Description
This paper examines a founding legend of the rosary that likely originated from the Cantigas de Santa Maria (late thirteenth century) and circulated in northeastern Spain before migrating directly from Valencia to Mexico City in the late 1500s. At its core is the rosary, an instrument of Catholic devotion associated with the Dominican Order, which played a key role in promoting its use through lay confraternities. The most significant rosary confraternity of the early modern period was founded at the Dominican house in Cologne, Germany, in 1476 by Jacob Sprenger, a theologian, inquisitor, and co-author of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, a treatise that fueled widespread persecution of alleged witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the 1490s, confraternities following Sprenger’s model had emerged in Barcelona and Valencia. These, in turn, were influential in establishing the first rosary brotherhoods among the indigenous Mexica (Aztecs) and Catholic Europeans in Mexico City and its surrounding areas.
Central to the literature of rosary brotherhoods in Spain and Mexico is a purported founding miracle of Sprenger’s confraternity, known as "The Knight of Cologne." Interestingly, this story is entirely absent from documents directly tied to Cologne itself. After tracing the probable origins of the legend in Cantiga 121, this paper follows its transmission through the preaching of St. Vincent Ferrer, as well as through incunabula tied to the Dominican houses of Barcelona and Valencia, before it appeared in early printed catechisms in Mexico. Developed, adapted, and transmitted in song, sermon, and print over centuries and across vast geographical distances, the inter-Iberian and trans-Atlantic journey of "The Knight of Cologne" illustrates an impactful, multimodal dialogue among devotional cultures during the early period of globalization—one facilitated by emerging technologies in manuscript and print production.
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