Miracles and Memory: The Virgin of Chiquinquirá and her People in the Seventeenth-Century New Kingdom of Granada

This dissertation examines the geneses of devotion to the Virgin of the Rosary of Chiquinquirá, now national patron of Colombia. I begin in 1586 with a miracle – the first of many – which signaled the activation of a painting of the Virgin Mary then hanging, neglected, in an open-air mission chapel in the New Kingdom of Granada. I explore ways in which the proliferation of miracles over a long seventeenth century fueled not only devotion to this local Marian advocation, but desire, including the desire of certain churchmen to elicit and preserve the memory of Mary’s favors. I demonstrate that as people testified under oath to their marvelous experiences before recording notaries, vestiges of colonial mentalities and lived worlds – reflections of contemporary society and culture – were preserved also. Devotion to Our Lady of Chiquinquirá was born in the translatable “thin places” of familiarity and rapprochement between Catholic Christianity and indigenous cosmologies, and its longevity was forged in the early intercessory processions which first introduced this Virgin to all kinds of people. I describe the hopeful who came to her rural shrine in pilgrimage, carrying away numinous relics and sharing stories of hopes fulfilled. I show how news of the Virgin’s interventions spread to needful believers throughout Spanish America and the Mediterranean basin as an aspect of their Catholic cosmopolitanism. Mary of Chiquinquirá was effectively championed by a series of promoters, some of whom also sought benefits which flowed from controlling the image and cult. In an evolving, often-perilous colonial landscape, this American Virgin became both community mediator and intimate personal advocate for many different people. Early preservation of the Virgin’s miracles was undertaken over the course of three texts: an información jurídica (1587-1589); an unpublished collection of juridical miracle testimonies (1651-1654); and the first published sacred history (1694). I examine these sources in a five-part study, with particular attention to ways in which the last, best-known historian of the sacred redacted the testimonies of miracles collected by the notary-priests who came before him. And I reveal how these texts, connected and complementary, illuminate the people who lived within the Virgin’s sphere.Ph.D