Miracles at the Jesus Oak, by Craig Harline
How will Maria nurse her starving baby? How will a burned son be healed? Will the former prostitute Aldegonde break loose from the watchful sisters with whom she has been placed? Should a search party try to retrieve the stolen communion wafer tossed in the privy? Craig Harline's engaging essays, drawn from archival sources of miracle stories from the middle decades of the 17th-century Spanish Netherlands, present women and men trying to answer such questions in negotiation with sometimes dubious doctors and occasionally conniving clergy.
Harline's subjects live in the contested terrain between the medieval world and the modern, between the sacred and the secular and between the Protestant and Catholic divides of the Counter-Reformation. The faithful and the gullible face a withering array of choices as the "new" orders (Capuchins, Theatines, Jesuits) compete daily with Dominicans, Franciscans and Benedictines for the loyalty and support of the people, while bishops, lawyers and doctors present new roles with changing rules.
The not-so-private lives of early-modern women and men are shown through their difficult choices. Who has the authority to explain what is miraculous and what is superstition? Which is more effective, confession at an "established" pilgrimage site or at an increasingly popular but unsanctioned site? Can a doctor really tell the difference between the natural and the supernatural? And will the doctors lose authority if they acknowledge mystery or the supernatural? When should saints be invoked, and when are more earthly remedies preferred? Should the bishop intervene in a jurisdiction dispute? In a world filled with dangers and Protestants, who is to be entrusted with people's faith, hopes, fears and ambitions?
