[Page numbers of the printed text appear at the right in bold.]

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Notes 1. See, for example, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame par Gautier de Conci, ed. V. Frederic Koenig, 4 vols. (Geneva, 1955-70), 3:11-22.
2. Los Milagros de Nuestra Se¤ora, ed. B. Dutton (London, 1971), pp. 90-92.
3. Koenig, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame, 2:197-204.
4. Colin Morris, The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 436-37. "[C]anonists," writes Morris, "regarded as perhaps the most important Lateran decision canon 21, omnis utriusque sexus, which commanded every adult to make his or her confession once a year, to perform the penance enjoined, and to receive the sacrament of the eucharist at Easter. The publication of the decree implies that annual confession and communion were not universal and the requirement to publish it frequently and to enforce it upon pain of suspension . . . strengthens the impression that a new requirement was being imposed."
5. Morris, The Papal Monarchy, pp. 298-302. "It would be more accurate," according to Morris, "to describe the changes taking place as a withdrawal of the liturgy from the people. . . . The worship of the early church had been that of believers who had confessed the faith in baptism and assembled for the common meal in the weekly eucharist, and who required training and support for their task of upholding the gospel in a pagan world. The local congregation had, by the twelfth century, assumed a quite different form, with universal child baptism and very infrequent communion in a society which officially accepted a monolithic Christian world-view. . . . The collapse of a common liturgy, and the failure to use it as a means of communication with the laity, was balanced by a growth of subsidiary ceremonies which were designed to present the Biblical message in a more simplified form (among which was) the use of images. The officium stellae ended with the adoration of the image of the Virgin and child, which was probably placed on the altar for the occasion. . . . Their value in stirring up devotion was recognized from the beginning of our period."
6. See note 27 below.
7. Michael E. Goodich, Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century: Private Grief and Public Salvation (Chicago, 1995), p. 2.
8. The institution of the Church suffered accordingly, especially at the diocesan level, where discipline was lax and morale tended to be low. In addition, the Crusades, lasting from 1095 to the mid-fifteenth century, fueled a militancy in medieval Christendom which was very detrimental to the spirit of the Church. Innocent III had, from 1199 on, championed the political machinations necessary to initiate the Fourth Crusade. He was later devastated by reports of the horror he had helped unleash, but unable to think what else he might have done. See Morris, The Papal Monarchy, p. 440.
9. Morris, The Papal Monarchy, pp. 450-51.
10. It is not hard to sense, in certain medieval Spanish works, the resonances of these reforms of the standards of priestly conduct. The Libro de Buen Amor, which is supposed by many (but not all) scholars to have been written by an embittered archpriest in ecclesiastical confinement, is a case in point. Even if

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the traditional understandings about authorship are wrong, the many complaints in the Libro against "repressive" Church policies especially relating to sexual incontinence make the point. Likewise, in his translation Milagros de Nuestra Se¤ora, Gonzalo de Berceo promulgates a collection extensively concerned with the problems of orthodox prohibitions and the difficulties arising from their application to real situations, especially those of religious living in order.
11. Morris, The Papal Monarchy, pp. 340-43.
12. Morris, The Papal Monarchy, pp. 467-70.
13. Marguerite Porete: The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. Ellen L. Babinsky, intro. Robert E. Lerner, (New York, 1993), p. 11.
14. Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Los Angeles, 1972), p. 233.
15. The Mirror of Simple Souls, pp. 11-13.
16. Tzvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse (Cambridge, 1990), p. 17.
17. Todorov, Genres in Discourse, p. 7.
18. Todorov, Genres in Discourse, pp. 9-11.
20. This is true even in modern times. Puccini's one-act opera Suor Angelica is a classic Marian miracle tale.
21. For a study of the influence of the liturgy in the mariological works of Gonzalo de Berceo, see Jo‰l Saugnieux, Berceo y las culturas del siglo XIII (Logro¤o, 1982), pp. 45-57.
22. Barbara Nolan, "Chaucer's Tales of Transcendence: Rhyme Royal and Christian Prayer in
the Canterbury Tales," in Chaucer's Religious Tales, eds. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, Chaucer Studies 15 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 21-38, at 37.
23. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H‚lŠne Iswolsky (Bloomington, 1984), p. 10.
24. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 14.
25. The American poet Ezra Pound went so far as to suggest that the troubadours' art, for example (and even some subject matter, reapplied), may have been learned in monasteries. See The Spirit of Romance (New York, 1968), pp. 98-99.
26. See, for example, "San Pedro y el monje lozano," in Dutton, Los Milagros de Nuestra Se¤ora, pp. 75-77.
27. Dutton, Los Milagros de Nuestra Se¤ora, pp. 75-77.
28. Dutton, Los Milagros de Nuestra Se¤ora, pp. 90-92. The quotation is line 224, p. 90.
29. Sarah Stanbury, "The Virgin's Gaze: Spectacle and Transgression in Middle English Lyrics of the Passion," PMLA 106 (1991), 1083-93.