Poetics of wonder

The unexpected return of contemporary public Christian miracles in the late antique Latin west, after a centuries-long assumption that these had ceased after apostolic times, helped to create a religious mentality there that would continue to characterize the western European Middle Ages. While the social and political functions of the new miracles have been gaining greater scholarly attention, this study is the first in-depth treatment of their experiential dimension. It examines this dimension in the first reactions to the new phenomenon - enthusiasm, puzzlement, deep suspicion, and outright rejection - as they are reflected and, especially, imagined in the earliest contemporary narrative and poetic sources that describe them.