Miraculous Images of the Virgin Mary in Monastic Imagination

The pictorial legends and exempla in the fourteenth-century manuscript from the Český Krumlov monastery (Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 370) feature many scenes in which Marian images play a very active role. These pictures can be understood as meta-images that convey the meanings and functions of Marian paintings and statues within contemporary monastic culture. The role of Marian images in parables serving medieval anti-Semitism has recently been elucidated. Some of their topics—for example, the Marian miracles described by Caesarius of Heisterbach—are only slightly altered from their sources. However, the codex also contains stories for which no convincing analogies or textual sources have yet been found. Some of these narratives came from the Christian East, such as the legend of St Paul the Hermit, which this manuscript presents in a substantially transformed form. The paper will provide a brief pictorial and textual presentation of these narratives, together with a state-of-the-art review and an attempt to catalogue the open questions that could be discussed at the roundtable.