Michelle Karnes's "Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World"

Michelle Karnes is associate professor of English and the history of philosophy and science at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages and the coeditor of Studies in the Age of Chaucer.

Karnes applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World, and reported the following:

Page 99 focuses on Thomas Bradwardine's fourteenth-century De causa Dei and the views about marvels that he describes there. One-time archbishop of Canterbury, Bradwardine wrote the work to argue that God's power has few limitations. Here, he's describing how the parting of the Red Sea resonates in different stories, and specifically non-Christian ones. He cites Pliny, who tells a story about honorable people who could walk on fire without harm, and then turns to Alexander the Great, who created a barrier to keep Jews on the Caspian mountains. Without drawing connections, Bradwardine suggests that God can open or close pathways as he chooses. He saved the Jews who crossed the Red Sea by parting its waters, as he allowed the Hirpi to cross fire without harm. His enemies, however--and Bradwardine is characteristically antisemitic here--are unable to move forward, stuck on a mountain without egress. Bradwardine compares the parting of the Red Sea only implicitly to these other situations. The unusualness of the marvels, which have nature operating against its instincts because fire does not burn and water does not flow, shows that there are larger forces at play in the world, that nature isn't operating independently.

A reader who only looked at page 99 would be very confused! They'd find themselves in the middle of an 8-page section on Bradwardine, and would probably think that the book is more focused on religious literature than it is. Let's discourage readers from adopting Ford's test. It's the test that's flawed, not my book. Of course.

I do actually love this section of the book, if read in its entirety. I'd been grappling with Bradwardine's dense Latin for a while when I found this section, with dozens of stories that seem unrelated to each other, some fictional and some not, drawn from all sorts of different times and places. I was poring over it when I suddenly realized that all the stories were supposed to be versions of the parting of the Red Sea. I was so happy that I had to take a walk. I was at the Radcliffe Institute at that point, just starting serious research on this book, and I took a little stroll around Cambridge as I tried to figure out what was so exciting about this passage. It was one of the first things I read that I just knew would end up in the book. It shows how the weirdness of marvels invites all sorts of creativity, here with an unintuitive collection of stories that even includes pagans. Bradwardine tells us that Claudia Quinta survived a journey at sea because she carried a statue of the pagan goddess Cybele, and that the vestal virgin Tuccia proved her chastity by carrying a sieve full of water from the Tiber to her Temple without spilling any of it. Both women showed their virtue by completing seemingly impossible journeys. As I write about Tuccia, on page 102 (if I'm allowed to depart from page 99), "The unlikely soundness of the sieve proves the virgin's chastity: herself whole, she makes an object designed to release liquids contain them. Her walk of nonshame is the parting of the Red Sea abstracted." The passage helped me see how the creativity of marvels is reflected in the creativity of those who wrote about them. It's more important that they be surprising than true, and the reader is invited to marvel not just at them but at the cleverness they inspire.

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--Marshal Zeringue