A Note on Titles and Catalogues

The breadth of international scholarship on Miracles of the Virgin over the last century or so (beginning with Adolfo Mussafia's work in 1886–98) has put into use a frustrating variety of editorial titles for individual miracles. As is often the case with exemplary literature, the number of analogues or related narratives associated with a given tale increases the confusion. Many scholars writing on Marian miracles will use titles eclectically, and some knowledge of existing catalogues is necessary for comparative work and source studies. For the most part, I have titled miracles in accordance with either the MWME XXIV or Peter Whiteford's catalogue of Middle English miracles (in The Myracles of Oure Lady). Whenever generally accepted titles misrepresent the content of an English version of a common tale or gloss over important distinctions between versions, however, I have made small adjustments or omitted titles altogether, and some collation with available lists is therefore of interest.

To facilitate further research, I index here all Miracles of the Virgin discussed in this book, collated wherever possible with three important reference works that will, in turn, provide further bibliographical information. Albert Poncelet compiled almost 1,800 Latin incipits in his ‘Index miraculorum B. V. Mariae quae saec. VI–XV latine conscripta sunt’, Analecta Bollandiana 21 (1902), pp. 242–360, and these are now available online as the Electronic Poncelet, maintained through Oxford's CSMD. The Oxford database, which was launched in 2005 and continues to evolve, is an important new resource for scholars interested in Marian legends. Though its focus is the large thirteenth-century Galician-Portuguese verse collection of the Castilian King Alfonso X, it incorporates user-friendly cross-references, bibliographies, summaries, keyword links, and manuscript and analogue information that are wide-ranging and searchable. MWME XXIV catalogues information specific to extant Middle English miracles and includes content summaries and bibliographies keyed to individual miracles (as endnotes).

In what follows, miracles are ordered alphabetically, according to the titles I habitually use or (when I have not used a title) according to a CSMD or MWME XXIV heading.