told that not all of this milk need be that with which the Virgin nourished her divine Son. The Virgin, it seems, has been accustomed all through the ages to give nourish- ment to her children in their times of deadly need, and even her statues and paintings may, on occasion, supply it.69 We are here in conta.ct with a wide-spread legend of mystical nourishment which was current toward the end of the Middle Ages. "Mary was looked upon," as Yrjo Hirn explains,70 "not as an individual human being, but as an incarnation of an eternal principle which had exer- cised its power long before it became embodied in the figure of a Jewish girl. The Madonna's motherly care had previ- ously been directed to all the faithful, who had been fed by her 'milk' in the same way as the Child of Bethlehem. In Mechthild's revelations it is even expressly said that the Madonna suckled the prophets before Christ descended into the world. Later, she fed, during His childhood, 'the Son of God and all of us/ and when He was full-grown she offered her milk to the Christian Church. All friends of God could get strength at her bosom. 'Eja, darnach sollen wir bekennen— Die Milch und auch die Briiste— Die Jesus so oft kiisste.' " 71 There is symbolism here, but not mere symbolism. Therefore Hirn continues:72 "There is no question of symbolism when, in the miracle-histories, it is related that the Madonna cured pious individuals with her healing milk.73 It is also told of some holy men that they were quite literally refreshed by Mary's breast. The pious Suso relates without reserve, and in a description of great detail, how he tasted 'den himmlischen Trunk' ;74 and Bernard of Clairvaux, who merited the Virgin's gratitude more than any other man, was rewarded for all his pane- gyrics and poems by Mary visiting him in his cell and letting his lips be moistened by the food of the heavenly Child." 75 "Thus," explains Heinrich Giinter,76 following out the same theme, "in the age of the Mary-legend, the Virgin also had to become a miraculous nourisher, and that— in
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accordance with the exaggerated imagination of the times — with her own milk. A monk gets sick ; mouth and throat are so swollen that he can take no nourishment ; the brethren expect the end. Then Mary appears — visible only to the sick man — and gives him her breast and announces to him his early recovery. Among the mystical women of the convent of Tof the same thing happened to Sister Adelheit of Frauenberg; she narrates it herself: Mary says to her . . . '"I will fulfil your desire and will give you to drink of the milk with which I suckled my holy Child," and she put her pure, soft breast into my mouth; and when this unspeakable sweetness was done to me I was on the point of weeping.'"
As Mary, although the chief, is not the only sustainer of God's people, so, in the incredible materialism of mediaeval thought, it is not she alone whose milk has been given to succor them in their extremities. One and another of the saints, without careful regard to sex, have been recorded as performing the same service. Lacking another, Chris- tina Mirabilis was fed from her own virgin breast.77 Even the veins of saints, in token of their functions as sustainers of God's people, have flowed with milk as well as with blood.78 This was the case, for example, with Pantaleon, and there was preserved in Constantinople a vessel con- taining the combined blood and milk which had issued from his martyred body. "Every year," we read,79 "they changed places ; when ' once in our time, under the Emperor Michael (that is, Paleologus, 1259-82), the blood re- mained on top, it was a year filled with troubles.'" Pan- taleon was a great saint, and his preserved blood even acted as a palladium, giving oracles of weal or woe to the for- tunate cities which possessed it. As soon as the famous liquefying blood of Januarius appeared at Naples, Giinter tells us, "the blood of Pantaleon, too, all at once spread over all Italy, everywhere exhibiting the same quality — in Naples itself in three churches, in Ravello, Bari, Valli-
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