The Miracle Accounts

This chapter provides a semiological interpretation of the reading of miracle accounts in Jonas’s hagiography in seeking to understand the function that these accounts played within the texts. It argues that miracle accounts functioned differently with different texts and over time. It builds on the work of French historian Jean-Louis Derouet, who advanced a semiological interpretation of miracle accounts by contrasting them in two different hagiographical corpora from the seventh century. It categorizes miracles according to function, not type, following Pierre-André Sigal’s seminal methodological work on miracles in French saints’ Lives from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Sigal’s classification system of miracles is applied with Derouet’s semiological interpretation to provide a new reading of the miracle accounts in Jonas’s hagiography.