Narratives of Fluency. Miracles of Mary and Mariology between Byzantium and the West, in After the Text: Byzantine Enquiries in Honour of Margaret Mullett, eds. L. James, O. Nicholson, R. Scott, Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies 32, Abingdon-on-Thames and New York, Routledge, 2022, 72–84.

In this chapter I comment on an account of a miracle performed by the Virgin Mary through which Abbot Ambrose Autpert (d. 784) acquired a fluency of speech. Retrospectively, his biographer hints at the fact that this fluency was put to good use. The account also implicitly suggests that thanks to Mary’s direct intervention, Autpert became a promoter of her cult and at the same time developed an organic vision of her role in the economy of salvation which he expounded in his writings. Through theological commentaries and homilies on the Virgin, Autpert influenced the way she came to be perceived in the West. In fact, whilst in Byzantium Mariology was established earlier, in the West – after the celebration of Mary’s virginity by Ambrose of Milan (d. 397) and the promotion of Marian devotion by Bishop Ildefonsus of Toledo (d. 667) – a specific theological reasoning about the Mother of God only took shape with Autpert, hence he is widely acknowledged as the first early medieval Mariologist. I will remark his dependence on the Byzantine tradition, which has been previously suggested but never demonstrated. As a consequence of this dependence, the early medieval reasoning on Mary came to share many fundamental traits with Byzantine Mariology.