure 9).



 
COPY OF THE ACT FOUNDING THE CHAPEL OF OUR LADY OF THE HOLY SPRING (NOSTRA SENYORA DE LA FONT SANTA) AND DEPOSITIONS OF WITNESSES CONCERNING THE MIRACLES WORKED THERE. (11)
   

This first testimony was recorded as part of a village request for permission to build a chapel on the apparition site. It was not made until three months after the apparition. By that time the seer could no longer remember the exact date, just that it was a Friday in the month of November 1460.
 
Mary is never mentioned in the vision. Within a year the priest and villagers knew they wanted the new chapel to be dedicated to Mary, but the important symbol here, as in El Miracle and the Castilian visions, is the cross. The mysterious man with a pole suggested the building of a cross at a crossroads.
 
The villagers subsequently decided that the man in blue must have been an angel, but he was not considered a major actor in the drama, simply a messenger. They did not dedicate their shrine to him. He is more like the mysterious traveling artists who left crucifixes painted on the walls of the farmhouses of New Castile two hundred years later; the crucifix, the cross, and the spring were the foci of attention. Similarly, the spot where the man appeared and even the exact date were not considered noteworthy. He walked away westward along the river and out of the story altogether.
 
Perhaps the vision was not granted much credit to begin with, [129] even if the priest repeated it in church. For one thing the proof-- the death of the child--was a little thin. Castelló told his story only after he heard of the child's death; hence that death could serve as a proof only to Castelló himself. But once the idea had been planted that the spring was miraculous, the proof to the villagers lay in the water. Indeed, that became the central question. Not whether a vision took place, but whether the water worked cures. Even the seer Castelló apparently faded into the background. He is not mentioned as caring for the spring or as one of the citizens appointed to manage the construction of the shrine or the quest for alms. Like the anonymous messenger from heaven, Castelló was simply an instrument. Other witnesses, in fact, made no reference to the apparition.
 
Two days after Castelló testified in Girona, a nobleman of the village told of being cured and of the cures of others. The illness in question, dolor de costat, may well be the plague, for the costat and the coll were places on the body where the lymph glands formed bubos. If the first baby, who died on the apparition day, died from the plague, then Castelló was probably taken very seriously indeed.
 
TESTIMONY OF BERNAT GUILLEN

 From Bernat Guillen's testimony, then, by February 1461 the holy spring was attracting the lame and the blind from many of the neighboring towns--those he mentioned are about [131] twenty km. to the southwest. News that a spring somewhere could cure the plague must have spread quickly. Many of those interested in it would have been too sick to come, and the nobleman himself helped dispatch water to distant towns. By February the people of Jafre already had the idea of building a chapel. Alms were being collected, and a man had even offered to leave his slaves to help.
 
In June 1461, the vicar general of the diocese went to Jafre to see for himself what was happening and to question more witnesses. He was told of three people who had paralyzed hands cured: a woman, a ungaro (gypsy?), and a girl from near Vic (over 100 km. away, beyond a substantial mountain range). Later, with two priests, the nobleman, five church employees, and eight villagers, he drew up a document granting permission to build a chapel with separate curing pools for men and women, and set conditions for raising alms for the project throughout the diocese.
 
More miracles reported on July 12 demonstrate the wide area in which the spring had become known since February. Cured were people from Tarragona, Figueres, Santa Pau, and France. The Frenchman and the Tarragonés may have been beggars or travelers passing through, but the effective radius of the shrine, given the cured from Vic, Figueres, and Santa Pau, was at least 100 km.
 
One aspect of the original apparition message was supported by these latter miracles. The man in blue warned that the spring had once worked well, but that it became polluted when used for the mundane purpose of laundry. This need for the separation of sacred and profane is like the cases of Escalona and Monte Berico. At Jafre people noticed that the water stopped coming out when some people started to use it, and resumed its flow when they left. There was a striking case on July 12. Before noon the water stopped "because a man from Colomés named Besart wanted to draw a basin of water to drink. The witness said that Besart is a great sinner, which explains what happened. He committed many sins recently, especially all this year he carried Moors and horses in his boat to Granada, and with these horses the Moors had ravaged the people of Castile." [132] Calixtus III had excommunicated all persons helping to supply the Moors of Granada in 1456. (12)
 
The spring was thus not just a place for cures. It was a sacred test for purity and pollution. In faraway rural Girona, the Moors were still the "other," as at Santa Gadea, Jaén, and even somewhat Cubas and Guadalupe, where escapees from Moorish captivity came to give thanks. Curing is not a simple matter. At these holy places, health cannot be preserved or achieved mechanically; it must be earned through a state of grace and genuine devotion. Similarly, the Virgin at El Miracle told Jaume that the people, when they make processions, must make them devoutly, "or else they are worth nothing."

Jafre is quite close to Palacals (fifteen km. north), the only place in the diocese of Girona that Camós mentioned as having an apparition-finding legend. There an image of Mary supposedly spoke to a mute shepherd girl from an elm tree, telling her that the ox she was hunting was safe in the stable. When she told this in words to her amazed parents or employers, they went with her to find the image. Holy springs were not uncommon throughout Catalonia or indeed, throughout Western Europe, and the idea would not have been outlandish to those who heard Miquel Castelló tell his story in church. Apparitions are strange events, but they are usually not without precedent.
 
 

EL TORN (GIRONA), 1483
 

Between 1450 and 1530 there were many outbreaks of the plague in Catalonia. According to statistics from the city of Barcelona, the worst years were 1457 (with which the epidemic of 1458 connected to the El Miracle visions was associated), 1489-1490, 1501, 1507-1508, 1515, and 1530. A slightly lesser outbreak in the years 1482-1483 probably provoked the next apparition we can document. (13)
 
When the plague threatened Barcelona in late 1482, the city corporation, following a practice used in other parts of Spain, had a candle made the thickness of a finger and the length of the walls of the city--more than four miles long. Royal, Church, and municipal authorities accompanied the (presumably coiled) [133] candle in a procession, crying out, "Lord, true God, have mercy on us." At the chapel of La Pietat in the Augustinian monastery, the enormous candle was cut into five-foot lengths and burned night and day before the image there of Mary. (14)
 
The next year the plague took about 1400 lives in Barcelona between March 15 and the end of September, and the villagers in the hills of Girona would have been wondering when or if it would come to them. These same villages had been hard hit in 1475, and perhaps also in 1460, for the abandoned chapel where Miquel Noguer spoke to a weeping Mary was only fifty km. northwest of Jafre. (15)
 
TESTIMONY OF MIQUEL NOGUER OF EL TORN TO DIOCESAN AUTHORITIES IN GIRONA (16)

 Luis Constans carefully researched the background for this vision, and his work confirms the historicity of the events. Miquel Noguer was married and had at least one child at the time of his vision. Two of his children later married, and one son became a priest. Noguer was still living in 1509. He appears to have been a prosperous peasant, and it is a measure of his respectability that his story was believed (at least enough to reopen the shrine) without any proof, sign, or corroboration.
 
Constans found two of Noguer's wills. Together they confirm not only the apparition but also Noguer's own belief in it. The first will was made in 1482. In 1487 he changed it to mandate his burial at the door of the chapel where the apparition took place and the burning of a lamp before the image every Saturday (the day the vision took place). Noguer's bones were recently uncovered under the doorway in the presence of diocesan officials.
 
[136] The apparition document, reproduced in Constans's book, appears from the script to be the shrine's copy of testimony taken by diocesan officials in Girona. The vision was followed by an immediate revival of the shrine, which became one of the most popular in the diocese. Now it is also used as a summer seminary and a diocesan retreat.
 
As with all the Catalan visions of the time, this is a plague vision. One of the four questions officials in Girona asked Noguer was if God was going to punish the people. Similarly at Cubas, the one question the priest had for Inés was when the epidemic would come. The Virgin's essential message is an alternative: plague or moral reform.
 
A second, more proximate context was the abandoned chapel. Because of some profanation, whether its misuse as a stable, an intervillage brawl, or perhaps a failure to pay ecclesiastical duties, the chapel had been locked up, and the bishop had forbidden its use. As at Santa Gadea, the abandoned chapel must have been a matter of concern for the people living around it. A devout person such as Noguer, who went to ring the angelus on his way home from hunting, must have been sad not to be close to a representation of Mary of his devotion.
 
In the earlier visions, Mary had pointed to the Cross as the way to health and salvation. She was not reenacting a scene from the Passion, however, and neither was the Mary seen by Miquel Noguer. At El Torn, Mary (again, a child) wept alone, clasping her hands as at El Miracle, asking for mercy from a vengeful son. Her tears, perhaps due in part to the infidelity of the surrounding villages, could also be ascribed to her knowledge of the punishment the people would receive if they did not repent. Unlike either a pietá or a Mary at the foot of the Cross, Mary at El Torn was not weeping for her son, but rather to her son for her symbolic children, the human race. Her weeping was part of her intercession.
 
Of all the vision messages studied here, that of El Torn is the most clerical. The morality Mary called for was that defined by canon law. But it was not restricted to payment of tithes and removal of the interdict by the bishop or his vicar. It was a general call to order to a society seriously out of order after [137] years of plague and depopulation. Miquel Noguer was an appropriate carrier for this message; a prosperous farmer would naturally be concerned about reorganizing a disordered society; children, on the other hand, would be less susceptible to such a theme. Through Noguer, Mary called on people who had misappropriated property to restore it to its rightful owners. The dead must also be paid their dues, and their salvationary bequests fulfilled. In addition to observing Sundays and abstaining from swearing--perhaps the two most ignored religious injunctions in rural Iberia--the neighboring villages were to make weekly processions on Fridays to the shrine. As at Cubas and Monte Berico, there were instructions for fasting, and they were to punish future violations of all these injunctions.
 
It may be that these late fifteenth-century Catalan apparitions were part of a religious revival, not simply because of the threat of the plague, but rather because, with the worst of the plague over, the people were in a position to restore some of the fabric of religious and moral life. The critical moments of these supernatural messages came in minor outbreaks of the plague, logical times to remind people what could happen to them if they did not reform.
 
The vision of El Torn had much in common with El Miracle and that of Pínos, which followed. As at El Miracle, Mary was a child who warned of plague and asked for conversion. Her message resembled that of a charismatic missionary. Her appearance came on Saturday, Mary's day, at dusk, Mary's time, when the angelus was rung.
 
PINÓS (LLEIDA), 1507

1507 was another plague year. Throughout the southeastern half of the Iberian peninsula, the population had been physically weakened by two years of bad harvests. The area around the shrine of El Miracle was again affected, not only by the bubonic plague but also by some other epidemic, possibly malaria. Mary appeared again with instructions, this time at an isolated wayside chapel about 20 km. south of El Miracle and 170 km. southwest of El Torn. The visionary, Bernat Casas of Matamargó, made [138] his declaration in the parish church of Cardona the day after the vision. (17)

 Casas assumed that the woman who appeared to him suddenly with the sound of dull thunder was the Virgin Mary. She does not appear to have been child-sized. The plague was just beginning in Matamargó, as it spread out from Cardona.
 
Casas's visions may well have been influenced by those of El Miracle and El Torn. Ardévol and Riner, two of the castles or hamlets mentioned, were involved in the visions of El Miracle fifty years before. Mary appeared in red, as at El Miracle.
 
Questors from El Torn circulated throughout Catalonia and could have carried the story of that vision to eastern Lleida. As at El Torn, there was a context of epidemics and an abandoned devotion. As at El Torn, the vision came to a man who intended to say a prayer to Mary, and Mary told him that if the shrine [140] were revived and maintained, God would have mercy on his people. Finally, as at El Torn, no proof was given, perhaps for the same reason--the credibility of the seer combined with the imminence of epidemic.
 
The day of the vision, San Gil, September 1, was to some extent a Marian day, celebrated at the famous shrine of Nuria. Giles, according to legend, supposedly lived at Nuria and left the shrine image there, to be discovered miraculously by an ox and a ram centuries later. One of the major holy days there was consequently September 1; it became a major feast day at Pinós, as well, known as Apparition Day.
 
 
TWO EARLY MODERN VISIONS:
REUS (TARRAGONA), 1592, AND SANT ANIOL (GIRONA), 1618

In Catalonia, as in Castile, there were very few visions leading to the establishment of shrines from 1500 to 1900. Two early modern visions in the present-day provinces of Tarragona and Girona, however, repeated the medieval patterns.

In 1587 a woman in Bagnères in the French Pyrenees had visions of a "belle demoiselle" asking for a general procession to her shrine and warning of a plague. The seer, a widow who lived alone with her daughter, was ignored, and in 1588, five-sixths of the population supposedly died of the plague. When the townspeople finally made a vow to Mary and held a procession with the woman and her daughter in the front dressed in white, the plague ended. The town fathers paid for the dowries of both mother and daughter, and they entered the Cistercian convent of Vallbona in Catalonia, for the wars of religion had disrupted conventual life in France. (19)
 
Vallbona is sixty km. north of Reus, where another apparition occurred on September 25, 1592, also during a plague. Most of the town councillors had abandoned the city a month before, just as the councillors and archbishop had left Tarragona. The seer, Isabel Besora, was sixteen years old, the daughter of a weaver. She saw the Virgin while she was tending sheep (see Figure 10).
 
[141] There is no authentic text for this vision. Only an oral tradition of the Virgin's message remains--that Isabel tell the town councillors that Mary was the co-redeemer of the town, and that they should light the plague candle in the church if they wanted to be free of the epidemic. The councillors did not believe Isabel, who returned to the apparition site, where Mary touched her on the cheek (like Vicenza of Monte Berico, Inés of Cubas, and Joana of Escalona), leaving a mark of a red rose.
 
Isabel was then believed. The town held a procession to a chapel where there was an image that looked like the vision, and lighted the plague candle, perhaps a candle the length of the town walls. The following day there was a solemn mass, during which Isabel remained on her knees with a lighted candle. At the end of the mass (as at Escalona and Navalagamella) the mark on her cheek disappeared. This is the story recorded from traditional sources at the beginning of the nineteenth century. (20) In 1657 Camós gave a shorter version in which Isabel's proof was a traditional one for apparition-findings in Catalonia, the hand stuck to the cheek. (21)
 
The immediately relevant pages are missing from the town council register. The first documentary evidence for the apparition is the entry in the register for December 13, 1592, when the councillors unanimously agreed to purchase the land and build a chapel "where Our Lady appeared to the girl." The chapel was completed in 1601. Today it is the main shrine for the town. The image, a standing figure of Mary with child dating from the mid-fifteenth century, had been in a private chapel before the visions.

It is impossible to know how much of the tradition is historical, and how much an amalgam of other stories. What is known for sure is that a girl had a vision in the context of a plague, and that the statue subsequently venerated was already in the city. Whether or not the story told by the new nuns at Vallbona had reached Reus, it appears that the earlier pattern still had a hold. (22)
 
The final vision also referred to a preexistent image and devotion, Nostra Senyora dels Arcs, Our Lady of the Arches, in [142] the jurisdiction of the town of Santa Pau (Girona), quite close to El Torn. The declaration I translate below is that which the seer, Maria Torrent, gave on December 8, 1618, at the shrine and confirmed eleven years later. Narciso Camós copied it down around 1651, and since then the originals have been lost. (23) The vision occurred on All Saints Day, and draws attention to the people's anxieties about their obligations to the dead. Note that María Torrent had a promise pending to the image of Collell, the Marian image that appeared to Miquel Noguer at El Torn, 150 years before.

VISION OF MARÍA TORRENT, SANT ANIOL, NOVEMBER 1, 1618

 María Torrent was upset because she could not fulfill her obligations to her dead parents. Furthermore it was dark, she was on a mountain path and afraid. As at El Torn, Mary came after being invoked, dressed in white. First Mary reassured her, telling her not to fear, then she went back with the seer over the events of the day. Psalms, Mary told her, could be substituted for the unsaid responses.
 
After this solution to María's immediate problem, the Virgin gave her the kind of precise instructions that very devout people who did not know how to express their devotion would be glad to have. She was to wear white for a year, like the penitential habits still worn today, usually after a promise, by village men and women in Spain. She was not to swear at the children she cared for; she should say the rosary the first thing every morning, again for a year--a kind of sacred quarantine after seeing the Virgin. And she should fulfill the promises she had outstanding to the shrines of Els Arcs and Collell.
 
The people of Sant Aniol were given instructions like those given the people of El Torn. They were not to blaspheme or bear false witness, and they were to cease rivalries and malice and to punish each other's vices.
 
The theology of the vision was much the same as at El Torn. Mary was an advocate who obtained, not God's help, but his mercy. God had two options: punishment or the withholding of punishment. Mary could stay his hand. In return the people as a corporate body had to make penitential processions to her shrine, everyone (except the priest!) barefoot, reciting Our Fathers and Hail Marys for the souls in purgatory and Christ's precious blood. The reference to purgatory is something of an innovation, one in keeping with the increased attention to purgatory in southern Europe in the seventeenth century. (24)
 
 
CATALAN AND CASTILIAN MESSAGES

With its different levels of instructions for personal problems, personal piety, community moral reform, and community piety, [145] something like a personal and communal examination or conscience, María Torrent's vision resumed much of the content of the late medieval Catalan apparitions. All in one way or another combined piety and moral reform.
 
For in fifteenth-century Catalonia, with the Moors distant and heresies yet to come or long gone, the "other" was within. The "other" was the blasphemer, the false witness; the "other" was the villager who carried horses for the Moors, not the Moors themselves. The "other" was the individual villager or the entire community lax in religious duties. In some of the visions the dereliction was made specific: shrines abandoned (not surprising, given the population decline), a spring polluted, and a ceremony of propitiation neglected. The vision message was not one of aid against an external enemy, but rather a warning against the enemy within and a call for conversion. Such a warning was especially useful for communities under the perennial menace of epidemics; it served at once as an explanation for their cause and a prescription for their avoidance.
 
Jews were not mentioned in these visions, but the cleansing of the body religious by self-reform and conversion was like an extension to the conversion of the Jews preached by Vincent Ferrer and others as a means of purging communities of impurity. Jews were persecuted as the cause of the Black Death of 1348 in Barcelona, Cervera (near El Miracle and Pinos), Tárrega, Girona, Solsona, Tarragona, and Lleida. For Jews were another internal "other," part of the fabric of Catalan society, rather than an external enemy. Arguments for purging or conversion of Jews could be applied also to lax Christians. Indeed, Vincent Ferrer used an exemplum in which Saint Macarius spoke with a skull whose soul was in hell. That particular soul had been a pagan, and reported to Macarius that there were different levels of hell. Jews were worse off than the pagans, and Christian sinners were worst off of all, even worse than the Jews. (25)
 
The distinction between Castilian and Catalan visions should not be pushed too far, given the limited number of cases and the essential similarity of both to French and Italian visions. The more dire tone and the more penitential message of Catalan apparitions are consistent with differences in the relative [146] well-being of the two regions in the fifteenth century, and in keeping with the kind of theology preached in Catalonia by Ferrer and his disciples.
 
Vincent Ferrer had been dead for about forty years at the time of the visions of El Miracle, but his memory was very much alive. He had preached at nearby Cervera; (26) his disciples, mainly Dominicans, were still active; and it was precisely in 1458, the year of the visions, that the bull of canonization was proclaimed. His particular appeal came from the appropriateness of the solutions he offered to a society in very grave, long-term economic and demographic straits.
 
In the Catalan sermons of Vincent Ferrer, there is very little emphasis on the intercession of saints or Mary. In a sermon on Saint James, for instance, he mentioned in passing James's visit to Spain, but not the shrines of Filar or Compostela. For Vincent the saints were examples to follow rather than intermediaries with God. His sermons emphasized good behavior and penance. Christ was often compared with a king, and Ferrer's exempla proposed how one would act when dealing with the king directly, as when one received an invitation to the wedding of the king's son or when one married his daughter. There are no powerful intermediaries in these exempla. Similarly the Catalan visions, unlike those of Castile, rarely involved the simple establishment of a relation of patronage between saint and town. Instead, the beings that appeared brought instructions for moral reform and penance.
 
The purpose and scope of the visions were comminatory, as Vincent described in one of his sermons: "When our lord God wants to destroy a town, city, or kingdom, first he is accustomed to send a messenger to warn the people." Ferrer gave as examples Noah, Lot, Amos, Saint John the Baptist, and the Apocalypse of John. (27) The saints that appeared to Catalan seers were above all messengers of God with warnings of disaster and the means for avoiding it. Even if the messengers themselves subsequently became cult figures at shrines (as Vincent himself did), this should not distract us from their immediate function in the fifteenth century.
 
A convention ultimately derived from twelfth-century [147] reinterpretations of the Book of Revelation, a progressive, linear, view of history, its logic and its future revealed in visions, became a theological and literary convention in the late Middle Ages. (28) How much the apocalyptic revelations of John served as the underlying myth or template for the Catalan and Castilian lay visions is an open question. Certainly in the earliest ones in Castile, the reference to brightness greater than the sun recalls Revelation 12. Perhaps the very notion of a divine messenger foretelling disaster was reinforced by theological attention to Revelation. Scenes from the book were commonly portrayed on Catalan church walls. In addition, Vincent Ferrer had preached the coming of the apocalypse, though not as frequently as is generally supposed, and in rather vague terms.
 
The messages of these by and large humble visionaries were not really apocalyptic. There had been too many plagues, too many recoveries from the plague, perhaps too much apocalyptic preaching, for any particular epidemic to be seen as a sign of the end of time. Rather than the Judgment, the plagues were simply judgments; final enough for those condemned, but not part of the final act of the grand design.

The emphasis on the observance of Catholic precepts in the Catalan visions echoed the "Heavenly Letter," which was particularly well circulated in fifteenth-century Catalonia, to judge from the surviving manuscripts in Catalan verse and prose. The Letter was supposedly written by Christ and found on an altar in Jerusalem. Its central instruction was to observe Sundays, but different versions contained allusions to usury, mutual forgiveness, and a general conversion. Much of the text described the punishments that would befall those who did not heed the Letter (or priests who do not read it from their pulpits). In the Catalan versions, there was particular emphasis on the saving intercession of Mary. (29)

The Letter apparently began in the sixth century. The earliest extant version in Spain is one from Urgell in the tenth century. A variant version was circulated by the flagellants of the thirteenth century in Germany that promised remission of sins for those who joined them. The Catalan versions do not contain this clause, but it has been speculated that the circulation of the [148] Letter in Catalonia nevertheless coincided with the missions of Ferrer. Certainly the missions and the Letters would be mutually reinforcing. Comminatory visions and the Heavenly Letter were, similarly, alternative ways of explaining and managing recurrent plague and famine. Unlike the Letter, however, the visions had a special immediacy in that they were keyed to a specific time and place, and the seers were members of the community being warned.
 
Comminatory prophecies were also included in the revelations of Saint Bridget of Sweden (d. 1373). A Spaniard, Alfonsus of Jaén, edited her writings, and another, Cardinal Juan de Torquemada, gave them a certification, which was printed as a preface in the early editions. Christ told Bridget, "I shall send my friends to such as I choose, and they shall make ready a way to God." (30) Images of chastisement in her writings included a beast that led sinners down into hell, the Lord as a terrifying giant, and the Lord plowing the earth, sparing neither old nor young, poor nor rich. (31)
 
Though such warnings were a minor aspect of Bridget's writings, they seemed to have a special appeal in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. In north and central Italy a number of self-proclaimed prophets distributed broadsides with warnings described as the prophecies of Saint Bridget. Dressed in the sackcloth of apocalyptic messengers, they went from town to town warning of doom and calling for repentance, and until the novelty wore off they were received as saints by the common people. (32)
 
I do not know if there were similar amateur prophets in Spain at the time--rough lay versions of Vincent Ferrer. But the extent to which the Church at Constance and Basel accepted the prophecies of Bridget gave the spontaneous prophets of Italy, and Savonarola as well, a certain legitimacy. This temporary climate of toleration may have had a similar effect in Spain, where the notion of God "sending his friends to such as he chose" may have eased the acceptance of the local visions.
 
In spite of the more prescriptive nature of the Catalan visions, and in spite of differences in vision motifs (body contortion as proof was uniquely Castilian), the visions in both Catalonia and [149] Castile shared the basic pattern of the shrine legends. All but one were rural and implicitly regulated the relations between society and nature. On the one hand, there was the Virgin or saint's statements; but there was also a meaning of time, place, and gesture. Whether in zones of nucleated or dispersed settlement, the visions called for people to leave their homes and their parish churches and go out to sacred spots in the countryside. In some cases new shrines were to be built, in others, old shrines were to be revived. As with the legends gathered by Narciso Camós, natural objects were specified that would aid in cures--sacred trees, springs, and stones. Animal intermediaries had mostly, but not entirely, disappeared--bees showed the sacred spot at Santa Gadea, mules and sheep at El Miracle. The visionaries were still, predominantly, males. With the single exception of Jaén, these were not visions that sorted out urban space, but rather part of a continuing process of sacralization of the countryside--effectively, the establishment of societal outposts in non-urban space.
 

Three generations after the visions of Cubas, the original comminatory message had been forgotten. The subtext had become the text, the location of a sacred place in the countryside the message. This may also have been true at Escalona and Navalagamella, for which we have only hearsay testimony long after the visions took place. In those places, too, there may have been a more immediate, time-bound message, which was later forgotten as irrelevant.
 

So there were both historical and ahistorical messages in these visions. The second, the regulation of relations with nature, transcended the times and joined the preexisting corpus of legends and subsequent miracles as a general expression of divine protection for and divine availability at a particular place. 

Notes for Chapter Two
The Catalan Context

1. Fortià Solà, Historia de Nuria (Barcelona, Editorial Estel, 1952).

2. Iayme Prades, Historia de la adoracion y uso de las santas imagenes, y de la imagen de la fuente de la salud (Valencia, Felipe Mey, 1597).

3. VI Semana de Estudios Monásticos, España Eremítica, Analecta Legerensia, Abadía de San Salvador de Leyre, Navarra, (Pamplona, Editorial Aranzadi, 1970).

4. J.-P. Cuviller, "La Population catalane au XVe siècle. Comportements sociaux et niveaux de vie d'aprés les actes prives," Melanges de la Casa de Velazquez 5 (1969) 159-187.

5. Pierre Vilar, La Catalogne dans l'Espagne Moderne (3 vols., Paris SEVPEN, 1962) I 481-2.

El Miracle

6. Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Reg. 1154 14v, in Amada López de Meneses, "Documentos acerca de la peste negra en los dominios de la Corona de Aragón," Estudios de Edad Media de la Corona de Aragón 6 (1956) 423.

7. The text I have translated was drawn by P. Cebrià Baraut (Santa María del Miracle, Montserrat, 1962, 163-170) from two sources: A, "Llibre calendari de totas les terras y proprietats de esta casa del Miracle" (17th century) fols. 9-15, in the archive of El Miracle; and B, a book of notes from the parish archive of La Curriu, probably kept by the parish priest, Juan Blanch, from 1580 to 1596. This latter version was first published by J. Viladrich, Memoria histórico-descriptiva de la imagen y santuario de Nuestra Señora del Milagro de Riner (Lérida, Imprenta Mariana, 1898) 144-153. The translation is of Baraut's preferred text, and I include the variants in the original in the appendix. I gratefully acknowledge Cebrià Baraut's permission to reprint the text.

8. Apocryphal Gospel of Matthew, Ch. 6. See also Gospel of the Nativity of Mary, Ch. 6. Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, and Revelations, Vol. XVI, The Ante-Nicene Christian Library, (Edinburgh, T. and T. Clark, 1870).

9. Camós, Jardín, 230-231.

Jafne

10. Barcelona, Dietari, II 242-243.

11. Jafre texts are from Libro de la Confraria del Roser 1622, f. 6 ff., compiled with what remains legible of the original in the ADG Section C, No. 16, lligall 71 by Maruja Arnau i Guerola in Jafre i el santuari de la Font Santa (Girona, Gráficos Taberner, 1974) 145-152, and they are reprinted here by her kind permission. In the diocesan archive is the permission for almsquestors within the diocese dated July 10, 1461. It refers in particular to cures of the plague (ADG 1/26, Regesto de Questoriorum 72v-73r).

12. José Rius Serra, Regesto Ibérico de Calixto III (2 vols.. , Barcelona, C.S.I.C., 1948) Bull of August 6, 1456 (II, 214).

El Torn

13. Barcelona, Dietari, II and III passim.

14. Camós, Jardín, 39-40.

15. Luis G. Constans, Historia de Santa María de Collell (Santuario del Collell, 1954).

16. Ibid., 87-90, corrected as per photograph of original document. In a similar Italian vision, Mary appeared as a girl dressed in white to an elderly man praying in Motta di Livenza (Treviso). Mary instructed him on March 9, 1510, to fast for three consecutive Saturdays, for nine days to preach to the people of the town and the surrounding region that whoever fasted with repentence would be forgiven, and to ask for a church. His testimony is preserved in the Biblioteca Comunale di Treviso. See Prosdocimo Prodomi, La Madonna dei Miracoli in Motta di Livenza (Motta di Livenza, Santuario, 1954).

Pinós

17. Camós, Jardín, 384-385. He cites a document in the archive of the collegiate church of San Vicente de Cardona by Juan Nogués, notary public, September 5,1507. I have not been able to find this document in Cardona. In Camós's time there was a copy in the chapel of Pinós notarized by Jerónimo Alsina and Juan Torrebruna, who were notaries in Cardona from 1620-1640. Their notebooks are in the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón in Barcelona and possibly would include a transcript.

18. error; should be September 2.

Reus

19. Alexis Théas, Notre-Dame de Médoux; aujourd'hui Notre-Dame d'Aste, 2nd ed. (Tarbes, Clement Larrieu, 1896). Evidence is the town council records of sending the seer to Spain and an official retrospective investigation in 1648 with 18 witnesses, excerpted in this edition and printed in full in the first edition, 207-266.

20. Juan Bertrán Borras, Nuestra Señora de la Misericordia y su santuario de Reus (Reus, Santuario, 1966) 8-10, cites manuscript history destroyed in 1835.

21. Camos, Jardín, 4-5.

22. Hamon, Notre Dame de France, III 105, gives an almost identical vision occurring in Perpignan at the end of the seventeenth century--a vision of Our Lady "de la Miséricorde" to a shepherdess during a plague; "Tell the consuls to make a solemn procession with candle in hand." Could this be a satellite shrine from Reus?

Sant Aniol

23. Camós, Jardín, 101-102, has text and names of witnesses to declarations of December 8, 1618, and July 28, 1629. Local historians have been unable to locate the original documents. Miguel Juanola Benet, Historia y tradición del Santuario de Na. Sa. dels Arcs (Santa Pau, 1950).

24. Michel Vovelle and Gaby Vovelle, Vision de la morí et l'au-delá en Provence du XVe au XXe siécle, Cahier des Annales (Paris, A. Colin, 1970).

Catalan and Castilian Messges

25. Quaresma de Sant Vicent Ferrer, ed. Josep Sanchis Sivera (Barcelona, Instituí Patxot, 1927) 283; also in Sermons II (Barcelona, Ed. Barcino, 1971).

26. Henry Dominique Fages, Historia de S. Vicente Ferrer (2 vols., Valencia, A. García, 1903) II 76-77.

27. Vincent Ferrer, Sermons, II 38.

28. Barbara Nolan, The Gothic Visionary Perspective (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1978).

29. Hippolyte Delehaye, "Note sur la légende de la lettre tombée du del," Académic Royale de Belgique, Bulletins de la Classe de Lettres, Bruxelles, 1899,171-213; R. Aramon i Serra, "Dos textos versificáis en cátala de la carta tramesa del cel," Estudis Universitaris Catalans XIV 2 (1929) 279-298; D. Molins de Rei, "Notes sobre la 'Lletra caiguda del Cel'; les versions catalanes en prosa," Estudis Franciscans 43 (1931) 53-94; Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, rev. ed. (New York, Oxford University Press, 1970) 129-132, 134, 347.

30. The Revelations of Saint Birgitta (London, English Early Text Society, 1929) Book IV, Ch. 41.

31. Ibid., Book I, Ch. 41, Ch. 57; Book IV, Ch. 41.

32. Ottavia Niccoli, "Profezie in piazza. Note sul profetismo popolare nell'Italia del primo Cinquecento," Quaderni Storici 41 (May-August, 1979) 500-539.