ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role of the mental image in a kind of text which still somewhat baffles medieval historians: the miracle story. It describes the midst of a continuous development along an ostensibly linear course of this-worldly causation, what appear to be sudden intrusions of a completely different kind of dynamic. In the past decades, however, a semiotic approach has fruitfully analyzed them as documents of social history in which the subjects act out and address contemporary ideological, social and personal concerns. Gregory was bishop of Tours in a politically unstable and physically insecure late sixth-century Gaul that was ruled by warlike and quarrelsome Frankish kings. Gregory's world looked different: as he frequently indicates, he based his world view squarely upon Christ's unambiguous statements. Gregory's miracle story is inexplicable only as long as one attempts to understand it as a discursive statement about sensory-concrete events.
