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The Child’s Body Cut to Pieces as a Lesson Staged Through Narrative – Mirakulʼ ot tela božiê (The Miracle of the Body of God) From the Petris Miscellany (1468)
Igor Medić
; Institut za hrvatski jezik
Sažetak
The paper presents a layered interpretation of a previously unexplored text from the Glagolitic Petris Miscellany (1468), which begins with the incipit Čte(nie) mirakulʼ ot tela božiê (The Miracle of the Body of God) (37v–39r). The text was originally included in the early Christian collection Vitae patrum, i.e., the Verba seniorum, and is structured as a story teaching the real presence of Christ in the consecrated host. Two hermits attempt to persuade a third to believe in the real presence, but he refuses. Subsequently, during Mass, all three experience a vision which, at the moment the monk breaks the host, reveals an angel cutting up the bloody body of a child. When the sceptical hermit comes to believe in the Eucharistic mystery, the bloody pieces of flesh turn back into the host. The text, treated as an exemplum, is analysed in detail and compared with the Croatian Latin-script version of the story from Žića svetih otaca (14th century). It is argued that the story was transmitted and read for several reasons in late medieval culture as well. The skilfully narrated and visually powerful staging of the moral in the exemplum is linked, in line with the cultural-historical research of Caroline Walker Bynum and Miri Rubin, to changes in the way the Eucharist was venerated and experienced in the late Middle Ages, as well as to the significance that the texts from the Vitae patrum collection held for various religious orders in this period. The central motif is also placed within a broader literary-historical context and compared with related motifs in Western European exempla. In the concluding part, the story is connected to other Glagolitic exempla about the host, which have so far remained unexplored, both individually and as a whole.
Ključne riječi
Petris Miscellany, Vitae patrum, host, Eucharist, Passion, exemplum
Hrčak ID:
349661
URI
Datum izdavanja:
23.7.2026.
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