From devotional sensorium to hagiosensorium: Los Milagros de Guadalupe as a sacralising text of the experience of Christian captives

Abstract

The notion of devotional sensorium is related to the vitality and variety of the medieval sensorium and points out changing sensory relationships, connected to inter-sensory, synaesthesia and the significant impact of votive objects, whose materiality operates in the social and institutional determination of religious practices that are, in their origin, individual and/or specific. This concept links to that of sacral sensorium or hagiosensorium but they are not the same. While last one has a hierarchical orientation from “top down”, since ecclesiastical, legal and politic authorities impose it on the social body through normative texts, regulated practices and controls, the first one proceeds from “bottom up”, as it is the same devotee who carries out a practice, framed in a personal experience, which will enter the orthodoxy through diverse texts collecting the experience through specific rhetorical images, mainly by popular diffusion.In the relationship of these conceptualizations, which refer to differentiated instances of religious medieval practice, we will analyse the role that textualization plays in the transition from one sensorium to another. We will consider specifically some miraculous stories compiled in Los Milagros de Guadalupe (LMG).That compilation went through various instances of discursive production, a process that indicates the coexistence and the interdiscursive relationships between oral communities and literate intellectual groups or elites. In this way, the written text of LMG constitutes the means by which the literate producers establish a sensitive and empathetic link between the subjects of the statement –the Christian captives– and the rest of the devotees of the Virgin of Guadalupe to promote the cult and pilgrimage to the Sanctuary. In addition, the work is fundamental for, on the one hand, fixing the miraculous acts of Mary in the collective memory and, on the other, sacralising and institutionalizing individual pious experiences, that is, moving from the devotional sensorium to the hagiosensorium.