Ethiopic Miracles: A Database to Link Images and Texts of Marian Miracles

digitalorientalist.com The Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean & Egyptian Miracles of Mary Project (PEMM), hosted by Princeton University, aims to bring together the miracles of the Virgin Mary that have circulated in the cultural space of Ethiopian Christianity since the medieval period. Miracles, an extremely popular genre in Ethiopian Christianity, are fairly short texts, in which trivial or unusual situations are resolved by a miraculous intervention, in our case that of the Virgin Mary. They are written in Ge’ez, the classical Ethiopian language. They form collections that vary significantly in size and composition. Some miracles are widespread, while others are rare. In quantitative terms, this is a substantial corpus of both textual and iconographic material, with more than a thousand different Marian miracles. However, exhaustive descriptive tools for these materials have so far been lacking. The Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean & Egyptian Miracles of Mary Project (PEMM) came into existence in 2018. Its aim is to use the possibilities offered by databases to create links between the manuscripts containing compilations of Marian miracles.