![]() This also applies to other episodes, including premonitory dreams, disembodied voices and the undead. Her miracles share much with classical hagiography, except that in some instances she imbues her tales with an almost Gothic sense of the uncanny. The Devil’s purported good deed in one of the tales is nothing but subterfuge, fooling protagonists and modern critics alike. Her stories of the Devil may seem traditional at a first glance, but closer inspection reveals that the author plays a clever game with the reader. But even when magic is described as efficacious, her discourse is permeated by indeterminacy. Sometimes she treats magic as real, sometimes as false, now as a prank, then as a harrowing experience. ![]() ![]() In twelve out of her twenty novellas something happens that falls within the remit of the supernatural sensu lato – in the early modern period a crucial distinction was made between the supernatural sensu stricto (the miraculous) and the preternatural (the marvellous). This indeterminacy is exploited by María de Zayas, albeit not necessarily consciously. The seventeenth century saw an epistemological shift, which resulted in indeterminacy with regards to the supernatural. ![]()
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