Paperback: Apparitions in late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (1981) investigates the world of images in the minds of the people of rural Castile and Catalonia in the fifteenth century.
Like most other peoples, Spaniards have long wondered about God and the saints - what they want from mortals, how they affect human affairs, even what they look like. The most direct evidence has come from face to face meetings with the holy ones. These meetings are the subject of this book.
For this purpose, it comprises a series of verbatim reports of celestial visions of common people, children, farmers, shepherd's wives and servants. They, too, sought to represent the world of images, what they saw and heard, in words, like the poets; at times they seemed characters in a public sacred play; and their descriptions became the basis for paintings and statues.
Rather than explaining away the visions, or even explaining them, the author has tried to learn from them how people experienced both the world they knew and the world they had to imagine. These were extraordinary moments when the two intersected, and Mary and the saints were with them.
The author has included complete texts wherever feasible, and has placed them in the forefront with a minimum of introduction for each, so readers can form their own opinions and make their own discoveries before reading the author's glosses. The author hopes you will experience in some measure the excitement felt by the villages and townspeople of Castile and Catalonia when these epiphanies took place.
About the author: William A Christian Jr (b 1944) is an American religious historian and independent scholar who lives in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. He was the JE and Lillian Byrne Tipton Distinguished Visiting Professor in Religious Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. Christian is a graduate of the University of Michigan (PhD 1971).
His books include Augustine on the Creation of the World (1953), Person and God in a Spanish Valley (1972), Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (1981), Moving crucifixes in modern Spain (1992), Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ (1996) and Divine Presence in Spain and Western Europe 1500-1960: Visions, Religious Images and Photographs (2012).
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