THE CASE OF JEANNE D'ARC AND CRITERIA FOR VERIFICATION OF VISIONS

[188] Francisca la Brava's testimony was scrutinized and rechecked, and she was variously accused of lying, dreaming, or seeing the devil in disguise. Her case is a good introduction to the criteria used by villagers, parish priests, diocesan officials, and inquisitors to establish the truth or falsity of visions. The criteria were ancient.

Except in the cases of Cubas, El Miracle, La Mota, and Quintanar, the investigations of Spanish visions that have reached us were vestigial. In only three other inquiries were any of the investigators' questions recorded. There are, however, extensive records of the trial and rehabilitation of Jeanne d'Arc. These records provide in explicit form many of the theological and popular criteria implicit in the testimony of the Spanish visionaries.

Jeanne d'Arc had her first visions at age thirteen in her father's garden. First Saint Michael and later Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret appeared to her. These saints served her as advisers and helpers almost daily from 1424 until her execution in 1431.

Jeanne's interrogators in Rouen wanted to know why she believed the spirits she saw were saints, whether she had a sign, and whether she in turn could show others a sign. A consultant to the investigation, Zanon, bishop of Lisieux, said that only after signs, miracles, or special references in the scriptures should prophets be believed, because it is so difficult to tell true from false spirits. He cited as his authority a decree of Innocent III, Cum ex Injuncto. ⁽¹⁾

For Jeanne's interrogators, a sign would appear to be something that could be seen, smelled, or touched by others besides the seer, some manifestation of divine presence or impingement upon the natural world that could be independently verified. [189] They asked her, for instance, "what sign she had that the revelation comes to her from God and that Saint Catherine and Margaret are the ones who talk to her." ⁽²⁾ Jeanne avoided that question, but in a later interrogation she raised the issue herself. ⁽³⁾

She also said that whatever she did that was important [the saints] always helped her, and this is a sign that they were good spirits.

Asked if she had any other sign that they were good spirits.

She said that Saint Michael confirmed it, before the voices came to me.

Asked how she knew it was Saint Michael.

She said by his angelic speech and language. . . .

Asked how, if the enemy [the devil] transformed himself in the form or visage of an angel, would she know if it was a good or bad angel.

She said she would know well enough if it was Saint Michael or something disguised as him. She also said that the first time she was very unsure if it was Saint Michael. And the first time she was very afraid; and she saw him many times before she knew it was Saint Michael.

But Jeanne still had to convince the future Charles VII of her mission. It was not easy. For three weeks of March 1429, she had to plead her case before a commission of priests at Poitiers. According to Jeanne, Charles was finally persuaded not by the judgment of the clergy, many of whom were unconvinced, but by a sign. ⁽⁴⁾

Michael had come to her, Jeanne said, in her boardinghouse in Chinon and accompanied her hand in hand to the king's room. There Saint Michael had bowed to Charles and presented [190] him with a marvelous crown, telling him that with Jeanne's help he would chase the English from France. When Jeanne entered the room with Saint Michael, she said to the future king, "Sire, vela vostre signe, preney lay (There is your sign, take it)." ⁽⁵⁾ This incident was glossed over at Jeanne's posthumous rehabilitation. She may well have imagined or fabricated it. But it shows how well aware she herself had become of the importance of signs.

The story did not convince the interrogators at Rouen. They did not rule out the possibility that the devil had appeared in the guise of Michael to Charles as well as Jeanne, and so they asked her what sign Charles had that it was Saint Michael. The interrogators could not disprove Jeanne's visions any more than she could prove them, but they could impugn her signs. Since they appeared to have testimony from persons who had been present at Charles's court two years before (and who presumably saw nothing), they pressed Jeanne about the resplendence that she said accompanied her visions and voices--whether it could also be seen in the future king's chambers. They also asked whether anyone else saw the crown, and whether it smelled good or shone. ⁽⁶⁾

From the start, Jeanne's interrogators were convinced that her voices were evil spirits. They persistently attempted to link Jeanne's voices and saints with the Lady Fees, or fairies that some people in her village had seen in a certain tree, and for whom the children made garlands. ⁽⁷⁾ Such fairies as pagan spirits were by definition demons, and if Jeanne had received their help and counsel, then she had been doing the devil's work. Discretio spirituum, or the discernment of good from evil spirits in disguise, was thus central to Jeanne d'Arc's trial and sentence.

The willingness of Jeanne's judges to see her visions as diabolical cannot be entirely ascribed to malevolence. For Jeanne's spirits were just as real to the interrogators as to her. Time and again when she would not answer a question, they asked her to obtain an answer from her voices. Articles 48 and 49 of the formal indictment charged that "she firmly believes that those she sees are saints, although she has no sign and she has consulted no bishop, priest, or prelate about whether to believe [191] them," and that in fact they were evil spirits in disguise with which she had made an idolatrous pact. ⁽⁸⁾

The interrogators saw as evidence for such a pact Jeanne's easy access to the spirits. It was suspicious, they thought, that the supposed saints visited, kissed, and embraced her frequently for no good reason, "something that saints are in no way accustomed to do in apparitions." ⁽⁹⁾ They therefore endeavored to find other incriminating evidence about the saints' behavior, asking if they ever contradicted themselves, or why Jeanne could not send them with their messages directly to the so-called king. ⁽¹⁰⁾ They noted that Michael bowed before Charles, "when there is no indication that such a bow or greeting had ever been made by angels or archangels to any holy man and not even to the Blessed Virgin, Mother of God." ⁽¹¹⁾

The spirits were evil, perhaps most obviously, because they were opposed to the English. One of the articles of the indictment charged that Jeanne said the spirits had "a mortal hatred for a Catholic kingdom and a people that practices the veneration of all the saints according to the prescriptions of the Church." ⁽¹²⁾ But the judges objected to other doctrines of the spirits as well. A very major objection was to the spirits' instruction that Jeanne wear men's clothes, a violation of scriptural and canon law. Another was to their instruction to Jeanne to ignore many of the judges' questions. Legitimate saints, they were sure, would on the contrary encourage her to cooperate with the Church.

These last objections point to a second criterion used to distinguish whether or not someone is truly possessed of the Holy Spirit--the character and comportment of the seer. Philibert, bishop of Coutances, when he assessed the articles of conviction, wrote, "Indeed, in her the two signs that, according to the blessed Gregory, are manifest in a person filled with the Holy Spirit, virtue and humility, are entirely absent." ⁽¹³⁾ His reference was to the Dialogues of Gregory the Great (Book I, Ch. 2). Jeanne's wearing of men's clothing reflected poorly on her virtue, as did her leaving home without permission of her parents and her leap from a tower in which she was imprisoned, which appeared to the judges to be suicidal. Jeanne's refusal to submit to the militant, earthly Church, as opposed to the victorious, [192] heavenly Church of saints reflected poorly on her humility. So did her firm belief that she must be in a state of grace and virtually her entire career as a prophet and a divinely inspired military leader.

Character and comportment were emphasized by Jean Gerson also. Gerson was a recognized authority on the evaluation of spirits. Around 1400 he had written a treatise, De Distinctione Verarum Visionum a Falsis, in which, following Hugh of Saint-Victor, he asserted that a true seer would have five virtues displayed by Mary at the time of the Annunciation: humility, willingness to accept counsel, patience, accuracy, and charity. ⁽¹⁴⁾

At the Council of Constance, in 1415, he was called on to help decide whether or not Bridget of Sweden's visions were authentic. He felt they were not and wrote another treatise, De Probatione Spirituum, which set out principles and procedures for distinguishing good spirits from evil ones in visions.

According to Gerson, the ideal evaluator would have personal mystical experience as well as knowledge of theology and canon law. He advised a careful preliminary investigation of the visionary, a detailed examination of the vision to see if it conformed to faith and morality, great prudence and caution in reacting to visions, consideration of possible motives for, and gains resulting from visions, scrutiny of the kind of life the visionary led, and then a judgment as to the nature of the spirits involved. These may be the Spirit of God, the good angel, the evil spirit, and the spirit of man. If it is a purely human matter, the visionary might be fabricating the vision consciously or unconsciously.

Gerson was not cited by Jeanne's judges in Rouen, for he was in the other camp. His opinion was apparently solicited by the earlier commissions of Charles VII at Poitiers and Chinon in 1429, and his response from Lyons was a favorable one. In it he pointed out that it was not necessary as a matter of faith to believe Jeanne entirely; all that theologians had to decide was whether there was anything questionable in her story or comportment. He found what he knew about her admirable. ⁽¹⁵⁾

In all of his essays on visions, Gerson was very pragmatic. [193] He took the substance of a vision as a given and did not request additional signs. He did refer to miracles as favorable evidence, and also to clear references in the scriptures, but not to signs. The judges at Rouen by centering on signs, proofs that could be tested by the senses of others, used a much tougher criterion, but one that was easier to apply.

Almost twenty years after Jeanne's execution, Charles VII asked an adviser, Guillaume Bouille, to initiate Jeanne's rehabilitation. Bouille's preliminary evaluation of Jeanne's visions, written in 1449, once more used the criterion of comportment. He found that Jeanne possessed all five virtues recommended by Gerson and Hugh of Saint-Victor. Not surprisingly, Bouille evaluated her conduct differently from the judges of 1431. For instance he emphasized her willingness to accept the counsel of the saints, instead of her unwillingness to accept the counsel of the clergy. He praised virtues not mentioned in Rouen--her chastity, her abhorrence of violence, and her exemplary death. The accuracy of her prophecies was more evident in 1449 than in 1431, and accuracy was another of the five virtues.

Almost as an afterthought, Bouille mentioned yet another criterion, one not explicitly cited in Rouen, although clearly in the minds of Jeanne's interrogators there; nor is it mentioned by Gerson in his writings. Bouille cited Thomas Aquinas, who in turn cited the Life of Saint Anthony to the effect that "the distinguishing of good from evil spirits is not difficult: If fear is followed by joy, we know that the help of God has come to us. The security of the soul is a mark of the presence of divine majesty. If, on the contrary, the fear remains, then the enemy is present." ⁽¹⁶⁾ This criterion was probably influenced by neo-platonic ascetic doctrines. Iamblichus in the third century showed how higher or lower spirits could be distinguished by one's subjective reaction. ⁽¹⁷⁾

Jeanne herself seemed to use this criterion. She similarly used her emotions to verify her state of grace. "She also says that she has a great joy when she sees [Saint Michael]: and she thinks that when she sees him, she is not in a state of mortal sin. " ⁽¹⁸⁾ This same rule of thumb, a happy, untroubled spirit, is [194] still seen by some people today as an indication of a state of grace. ⁽¹⁹⁾

Both Jeanne and her interrogators seemed to realize the importance of her subjective reactions. At times Jeanne volunteered to tell them her feelings during or after the visions; other times they directly asked her about them. She emphasized how happy the visions made her feel. "I will not talk to you about the voice of Saint Michael, but I speak of grant confort." ⁽²⁰⁾ In her time confort could mean contentment and happiness. Twice Jeanne told how her revelations "conforte" her daily. ⁽²¹⁾ Her interrogator asked her once, "if, when the angel left, she was left happy (joyeuse) or scared and in great fear." She replied, "He did not leave me frightened or fearful at all, but I was sad that he went. " ⁽²²⁾ In her final condemnation, her internal feelings of confortationem were faithfully reported. For Bouille, Jeanne's feeling first of fear, then joy, confirmed the presence of good, rather than evil spirits. ⁽²³⁾

The main criteria used to evaluate Jeanne's visions, then, fall into three categories:

1. Independently verifiable signs, including miracles.

2. Her character and comportment, whether it was compatible with one filled with the Holy Spirit or guided by good spirits.

3. Her emotional responses to the presence of the spirits. The prior question of whether she had visions at all was not treated seriously, probably because of her obvious sincerity and the magnitude of her accomplishments.

These criteria were also used in the verification of the Spanish visions. The Spanish seers, their villages, and the clergy felt, like Jeanne's judges, that signs were central. Except in instances of simultaneous plague, or corroborative witnesses, everything hung on some evidence that was visible. "But they will not believe me," the seers complained. "If they do not believe you I will give you a sign," Mary replied. "Ask her for a sign," the men of Cubas told Inés. A sign was sometimes even needed (as at Jafre) to convince the seer; it was virtually essential to convince the towns.

The devoutness, truthfulness, and virtue of seers was also [195] carefully checked in all of the significant Spanish vision investigations. When Inés of Cubas inaccurately predicted where her hand would come unstuck, a special session was held, and Inés testified that she had had another vision that clarified her previous mistake. But character evaluation in the Spanish cases was not directed, as with Jeanne d'Arc, at identifying what kind of spirit appeared, but rather at determining if the visionary was lying.

Indeed, the Spanish investigations are characterized by relatively little attention to Satan. In the Spain of these visions, no less than in the France of Jeanne d'Arc, it was common knowledge that the devil could provoke false visions. Yet only in the cases of Juan de Rabe and Francisca la Brava was there any mention of possible demonic participation.

Spanish writers knew of at least three ways the devil could counterfeit apparitions. One was by possessing the seer, who fell involuntarily under the devil's power. According to the Hieronymite Pedro Ciruelo, author of Reprobación de las supersticiones y hechizerias (1530), at certain hours or on certain days the devil entered certain persons and moved their tongues to say many and varied things. ⁽²⁴⁾ In view of this possibility the inquisitor asked the priest of Quintanar if Francisca la Brava had a history of being "endemoniada."

The devil could also get a seer to do his work by trickery. "Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light," warned Saint Paul in 2 Corinthians 11. The Libro de los exenplos told how the devil appeared in disguise to encourage the worship of false relics and a tree, surely a cautionary tale for our rural seers. ⁽²⁵⁾ In two chapters of his sober Treatise on the Spiritual Life, Vincent Ferrer warned monks and nuns against visions and revelations as illusions and temptations of the devil. So, indeed, did almost every fifteenth- and sixteenth-century handbook for the spiritually minded. ⁽²⁶⁾ The science of discernment was largely directed at this level of demonic activity, in which the seers themselves were deceived.

Francisca la Brava herself feared this deception, or at least said that she did, when she first saw Mary--"Get back Satan, [196] you are a devil come to deceive me!" Already before her visions she was alert to the devil; her bedtime prayer referred to sins "in compact" and deception in death. A trick by the devil was what her priest warned her of and explained with examples from the Bible.

A seer who was deceived could not be blamed for being tricked, but was culpable if she or he communicated the false vision to others. Francisca would not have been punished if, even believing her visions, she had told no one but the priest. Her crime was in the publicity she gave the vision and the cult she encouraged by trusting her own discernment when it was at variance with that of the Church.

The most culpable level of dealings with the devil was the knowing, willing pact. It was due to such pacts that witches and necromancers gained their powers. Perhaps taking his information from Malleus Maleficarum, Pedro Ciruelo admitted that some witches actually flew around at night, while others merely fell into trances, the devil, "depriving them of all senses, and they fall to the ground as if cold and dead . . . and they feel nothing, though they be whipped, wounded, burned, or whatever injuries can be done to the body." Some of them, he said, speak many secrets while in these trances, and are taken for prophets because of a "strange wisdom unusual even for the holy doctors of the Catholic Church," much like some of those possessed by the devil. ⁽²⁷⁾ It would seem that the woman who denounced Juan de Rabe thought he might have made such a pact, for she mentioned that he boasted of his frequent trances and he knew secret things.

Yet the investigators and inquisitors in Spain, in these particular cases at least, do not appear to have taken seriously the possibility of demonic involvement. Even with Francisca la Brava, whom the parish priest, one of the alcaldes, and even Francisca herself suspected of being tricked by the devil in disguise, the inquisitors did not think the devil was directly involved, but rather that Francisca concocted the story herself. They thought her motives were mere foolishness (liviandad) and vanity, the kind of attention she and Juan de Rabe received [197] from their fellows when believed. Other non-diabolical explanations for visions, suggested by parents, townspeople, or investigators, included dreams (Quintanar, León), insanity (Cubas, Navas de Zarzuela, Quintanar), and drink (Cubas).

Citing Saint Paul, Gerson warned that special attention should be paid to the character and comportment of female visionaries. "All the more it is true if these women, itching with curiosity, are the kind whom the Apostle describes: 'Silly women who are sin-laden and led astray by various lusts: ever learning yet never attaining the knowledge of the truth' (2 Tim 3:7). For where truth is absent, it follows that vanity and deception are present." ⁽²⁸⁾ Elsewhere he wrote, "All doctrine of women, especially words or writings on religion, is considered suspect unless carefully examined previously by the other sex, and much more than the doctrine of men." ⁽²⁹⁾

Female visionaries were mistrusted long before and long after Gerson. A seventeenth-century commentator on the Cubas apparitions approved the town's slowness in believing Inés with this general caution: "Women easily believe in any spirit, and sometimes tell as revelations that occurred in the daytime the foolish things they dreamed at night; and so it is necessary to hear them with a prudent, mature, and cautious mind." ⁽³⁰⁾ Women seers should be particularly mistrusted, according to Juan de Horozco in his Tratado de la verdadera y falsa prophecia (1588) because, once fooled, it was so easy for them, like Eve, to fool men. ⁽³¹⁾

Several writers thought (as the inquisitors felt in regard to Francisca) that women were tempted to have visions as a way of gaining the attention and power they lacked in society. A "discreet lady" explained around 1700 to the Franciscan Antonio Arbiol, after watching a poor woman's public penance by the Inquisition, that "everyone naturally desires wealth and esteem. Men have many ways of achieving them, whether by arms, learning, or sainthood, . . . but women who are poor and of common birth, when they see that everyone praises them and gives them everything they need when they are considered virtuous and holy, are easily fooled in this way by the devil." ⁽³²⁾ [198] Martín de Castañega in 1529 similarly used women's lack of power as one explanation for why women were more likely to be witches than men. ⁽³³⁾

These strictures applied in particular to sexually active ("sin-laden") women. Caesarius of Heisterbach wrote the following dialogue:

Novice: I wonder if Our Lady visits good women as she visits men.

Monk: There is neither male nor female in her eyes. She was born woman and she herself gave birth to the chief of all men, even Christ. Both sexes she visits and consoles, to both she reveals her secrets. ⁽³⁴⁾

The operant word here is "good." For Caesarius went on to give examples of women who saw Mary, and all were virgins. A panel of matrons examined Jeanne d'Arc at Poitiers to make sure she was a virgin as part of a theological investigation of her visions. Because her virginity was considered certain, the prosecutors at Rouen never impugned her visions on the grounds of gender.

So one is not surprised to find a double standard applied to the Spanish visionaries. In the cases studied, only one married woman, María Torrent, was the prime visionary and believed by the authorities (as opposed to six adult men, four boys or youths, and three girls). Probably the visions of adult women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did not make it past an initial round of elimination. Many of them must have been rejected like Francisca la Brava by village authorities and priests before the matter went any further.

In addition to gender, Gerson directed attention to the social and economic standing of the seers, "also whether the visionary is rich or poor, for in the one we may suspect pride or secret sensuality, in the other deception." ⁽³⁵⁾ All the Spanish visionaries, with the possible exceptions of Juan of Navas de Zarzuela and Miquel Noguer of El Torn, would have been considered poor by the authorities. As noted in regard to Inés, however, within their villages our visionaries, peasants and rural craftsmen, were not the true poor. None was a beggar, and only one was an adult day laborer (who was eventually whipped). It is true that for most of the visionaries a job as a shrine tender would mean an easier and more interesting life and would bring them respect from all levels of society, but it is hard to make a strong case, in these instances, for visions for economic gain.

The third criterion used in the Jeanne d'Arc case, that of the emotional responses of the seer, was on the minds of at least some of the Spanish investigators. That this doctrine was known in Spain can be seen from a Catalan sermon of Vincent Ferrer, probably delivered between 1412 and 1418. Ferrer was describing the appearance of the Archangel Gabriel to Zacharias, father of John the Baptist, an example of a Biblical vision used also by Gerson. ⁽³⁶⁾ 

[200] And notice that one day Zacharias went to the temple to pray and when he was praying the Angel Gabriel appeared to him on the altar, and Zacharias was terrified. "Fear not, Zacharias." You see that the doctrine is correct that when the good angel or a soul appears to a person, at first they make him terrified, because the flesh cannot bear so much; but then they console him (aconsole); hence, "Fear not."

In 1430 the vicar general of Jaén had only one or two of his many questions to each seer recorded. One of those, put both to Pedro and Juan, was whether they felt pleasure (plazer) or fear (espanto, pavor) when they saw the vision. He apparently asked the other two women also, for although no questions to them were recorded, they both reported their emotions. María Sánchez's response, like the rest of her vision (she was the only person to identify Mary and Ildefonsus), was letter perfect; she felt fear (pavor) then happiness and pleasure (gasajado y consolacion)--Saint Anthony's test for a vision of a good spirit.

The diocesan officials who questioned Miquel Noguer of El Torn in 1483 put down only three of their queries. One was how Miquel felt when Mary disappeared--was he desaconsolat or desconfortat? Miquel's answer was "correct"--molt aconsolat, very pleased. At Cubas, too, the diocesan officials were insistent on this point. In regard to four separate visions they asked Inés whether she had been frightened (si ovo miedo), the same question asked of Francisca la Brava (si ovo temor). Note that at Jaén, El Torn, Cubas, and Quintanar, the interrogators were high diocesan officials or Inquisitors, who could be expected to know the right questions to ask. The questions were not asked at El Miracle and Pinós, perhaps because the investigations, made on short notice, were by local priests. In the latter cases it is possible that the questions were asked but not recorded, for in any case the seers volunteered their emotions.

Even apart from the critical importance for discernment [201] terror or joy, the Spanish visionaries, like Jeanne d'Arc, seem to have constantly monitored their emotions, and to have been remarkably open, compared to their modern counterparts, in telling about them. For modern Westerners, emotions are the signified, the net result of experience and physiology, clear data that can be acted on. For these people five hundred years ago, certain emotions seem to have been moral indicators, or signifiers. Just what they meant was not always clear. Some emotions were unidentified, which I do not think is true in modern times. Francisca la Brava felt a pain in her heart, not her body, and anguished and prayed to know what it meant. As with that pain, some emotions were not truths in themselves, but rather a form of obscure communication from God. Like dreams, they were messages to be deciphered. Unusual emotions seem to have been discussed and commented upon among neighbors like symptoms in a moral etiology.

The Spanish authorities also made sure that complete descriptions of the saints were put in writing. In Francisca la Brava's case, repeated, detailed, inquiries about the Virgin and her clothes were designed to catch her in inconsistencies. There may have been another kind of test in these questions. Greek and Roman dreamers and visionaries were warned to observe their visions closely for deceptive features. Artemidorus of Daldis advised in regard to the appearances of heroes and demons that "each of them must be wearing his own proper attire and that he must not change it or cast it off. He must not appear in simple clothes or be without his usual weapons, since, then, whether the god signifies something good or bad, he is lying and deceiving." ⁽³⁷⁾ Martin of Tours realized a vision of Christ was really the devil when he noted Christ wore the purple robes of a king rather than the dress and stigmata of the crucifixion. ⁽³⁸⁾ Similarly, Jeanne d'Arc's interrogators may have had this criterion in mind when they asked for details about her saints. Did Saint Michael carry scales, they wanted to know.

However, the Spanish questions, except those put by the Inquisitors, seem to have had a different purpose. They were intended, I think, to make an accurate picture for posterity, especially to make a statue or painting of the saint. Visions of [202] Mary would lead to a new type or advocation, with its own clothes and stance, and here the information would be especially important.

In a canonical investigation, questions put to witnesses are often not recorded. I have summarized the recorded questions relating to Mary's appearance below:
 

Information wanted about Mary in the five cases in which questions about her were recorded (Cubas 1449, Miracle 1458, Pinós 1507, La Mota 1518, Quintanar 1523). The answers are summarized in parentheses.

her size (tamaño)--C,Q (small, see below)
her age--M (about 4)
her face--P,Q
her complexion--Q (morena)
hair length--Q,M (dk, long)
timbre of voice--C (delicate)
clothes, color--C,M,Q (see below)
belt--C (no)
falda--C (no)
headwear--C,M,Q (coif, none, coif)
crown--C (no)
color of coif--C,Q (gold, white)
calza or descalza--C,Q (varied)
carrying child--LM (no)
alone--LM,Q (yes)
walking--Q,C (yes)
woman's gait--C (yes)
odor--C,Q (no)
aura--C,Q (yes)
departure--Q,M

Whether or not it was requested, this kind of information, particularly the color of the saints' clothes, was given by nearly all the seers. Mary wore white in six visions; she wore red (vermell) at El Miracle and Pinos; and she wore gold at Cubas. Colors were not given in the hearsay reports of Reus and [203] Escaloña. At least six visions were of small saints; they are discussed below.

Jeanne d'Arc was told in 1431 that her visions were a threat to the Church and the Faith. "The great danger was shown to her that comes of someone so presumptuous as to believe they have such apparitions and revelations, and therefore lie about matters concerning God, giving out false prophecies and divinations not known from God, but invented. From which could follow the seduction of peoples, the inception of new sects, and many other impieties that subvert the Church and Catholics." ⁽³⁹⁾

The Spanish visions documented above were less momentous. The relatively local, stereotyped visions, offering pious solutions to immediate crises and identifying long-term protectors, were doctrinally harmless. Only in the sixteenth century were such visions perceived as threatening. Then they were suppressed with similar reasoning. "They are indeed vain things and prejudicial to Our Holy Catholic Faith and the souls of the simple and Catholic folk who hear them" (from the sentence of Juan de Rabe).

But even in the trials of Juan de Rabe and Francisca la Brava the language and the punishments were relatively mild for the Inquisition at that time. People did not need much persuasion to learn that times had changed. Other ways would have to be found to know for sure who were their holy helpers.

In point of fact, Jeanne d'Arc did not really threaten the Church and the Faith, although she could have if she had continued her revelations for life and taken an unorthodox turn. Certainly the theologians who rehabilitated her in 1455 and the pope who canonized her in 1920 did not consider her a threat. Jeanne was, however, a substantial threat politically for the Anglo-Burgundian cause. Lay visions in Spanish villages in the fifteenth century posed no such threat to local or royal power. On the contrary, miracles and shrines meant more business for a town's merchants, construction work for its laborers, masses [204] for its priests, and documents for its notaries. Validation was itself in the hands of the town government and the clergy. It was the priest of Santa Gadea who followed up on the vision to set up a Benedictine monastery. The Jaén visions eventually led to a new addition to the parish church. One of the seigniorial officials of the duke of Medinaceli became the majordomo of the Cubas shrine; he was the person who made sure that miracles were recorded. New grace threatens no one. The only persons possibly affected adversely would be those devoted to or profiting from preexisting grace at other shrines. But major apparitions rarely occur in towns that already have active sources of grace. The competing sources of grace belong to other towns or villages, not the political unit that decides on validation.

Hence the inquiries that have come down to us of early Spanish visions were not primarily investigations, but rather ratifications. A more thorough questioning of witnesses could give a nascent devotion more weight, but was certainly not intended to challenge it. The archbishop of Toledo gave the mayors of Cubas permission to build the new shrine in the same letter in which he ordered a thorough documentation of the visions. Patently unbelievable lay visions probably never reached the stage of a public document; and there would have been no particular reason to preserve such a document should it have been drawn up. That is why, in these rather pro forma investigations, one has only glimpses of the theological criteria applied to more serious matters. Castilians did use such criteria in earnest. Juan de Torquemada, uncle of the head of the Castilian Inquisition, had been called upon at the Council of Basel, like Gerson at Constance before him, to evaluate the revelations of Bridget of Sweden. But the Castilian Inquisition in its first years concentrated on ill-converted Jews, and only after the turn of the century did it expand its attention to other matters.

The influence of late medieval Castilian and Catalan visions rarely extended beyond a radius of 100 miles. Even that radius would be a temporary one, during the first wave of miracles. None of those studied here was reported in the official chronicles of Castile or Aragón. They were not considered earthshaking [205] events. For unlike the visions of Jeanne d'Arc, Bridget of Sweden, or Savonarola, their objective was limited and local--the establishment of a regular link of clientage and patronage between a social group and a sacred protector. As mentioned in the introduction, they were far from the only way to set up this link. Alternatives included the trial and error system of conditional community vows; the selection of protectors by lottery; and the decipherment of striking anomalies or coincidences (like the collapse of a church portal during mass on a given saint's day). Apparitions were clear, easy to read, explicit solutions. The messages given by the saints, however, rarely went beyond what the villagers could deduce from their more normal systems of selection. The theology explicit and implicit in these visions was orthodox. A general theological statement like that of Mary to Francisca, "I am She who sustains you on the face of the earth, you and every Christian," was hardly adventurous.

Nor were these visions exceptional because of the miracles they provoked. Spates of miracles were set off by the discovery of saints' bodies, fraudulently or not; the finding of statues; and most commonly of all, a striking cure at a preexisting shrine that sparked an explosion of new wonders. Such an "activation" of a statue was relatively easy to counterfeit, and such frauds were decried in diocesan decrees. ⁽⁴⁰⁾ Inés and her visions were virtually forgotten at Cubas by the end of the fifteenth century because Santa Juana was there working miracles herself.

Of all the visions studied above, only those of León (c. 1512) and El Miracle (1458) resulted in shrines that maintain a significant radius of attraction today. When in 1530 the Italian humanist Lucio Marineo Siculo listed the twelve major shrines in Spain, not one of those studied above was included. He cited the Marian shrines of Guadalupe, Pilar, Montserrat, Valvanera, and Peña de Francia; shrines to Santiago, Santa Casilda, and Santo Domingo de la Calzada; the Cámara Santa of Oviedo, the Corporales of Daroca, and the Christ of Burgos. He mentioned the Veronica of Jaén, but not Our Lady of the Capilla. ⁽⁴¹⁾

These visions were local, devotional, and protective. In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries when the Castilian nation-state turned its weapons on its Catalan and French neighbors, [206] and Spanish soldiers were fighting heretics in Germany and the Low Countries, the visible signs that succeeded true apparitions took on, or were given, political meanings. In the late medieval apparitions, these wider significances were by and large missing.

That the visions had a relatively local significance is a virtue for historians, who know least about local, personal religion. The visions of Jeanne d'Arc, Bridget, Savonarola, Teresa de Avila, and John of the Cross are well known and documented precisely because they were exceptional in their political and religious significance. Paradoxically, because the visions studied here were far more common, less is known about them; only at the most local level did they have meaning and impact. Whether viewed as true epiphanies or as exercises in religious imagination, they provide clues to the whys and hows of local religion for the Spanish towns and regions in which they occurred; and they offer terms for questions about local religion throughout Western Europe.

Like the Catalan legends collected by Camós, visions served to strengthen relations between communities and the forces of nature. The overall pattern of the human drama of the visions was similar. The saint appeared to one or more seers, generally in the countryside, almost always in the public sphere. If the saint was not already established as a protector, the seer had to persuade the town of the truth of the vision. The people were persuaded by signs such as contorted bodies, a beating, the death of a seer or a villager, the resurrection of a dead person, or the testimony of adult witnesses. Other additional signs, such as the imprints of a saint's hand or foot, or the testimony of small children, were essentially corroborative. When the town believed, the people went out to the site of the vision in procession. They then set up regular devotions and established a shrine for the saint, in return for the saint's protection. A new link was thereby made between the society and its environment, a new sacred spot defined where people could seek help.

Very few of these visions created both a new image and a new sacred place. For these towns already had many of both. The sacred geography was constantly in flux, with some places and some images gaining and others losing power and popularity. So that, other things being equal, one would not be [207] surprised if a "retired" image or place reasserted its sacred power in the visions. In fact all but two of the visions studied here explicitly or implicitly redirected the people's attention to a preexistent image or place.
 

Preexistent Images
Jaén	altar images in church of San Ildefonso
Cubas	Our Lady of Guadalupe in Extremadura
Miracle	Cross on altar of San Sebastian
Escalona	Cross in the field
León	Our Lady of El Camino
Quintanar	Our Lady of Piedad
Reus	Image in private chapel
Sant Aniol	Our Lady of Els Arcs
Preexistent Shrine/Site
Santa Gadea	abandoned parish church
Navas/Zarzuela	"la yglesuela"
Jafre	profaned spring
El Torn	interdicted shrine
Pinós	untended shrine
El Toboso	previously designated shrine sites
New Image at New Site
Navalagamella	Saint Michael in countryside
Sta Maria/Llanos	Cross on road outside town

What happened, then, was a rearrangement of priorities within a previously existing pantheon. The old system was shaken up. Some old saints were tacitly demoted, and the village redistributed its devotion to new saints in old sacred places, or old saints in new places. Continuity was built into this process; each new devotion had a comfortable, known aspect.

The combination of continuity and innovation in the sacred geography and pantheon of the community is similar to the combination of creativity and tradition manifest in the stories [208] of the visions themselves. Reading the visions in roughly chronological order, one sees the extent to which each was a recombination of known elements, with a moderate touch of novelty The vision scenarios built on techniques used for the discoveries of saints' bodies; the legends of the discoveries of statues both in nearby villages and at the major Iberian shrines; the legends and iconography of the international Mediterranean shrines; Spanish and European legends and exempla of miracle visions; the apocryphal lives of Mary, and the Bible itself. But most of all, they built on each other, borrowing a motif from two or more visions in the preceding years, and combining them in new ways.

The relation between apparitions and legends was symbiotic. Apparitions borrowed from legends, and over time they became legends. The investigations and subsequent restatements of the visions correct them, simplify them, and remove contradictions. One sees this best in the bias toward certain stereotypical motifs. For instance, visionaries were supposed to be shepherds. This process was facilitated in Castilian because the same word, pastor, refers to any kind of herding. Thus images or paintings of apparitions often have the seer with sheep, even if the seer was watching pigs or chasing a donkey. Scholars have termed this kind of vision, and those involved in the finding of statues, the cycle of the shepherds. ⁽⁴²⁾

Only four of the visions occurred to people tending sheep, however. Jeanne d'Arc was nicknamed the "shepherdess of Domremy," but her testimony was quite clear--she was not a shepherdess. She came from a well-off peasant family, spent much of her time sewing, and only occasionally took the animals back and forth from pasture. None of her visions occurred while watching sheep, because that was not one of her jobs. ⁽⁴³⁾
 

Occupations of Seers, 1399-1618

 

Tending Sheep	Tending Pigs
2 Santa Gadea	1 Cubas
1 Navalagamella
1 El Toboso	Servants
1 Reus	2 Jaén
	1 Escalona
[209] Plowman
1 Jafre	Young Children
	2 of peasants Miracle
Day Laborer	1 of clothmaker Navas
1 La Mota	(1 of blacksmith Cubas)
	(1 of weaver Reus)
Wives
2 of shepherds Jaén	dk = prob. Peasants
1 of carder Quintanar	1 El Torn
1 of laborer Sant Aniol	1 Pinós

Stephen Sharbrough has written about the reasons for the legends of shepherds--analogies with shepherds who first heard about the birth of Christ; and the association of the Mother Goddess with animals and as symbolic shepherdess of mankind. ⁽⁴⁴⁾ These legends may have had more effect as symbolic statements of human-divine relations and charters for shrines than what really happened in the visions.

The iconography and the stereotype may also have been influenced by the Christmas plays put on in cathedrals--the Officium Pastorum. At Rouen, for instance, the shepherds approached a manger, and at a dramatic moment the mid-wives opened a curtain to reveal a statue of Mary with the baby Jesus, brilliantly lit up. Some such play is known to have been given in fifteenth-century Girona. ⁽⁴⁵⁾ It is possible that the "discovery" of a venerated statue by shepherds in these plays could be transformed over time into a replaying of a supposedly historical "inventio" of the image itself by shepherds. The dramaturgy and the stereotype may in turn have influenced some real shepherds to have "real" visions. But the fact remains that only a few of the late medieval visionaries were shepherds.

How did these motifs reach the people of Castile and Catalonia before the time of print and radio? How did they hear about visions? A prime source must have been preachers. Some of the early legends, like that of the apparition of Saint Michael, would have been read and commented on in church. Clerics might know stories about Saint Catherine's in the Sinai from pilgrim accounts. There was a certain amount of circulation of members of any given order through its monasteries throughout Europe. ⁽⁴⁶⁾

[210] Another source would be simple travelers or pilgrims, who criss-crossed Catalonia and Castile on their way to Santiago de Compostela, Guadalupe, and Montserrat to fulfill promises.

Yet another would be iconography. One of the Jaén seers identified what she saw with an altarpiece. In Quintanar there was a pietà that may have resembled the tired and bleeding Mary seen by Francisca la Brava. One wonders if there were paintings of Mary embracing the Cross in or around Cubas and Escalona. A partial explanation for the appearance of Mary and Saint Sebastian as child-size adults would be that they appeared the size of their statues in the churches. Similar visions in twelfth-century England have been interpreted this way. ⁽⁴⁷⁾

People would know the legends of the nearby shrines. They would also know those of the district, regional, and national shrines, for questors gathering income from vows and carrying tokens from these shrines circulated through all of Spain's villages, as they still do in some regions today. When the shrine of Jafre was under construction, its keepers were allowed to beg for alms throughout the diocese. Questors from El Torn received permission to circulate through all of Aragon in 1493. For a shrine starting from a vision, a questor would naturally tell about the vision to gain acceptance and alms. The questors I have known in present-day Galicia circulate on foot or horseback, gathering grain or money, visiting the most remote places as well as devotees in cities. They are very thorough, and would have been so in the fifteenth century as well. A vision story in rural districts would have been big news, especially if it could mean cures for the chronically ill. In 1514, only two years after the dream or the vision of the shepherd in León, the church administrators of Our Lady of El Camino were complaining about fake questors "proclaiming bulls of our lady Saint Mary of el Camino." The shrines of Santa Gadea and Santa María de Nieva obtained papal indulgences for contributions to their construction, and these too must have been widely publicized. In some cases the visionaries themselves were sent around to gather alms and tell their story, like Alvar Simón of León. ⁽⁴⁸⁾

Once the word was out, its circulation had its own logic. For if a shrine proved miraculous, the people who were cured served [211] as living advertisements to its power. With the story of its cure, they would doubtless tell how the shrine started with a dramatic vision. Hence the incantations that led to the curing of villagers some distance away from Cubas referred to the fact that Mary appeared to Inés.

That visions and miracles were news, and that information was avidly sought by the populace as it was distributed by the shrine tenders, can be seen from its commercialization. Shortly after a crucifix was discovered in 1514 by a dog in a field near Albalate de Zorita (Guadalajara), the story of the discovery was put into verse and printed up "en letras de molde" on broadsheets sung and sold by blind men. ⁽⁴⁹⁾ This is one of the earliest references to the blind selling broadsheets in Castile. Subsequently they organized themselves into a guild. ⁽⁵⁰⁾

In Catalonia and Aragón, pilgrims at a shrine would hear and sing hymns that told the story of the image's origin. Just how early these song-legends, known as goigs or gozos (from Septem Gaudia, the seven joys of Mary) were printed up is not clear, but certainly the hymns date from long before their publication.

Any souvenirs the pilgrims brought away from an apparition site would remind them of the vision. Indeed, according to the Siete Partidas as cited above, pilgrims went to holy places precisely "in order to take something away," presumably for home cures and protection against disease and enemies. Pilgrims similarly descended on the vision sites, carrying off sand from Cubas, splinters of the cross from Escalona, water from Jafre, and stones and dirt from El Quintanar. The same occurs with the twentieth-century visions where entire trees have been removed piecemeal; and the legend of Guadalupe stated as a matter of course that all of the stones around the image's hiding place were broken up and carried off by the first delegation of pilgrims from Cáceres "as relics." The photograph of the stone of the Descent of Mary in the Toledo Cathedral shows the extent to which the reminders of holy visitations have had to be protected from pious vandals. The distribution of these relics of a holy presence ensured the repetition of the vision story.

Surely this kind of relic quest provides poignant evidence for the hunger for contact with the sacred that was met by [212] apparitions. Modern people too easily dismiss this as "superstition." For those who believe in divine apparitions, the sand on which Mary left her footprints, the leaves of a hawthorn or live oak on which she appeared, and the stone on which she sat bore her signature and were meant by her to be kept and used in memory of her visit. Perhaps this tangible immanence was the ultimate attraction of an apparition. Certainly of all the effects of a vision, it lasted the longest.

The sacralization of a place or the revitalization of a sacred place was one critical purpose of an apparition. But from Mary's messages and the peoples' questions to the seers we know that the visions had more immediate and specific meanings for the villages where they occurred. These meanings can be summarized as a series of questions.

1. Who is interceding for them?
Answers: Mary (12), Saint Anthony of Padua (1), Saint Michael (1), Saint Roch (1), not given, assumed Mary (1)
This question underlies all of the visions. By the same token, people want to know where the saints can be approached and when during the year is the best time (usually, by implication, the apparition site and time).

2. What will the future bring? Will the plague come or go? plague will come (2), plague will depend on response (4)

3. How can they affect that future?
A. What should they cease doing that they have done wrong? theft (1), blasphemy (3), village rivalries (1)
B. What should they do that they have not done? masses (5), fasts (1), prayers (1), processions (10), pay tithes and other duties (1), build shrine (10), erect cross (2), set up brotherhood (2), punish lapses (2), general conversion (3)

4. What is the situation of the dead? How can it be remedied? fulfill last wishes (2), have masses said (1), honor dead martyrs (1), have psalms sung (1)

5 What are the emblems, signatures of God to use for curing? sand, water, stones, dirt, leaves

6 What is the logic of divine behavior?

This final question is more ours than theirs. The visions reveal the character of the gods only implicitly, for this is something the seers and their communities already know. At most, the visions serve to reconfirm procedures of punishment and intercession. For the communities, the visions are living exempla, like skits sometimes acted out during sermons. They already know the sermon. The visions made known doctrine alive and immediate as something to be acted on. They also localized doctrine, gave it physical referents in time and space. That is, the visions integrated a theological system of punishment and grace into a local pantheon of saints.

At the apex of the system was a distant and severe God, named in the visions as Our Lord God, Jesus Christ, and My Precious Son. God did the punishing. "There is no one four or more years old whom my son will not reap," warned the child-Mary at El Miracle.

This God did not appear as an actor in the visions; he was always a power brooding offstage. Even as the passive child-Jesus in Mary's arms, he appeared only once, at Jaén. Although Mary at Cubas was supposed to be Our Lady of Guadalupe (an image seated with a child), Inés made no mention of a Christ-child when describing her vision in detail. Similarly, although by 1617 Our Lady of the Cross at Escalona was represented as a mother with a child in the shrine statue, Joana apparently mentioned no child, and the original painting did not show one as Mary embraced the cross. God was present only symbolically in two of the other visions, on the crucifixes and crosses the Marian figures embraced or presented.

When God was offended, he had to be persuaded, sometimes by tremendous effort, not to punish. At El Torn a child-Mary wept and prayed to "Jesus Christ, asking him to take mercy and pity on his people." She told Miquel Noguer that if the people did not convert, God would send great mortal epidemics of the plague. Vincent Ferrer had preached just this kind of preventive [214] penance and organized penitential processions not far from Pinós and El Miracle in 1415, so neither the theology nor the response was new to Catalonia. Towns and cities regularly held penitential processions when faced with major disasters. Mary fulfilled the same role at Quintanar de la Orden, telling Francisca la Brava she had been out of her house for more than thirty days praying to her precious son to send health for bodies and salvation for souls.

To a certain extent, people could do their own penance and their own persuading of God. But these penances and persuasions were best channeled through intermediaries. By appearing in visions, saints spontaneously offered their services, or rather revealed the role they had already assumed. Mary appeared to Maria Torrent of Sant Aniol in 1618 to tell her that God was angry and that She, "The Mother of God of Los Arcos, had obtained mercy and forgiveness for them from her precious son."

The saints seemed to take two kinds of stances in these visions. One was that of a cool, benevolent messenger who informed the community of its alternatives, stating the terms, as it were, for the avoidance of disaster or the maintenance of friendly relations. Such saints appeared more or less as God's agents. It was at God's initiative that Mary came to Santa Gadea--"They should know that her coming was willed by her precious son, redeemer of the human race." This stance predominated among the Marian visions and applied to all of the other saints. Michael, Anthony of Padua, and Sebastian simply delivered messages or warnings, like the unnamed divine messenger who turned up in Jafre dressed in blue.

The second stance was seen in the tearful, pleading, or penitential Marys of El Torn (1483) and Quintanar (1523). The role of the saint in this second stance was one of active, self-motivated intercession. Mary's role as the supreme advocate of sinners was not new in this period. According to contemporary miracle books and chronicles, a shepherd boy of eleven in twelfth-century Soissons, a boy of thirteen in 1126, and a Benedictine novice in 1161 in Germany all had visions of Mary interceding with God. ⁽⁵¹⁾ Around 1230 the abbots of the [215] Cistercian order were told at a general chapter about the vision of William of Clairvaux. He saw the beginning of the last judgment, but after the first trump had been sounded, "the Mother of Mercy, the Virgin Mary, knowing the world would be ended if [the trump] sounded again, whilst the rest of the saints remained silent, rose and threw herself at the feet of her Son and urgently entreated him to defer His sentence and spare the world." ⁽⁵²⁾ In the late fifteenth-century Spanish visions, Mary's intercession was more emotional, desperate, and vulnerable, less stately, queenlike and dignified. It represented the ultimate humanization of her figure, the final step from the removed goddesses of Santa Gadea and Jaén and the subsequent approachable ladies of Cubas and Escalona.

In the messenger role, the saints helped people by conveying clear signals between God and the people. Devotion subsequently made to them by the people was presumably forwarded to God. In the intercessor role, Mary helped the people in two ways--first by obtaining God's mercy, and second by showing how to pray. For with her weeping, or praying on bloody knees, embracing the cross, or walking in a procession, Mary was endorsing certain procedures of penitential piety. Similarly, in some twentieth-century visions, Mary instructs the seers in how to say the rosary correctly and dictates new kinds of prayers and devotions.

In neither of these two roles is there any question about the source of ultimate, or even approximate, power. Punishments and rewards come from God. The saints, even Mary, help only indirectly. When the villagers of New Castile replied about their religion to a questionnaire of Philip II in 1575, they occasionally attributed some effective action, beneficent or vindictive, directly to a saint. There are no such slip-ups in the vision testimony.

Scholars working from "high culture" sources would have us believe that there was no notion of childhood and that children were treated cavalierly in late medieval communities; that high infant mortality led to a low emotional investment of [216] parents in children. Le Roy Ladurie, in his detailed ethnography of the Pyreneen village of Montaillou, has challenged that view. ⁽⁵³⁾ The documents of visions in Spain support his position and indeed elaborate it in certain critical ways. Children were symbols of purity used by communities for intercession with God.

The visions at Cubas are telling. When the priest and the village men first listened to Inés's story on Sunday morning, they heard her out and did not call her crazy or say she was tipsy as her father had predicted. Instead they asked her to obtain a sign. Her treatment after the sign was received showed the town's attitude toward children as sacred objects in general.

What was a child? The children nine and ten years old with Inés in the penitential procession were referred to as niños. Inés, who was twelve and a half was referred to as a moza, mozuela, or moza niña. Moza seems to have referred to a girl past puberty. The term was especially used when inquiring about Inés's moral comportment. Witnesses were asked whether she was a "moza de buena fama" and whether she danced at weddings "like the other mozas." When asked how long he had known Inés, her neighbor said, "since she was a niña"; apparently she was a niña no longer. So the cut-off point for niña/ moza would seem to have been about age eleven or twelve.

Inés was enough of a moza so that she was not considered automatically innocent; hence the investigation of her behavior. Mozas were potentially sinful; their purity had to be preserved by rigorously avoiding occasions for sin, such as dances. The judges' persistence on this question came from a long tradition. El Libro de los exenplos (1400-1420) contains the following story: ⁽⁵⁴⁾ 

Saint Gregory in the Dialogues tells of a girl (moza) to whom the Virgin Mary appeared, showed some other girls of her age, and asked if she wanted to be with them. She replied that she would. And the Virgin Mary said to her, "Then from now on do nothing that the other girls do" and also told her to keep away from foolishness (risos) and games, and that in thirty days she would come to be with the virgins [217] she had seen. The girl did this, and when she was dying after thirty days she saw the Virgin with the girls she had come with the first time, and the Virgin called her. She replied twice, "Lady I come, Lady I come." And saying this she gave up her soul to God, and thus she died in the company of the holy virgins. From which it clearly appears that it is forbidden to holy virgins to be at dances.

Unlike mozas, niñas (and niños) had some intrinsic innocence. Little children were put with Inés at the head of the Cubas procession. The villagers' idea seems to have been to put the village's best foot forward. They decided this without any explicit instructions from the Virgin, and two of the town officials went with the children to keep them in line. The strategy bore fruit, for a boy nine years old and a girl ten years old did hear the Virgin call to Inés, and another girl nine years old saw the Virgin, although the town official who was at the front of the procession with them saw and heard nothing. Children were privileged communicators with the divine, or at least privileged receptors.

Those who ordered the Cubas procession (the priest, the mayors, the "omes buenos") certainly had a sense not only of childhood but also of the sacred importance of childhood. The Virgin shared their notions, for during the climactic apparition when she planted the cross, she also instructed Inés, now in a special consecrated state, to spend the night in the church "with some innocent young children (algunas criaturas inocentes)."

When was innocence lost? Inés, who was twelve had not lost hers, and this appeared to have weighed heavily in her favor. She was a moza who out of exceptional religiosity had maintained the purity of a niña. We might get a hint of the age of the loss of innocence from the age at which children began to confess or receive communion. Inés confessed for the first time at age six, and received communion for the first time at age nine; the first appears to have been typical, the second, precocious, doubtless because of her unusual piety. Vincent Ferrer instructed people to send their children to confess at age six, and to receive communion at age eleven or twelve. ⁽⁵⁹⁾ It would seem, then, that there was a period between ages six and twelve in which there was still a degree of innocence.

The arrangement of children in a separate, advanced place in processions points to their separate sacred estate, like the separate legal estates of women, men, nobility, and clergy. In this sense it is certainly mistaken to assert that in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist. In religious terms it was far more demarcated and accentuated in fifteenth-century Europe than in the industrial West of today. Rather one might say that our idea of childhood did not exist.

Children's sacred condition persists in devout areas of rural Spain, although it is no longer mobilized in processions. ⁽⁶⁰⁾ Certainly children are carefully controlled, but they are also [219] respected, observed, and privileged until they reach the age of sin and the world of work. When, after long intervals, I revisit a village where I have lived, I am disoriented by the passage of whole sets of children from a pampered and appreciated category to the profane, taken-for-granted status of fallen angels.

There is every indication that, in the late Middle Ages, high infant mortality, rather than hardening parents to the death of children, had the opposite effect--that of heightening their anxiety for, and love of, children. Two of the visionaries were reproved by Mary for getting angry or swearing at their children (Francisca la Brava in 1523 and María Torrent in 1618), indicating a high degree of sensitivity to child treatment. The miracles reported at Spanish shrines often involved cures of crippled children of poor parents who had escorted them from shrine to shrine over long distances.

The cases of Francisca la Brava and El Miracle drew us to the connection between Mary as a child and the dead child as an angel. The purity of young children ensured their passage to heaven. Hence Francisca la Brava was doubtless not surprised that her dead son appeared as one of the angels accompanying Mary back to heaven. It is perhaps a measure of the anxiety and attention devoted to children in these times of epidemic that Mary appeared as a child. The village next to Francisca's reported a child mortality rate four times as high as that of adults in a 1544 epidemic. ⁽⁶¹⁾ At El Miracle Mary appeared as a girl the same day a girl dead from the plague was buried on a nearby farm. Jeanne d'Arc's guardian saint, Catherine, bore the name of Jeanne's deceased sister. ⁽⁶²⁾

Philippe Ariès suggested that the motif of Mary as a child in late medieval art may have come as a result of the spread of the apocryphal gospels. ⁽⁶³⁾ The explanation might just as well run the other way. The great plagues, with their disproportionate mortality of children, might have directed the attention of society more toward children as fragile and precious beings, and this attention in turn had repercussions in iconography, emphasizing the childhood of the two great religious figures, Christ and Mary, and by the same token the motherliness of Mary and Saint Anne. The popularity of the apocryphal gospels would [220] then be a response to a need to know about and identify with the Gods as children. For these visions of Mary-as-child and child-sized Marys occurred in conjunction with or announcing epidemics, epidemics that would almost certainly strike children the hardest, like the baby in Jafre whose death, perhaps the first from that wave of the plague, confirmed Miquel Castelló's vision.

The role of children as intercessors is graphically illustrated by an account of another procession in Barcelona, one in which child mortality was explicitly mentioned. On April 12, 1507, in the midst of the great plague, the city held an elaborate procession to found a chapel to the plague saint, Sebastian. In the procession walked a man dressed as Saint Sebastian, his clothes pierced by arrows, "and after him a group of children in shirts and barefooted, flagellating themselves. Saint Sebastian would turn to the children and ask them what they wanted; and they would fall to their knees and reply, 'We all ask our lord God that we do not die so quickly from such a severe plague, and we say Lord God have mercy.' And those who said this wept with tears and lamentations so piercing that it almost broke the hearts of those who cried and those who heard them." ⁽⁶⁴⁾ Such a drama reenacts, in a way, the apparitions studied above. For in at least eleven of the sixteen visions, children served as intermediaries between society and God, whether as seers, saints, or both.

The plagues and other insecurities of late medieval society may also account for the particular form of piety encouraged in these visions: a penitential devotion to the crucified Christ. The priest of Santa María de Llanos, when he heard Juan de Rabe's confession, decided to carry on his own back the cross they would set up. Mary presenting the Cross--planting it in Cubas, embracing it in Escalona, giving it to a child in El Miracle--would seem to mark a transition from a pre-plague rural devotion centered on a powerful Mary to a post-plague devotion centered on penance. (Similarly, Saint Sebastian appeared near El Toboso to present Saint Roch.) The Mary most appropriate to accompany the Cross was the pietà, foreshadowed in the weeping child of El Torn and the Mary with bloody knees of El Quintanar.

[221] Although the major shrines of Castile and Catalonia remained Marian, overwhelmingly dedicated to Romanesque and Gothic images of Mary with the child Jesus, the miraculous signs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were almost exclusively dedicated to crucifixes and images of the Passion. The only exceptions, in addition to the two late Catalan visions of Mary already mentioned, were images of Mary that wept. ⁽⁶⁵⁾

It was not uncommon for lay people in fifteenth-century Europe to imitate Christ's passion by public self-flagellation. Some of the processions held at Mary's request at El Miracle, El Torn, Sant Aniol, La Mota, and El Quintanar, and spontaneously at Cubas, Navas de San Antonio, Navalagamella, Escalona, and Reus, may have included flagellants. As a lay, as opposed to monastic, ascetic discipline, flagellation spread from Perugia in 1260 to much of central Europe. In Italy it was soon incorporated as a regular practice in religious brotherhoods. ⁽⁶⁶⁾ It is not known when public flagellation was first practiced in Spain, but in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was used there only on special occasions, such as after a mission or during a plague, or by a special group, such as the band of flagellants that circulated with Vincent Ferrer. Before 1500 public flagellation may have been more common in Catalonia than in Castile. Juan II of Aragón permitted it in 1394, and there were flagellant processions in Barcelona in 1425 and 1427. ⁽⁶⁷⁾ One suspects that Mary's requests for processions in 1458 and 1483 were considered requests for flagellation.
 

The first penitential brotherhoods in Castile and Catalonia to practice flagellation regularly were dedicated to the True Cross and the Blood of Jesus, respectively. ⁽⁶⁸⁾ They overlapped, if at all, only with the last of the visions described. ("The Captain of the Sinners" referred to in the visions of Quintanar may have been an official in a penitent "company.") Both the visions and the brotherhoods would seem to be independent manifestations of a devotional style new to Spain, but common in Germany and Italy. ⁽⁶⁹⁾

The association of the Franciscan order with the care of the shrines in the Holy Land, and Saint Francis's identification (to the point of stigmata) with Christ's passion, make the Franciscans those most likely to have propagated devotion to the Cross [222] and the Passion. ⁽⁷⁰⁾ They were by far the most numerous order in rural Spain. The first outside preacher to give a sermon at the site of the Cubas vision of Mary of the Cross, in 1449, was a Franciscan, possibly from the nearby convent at Recas. But it would be misleading to identify with a single order what was undoubtedly a broad movement of lay piety. The Augustinians, for instance, were in charge of the most popular Castilian shrine to the Crucified Christ--the Christ of Burgos--and devotion to Christ's passion was, of course, common to all orders.

Although the visions studied here were mostly of Mary, it was the nature of the times that they and others like them in Italy should emphasize Christ and the Cross, a warning of judgment and a model of penance. Both the Cross and the child were ultimately references to the plague. The children in Barcelona processions walked directly behind a crucifix; and it was to children that Mary presented crucifixes at Cubas, Escalona, and El Miracle. Children, like Christ, would be innocent victims for the sins of the community. They were the ideal messengers, human or divine, for warnings of judgment or imitations of Christ.

2. T I 73; T II 74-75.

3. T I 161-162.

4. T I 115-118; I 133-137; T II 107-109; T II 120-124.

5. T I 136.

6. T II 56, 74, 123.

7. T II 85-86, 163.

8. T II 192, 208-210.

9. T II 210-211.

10. T I 340; T II 145, 295.

11. T II 214.

12. T I 244.

13. T I 318.

14. Jean Gerson, Opera Omnia, ed. Ellies du Pin (5 vols., Antwerp, 1706) I 43-59. Paschal Boland, The Concept of Discretio Spirituum in John Gerson's "De Probatione Spirituum," and "De Distinctione Verarum Visionum a Falsis," Studies in Sacred Theology, Second Series, 112 (Catholic Univ. of America, Washington, D.C., 1959).

15. Dorothy G. Wayman, "The Chancellor and Jeanne d'Arc," Franciscan Studies 17 (1957) 273-303. Wayman's text is more in keeping with Gerson's earlier treatises than the questionable essay, possibly a forgery, used at the 1455 trial and reprinted in almost all editions of Gerson's works.

16. P. Doncoeur and Y. Lahors, Documents et Recherches relatifs à Jeanne la Pucelle (Paris, Librairies d'Argences, 1956) Vol. 3 70 ff.; Saint Athanasius, The Life of St. Anthony, trans. Robert T. Meyer (Westminister Md., The Newman Press, 1950).

17. Iamblichus, De Mysteriis, ed. Ed. des Places (Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1966) II 3.

18. T I 87.

19. William A. Christian Jr., Person and God in a Spanish Valley (New York, Academic Press, 1972) 139.

20. T I 73.

21. T I 86, 122.

22. T I 138.

23. Doncoeur and Lahors, Documents II 80-83.

24. Pedro Ciruelo, Reprobacion delas supersticiones y hechizerias [first ed. 1530 (?)] Rev. ed. (Salamanca, Pedro de Castro, 1541) Book III, Ch. 8. An edition was printed in the Colección Joyas Bibliográficas, Madrid, 1952.

25. Sánchez, Libra exenplos 329-330.

26. J. M. de Garganta and V. Forcada, Biografia y escritos de San Vicente Ferrer (Madrid, B.A.C., 1956) 465-541 and V. Beltran de Heredia, "Los alumbrados de la diócesis de Jaén," in Miscelánea III 324-334.

27. Ciruelo, Reprobación, Book II, Ch. 1.

28. Gerson, "De Probatione Spirituum" in Boland, The Concept, 37.

29. Gerson, Omnia Opera I 15 cited in J. L. Connolly, John Gerson, Reformer and Mystic (Louvain, Librairie Univ., 1928).

30. Pedro Navarro, Favores de el Rey de el cielo . . . (Madrid, Thomas Iunti, 1622) 7.

31. Juan Horozco y Covarrubias, Tratado de la verdadera y falsa prophecia (Segovia, luan de la Cuesta, 1588) 57rv.

32. Antonio Arbiol, Desengaños mysticos a las almas detenidas, o engañadas en el camino de la perfection Impresion Nona (Barcelona, Thomas Piferrer, 1772) 78.

33. Martín de Castañega, Tratado de las supersticiones y hechicerias [1529] (Madrid, Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles, 1946) Ch. 5.

34. Caesarius, Dialogue I 481.

35. Gerson, "De Probatione Spirituum" in Boland, The Concept 30-31.

36. Vincent Ferrer, Sermons (3 vols., Barcelona, Ed. Barcino) II (1971) 15: E veus que hun dia Zacaries anà al temple per fer oració, e, áxi com fahia oració, l'àngel Gabriel li apparech al cap del altar, e Zacaries hacne terror. 'Ne timeas, Zacaria.' E sapiats que doctrina és certa que quan appar 1'àngel bo o la ànima a qualque persona, tantost le dóna terror, car la earn no u pot sostenir; mas, tantost aconsole la persona; e per ço: 'No temats.' This was a common illustration. See also C.S.M. Kniazzeh and E. J. Neugaard eds. Vides de Sants Rosselloneses (3 vols., Barcelona, Fundació S. Vives Casajuana, 1977) III 318.

37. Artemidoris of Daldis, On the Interpretation of Dreams, trans. Robert J. White (Park Ridge, N.J., Noyes Press, 1975) II 40.

38. Sulpicius Severus, Life of St. Martin of Tours, trans F. R. Hoare, in The Western Fathers (New York, 1954) 89.

39. T I 340-341.

40. Christian, Local Religion, 103-105, 247.

41. Lucio Marineo Siculo, De las cosas memorables de España (Alcala, Miguel de Eguia, 1530) 91r-93r, "De las casas que ay en España de deuocion y Romeria."

42. Vicente de la Fuente, Vida de la Virgen María con la historia de su culto en España (2 vols., Barcelona, 1879) II 41; Staehlin, Apariciones, 148-149; Sharbrough, "The Cult of the Mother," 90 ff.

43. T II 45, text and note.

44. Sharbrough, "The Cult of the Mother," 93-100.

45. Richard B. Donovan, The Liturgical Drama in Medieval Spain (Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1958) 110-118. On the pastorets, Catalan nativity plays acted out by children, see Francesc Curet, Història del teatre Català (Barcelona, Aedos, 1967) 41-43.

46. Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims; Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London, Dent, 1977) 160, for circulation of information on miracles among preachers by letter.

47. Ibid., 34.

48. Alvarez, La Virgen del Camino, 86, 56.

49. Investigation in Albalate de Zorita (Guad.) was made in 1555; transcript in parish archive is from end of the eighteenth century.

50. Jean-François Botrel, "Les aveugles colporteurs d'imprimés en Espagne," Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 9 (1973) 417-482, 10 (1974) 233-272.

51. Mario Martins, "Narrativas da Apariçoes de Nossa Senhora (ate ao sec. XII)," Acta Salamanticensis (1958) 703-722.

52. Caesarius, Dialogue II 344.

53. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, village occitain de 1294 à 1324 (Paris, Gallimard, 1975) 306-309.

54. Sánchez, Libra exenplos, 84.

55. Barcelona, Dietari, I 251, 238; Jordi Rubio, "El b. fra Mateu d'Agrigento a Catalunya i Valencia" Gesammelte Ausatze zur Kulturgeschicte Spaniens (Munster) 11 (1955) 115.

56. Lionel Rothkrug, "Popular Religion and Holy Shrines," in James Obelkevich ed., Religion and the People, 800-1700 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1979) 20-86, 61-62; E. R. Labande, "Les pèlerinages au Monte-Saint-Michel pendant le moyen-âge," in Baudot, Culte de Saint Michel, 247-248; bibliography in Ulrich Gabler, "Die Kinderwallfahrten aus Deutschland und der Schweiz zum Mont-Saint-Michel 1456-1459," Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Kirchengeschicte 63 (1969) 221-231. See also Richard Trexler, "Adolescence and Salvation in Florence," in Trinkhaus and Obermann, The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion (Leiden, Brill, 1974) 200-264, and Chapter 11 of his Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, Academic Press, 1980).

57. Gabriel Llompart, "Penitencias y penitentes en la pintura y la piedad catalana bajomedievales," Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares 28 (1972) 229-249, gives other instances.

58. 58. Barcelona, Dietari III 405, 468-470.

59. Vincent Ferrer, Sermons III (1975) 185, 285. See also Jacques Toussaert, Le Sentiment Religieux en Flandres à la fin du moyen-âge (Paris, Plon, 1963) 107-108. According to Antonio de Cordova, Tratado de casos de consciencia, rev. ed. (Toledo, Diego de Ayala, 1578) 164-169, the normal age of discernment, beyond which children could mortally sin, and therefore beyond which they had to confess such sins, was seven. The age for obligatory annual confession was 11-12. Communion was obligatory after age 12-13 for women and 14-15 for men.

60. Christian, Person and God 155-157.

61. Relaciones To II 252 (Puebla de Almoradiel).

62. For a Florentine dream vision of Saint Catherine in 1407 intimately connected to the death of the visionary's 10-year-old son from disease, see Richard Trexler, "In Search of Father: The Experience of Abandonment in the Recollections of Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli," History of Childhood Quarterly III 2 (Fall 1975) 247-251.

63. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (New York, Vintage Press, 1962).

64. Barcelona, Dietari III 201.

65. Christian, Local Religion, 195-199.

66. Il movimento dei Disciplinati nel settimo centenario dal suo inizio (Perugia, Deputazione di storia patria per I'Umbria, Appendici al Bollettino 9, 1962); P. Bailly, "Flagellants" Dictionnaire de Spiritualité V 392-408.

67. Gabriel Llompart, "Desfile iconográfico de penitentes españoles," Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares 25 (1969) 31-53.

68. Christian, Local Religion, 185-190.

69. For votive prints of the Crucifixion, the intercession of Mary, and even the child Jesus bearing a scourge, which were used to ward off the plague in Germany 1450-1520, Peter Streider, "Folk Art Sources of Cranach's Woodcut of the Sacred Heart," Print Review (Spring 1976) 160-166.

70. It was the explicit policy of the order in the last half of the fifteenth century especially to promote devotion to Christ's Passion. Raphael Huber, A Documented History of the Franciscan Order (Milwaukee and Washington, 1944) 909-910.