Material and immaterial forms of miracle appropriation among the neogranadina population, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries

Abstract

The paper analyzes the forms of production, appropriation and circulation of miracles among the population of Nueva Granada, in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The concept of miracle as a condition of possibility of “the Christian as wonderful”, according to relations or travel diaries written by clerics of different regular and secular orders, who travelled through the territory with missional purposes, was used to draw a typology of the facts identified. The methodology is oriented by a popular look of miracles and studies the production of local saints as a process, the ecclesiastical rhetoric informing about the assistance of these saints in disease, the configuration of tangible and intangible expressions of gratitude and the phenomena of miracle circulation and dissemination at the center of the mentioned territory. Four categories of miracles were identified –of an image on itself, assistance, physical and thaumaturgic- and were classified as impersonal, individual or collective.