The study adopts a new perspective on miraculous events in medieval French texts - what in Old French was referred to as la merveille. It replaces modern ascriptions with an attempt to perceive and understand the phenomenon in terms of its status within a complex concatenation of text varieties and narrative models. Literature presents itself to us as a self-related and hence autonomous system rooted in a reciprocal interaction between a highly educated audience, the supra-regional nature of literary production, and the swift accommodation, referentiality, and further development of narrative models.