Michel Zink, de l’Académie française, professeur honoraire au Collège de France
The marvelous is perhaps, in the art and letters of the Middle Ages, what fascinates us the most spontaneously. It is however what is the most foreign to us, because the marvelous depends on the parameters that have changed the most since the Middle Ages: the limits attributed to the laws of nature, the relationship between nature and the creator God, the direct interventions of God or diabolic powers in the course of things, the notion of norm, the stake of the human. So many elements to be taken into consideration in order to understand the strangely rationalized wonder that the Middle Ages offer us.