Abstract
This book explores queenship and two-bodied figurations of authority in post-Reformation England, the precedents by which queens came into power, and the ways in which ruling women were represented on the early modern stage. It observes that many queens, regnant, consort, and regent, were “Rogue Madonnas” who, like the Virgin Mary, derived power from the births of their sons, those incipient rulers who began life utterly dependent on their mothers. Princes who were destined to be kings were fashioned in the early modern period as little god-men. As King James writes to his son in Basilicon Doron, princes owe a “double obligation” to God, “first for that he made you a man; and next, for that he made you a little GOD to sit on his throne, and rule over other men.”2 The mothers of these little gods could and did claim some of the same authority as attributed to God’s mother, Mary. Though Mary’s power as an icon was effectively drained in post-Reformation years, the precedents she established for women who ruled remained powerful and accessible.
What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
—Attributed to Aristotle in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (ca. 200–250 BCE)
Duas personas habet gubernator—Two persons are combined in the pilot: one he shares with all his fellow-passengers, for he also is a passenger; the other is peculiar to him, for he is the pilot. A storm harms him as a passenger, but it harms him not as a pilot.
—Seneca, Epistolae (65 CE)
Following therefore the Holy Fathers, we all, with one voice, declare that we ought to acknowledge one and the same (Son) our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead, perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man ... begotten of the Father before all ages in respect of the Godhead, and the same in these last days, born of Mary the Virgin, Mother of God, in respect of the manhood, for our sake and for our salvation; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, in two natures, without confusion, change, division, separation; the difference of the natures being in no wise taken away by the union.
—Chalcedonian Creed (451 CE)
We be informed by our judges that we at no time stand so highly in our estate royal as in the time of Parliament, wherein we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit together in one body politic.
—King Henry VIII, speaking to Parliament (1542)
Mary had two seeds, one seed of her faith, and another seed of her flesh and in her body. There is a natural and a corporeal seed, and there is a spiritual and an heavenly seed ... And Christ is her seed; but he is become man of the seed of her faith and belief; of spiritual seed, not of natural seed.
—Protestant martyr Joan Bocher (1550)1
Notwithstanding that these two Bodies are at one Time conjoined together, yet the Capacity of the one does not confound that of the other, but they remain distinct Capacities. Ergo the Body natural and the Body politic are not distinct, but united, and as one Body.
—Plowden’s Reports (1571)
But man & wife, they are one flesh, conjoyned not severed.
—Thomas Gataker (1620)
What they say of [the twins] Castor and Pollux, is true of Man and Wife: If they are divided, it is ominous.
—Matthew Mead (1684)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Quoted by Roger Hutchinson, Image of God, Or Layman’s Book (1550), in The Works of Roger Hutchinson, edited by John Bruce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1842), 146.
James VI and I, First Book of Basilicon Doron, in Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 12.
Ernst H. Kantorowicz offers some additional examples of accolated heads on coins in Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 503–504.
See Genesis 2:24, “Therefore shal man leave his father and his mother, and shal cleave to his wife, and they shalbe one flesh”; Mark 10:8–9, “And they twine shalbe one flesh: so that thei are no more twaine, but one flesh. Therefore, what God hathe coupled together, let not man separate”; 1 Corinthians 6:16, “Do ye not knowe, that he which coupleth himself with an harlot, is one bodie? For two, saith he, shalbe one flesh”; Ephesians 5:22–24, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your housbands, as unto the Lord. For the housband is the wives head, even as Christ is the head of the Church, & the same is the saviour of his bodie.” All quotations from the Bible are taken from The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1969; rpt. 2007). Frances E. Dolan extensively describes and analyzes the legacy of St. Paul’s belief in a unified, corporate, marital body in Frances E. Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
All quotations from Shakespeare follow The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997).
Accounts of the controversial events that took place before, during, and after the Council of Ephesus in 431 can be found in Susan Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy: The Making of a Saint and of a Heretic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 74–180;
Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of the Culture (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 56–58;
Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 64–66;
Luigi Gambero, Mary and the Fathers of the Church: The Blessed Virgin Mary in Patristic Thought, trans. Thomas Buffer (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 233–238; and
Vasiliki Limberis, Divine Heiress: The Virgin Mary and the Creation of Christian Constantinople (New York: Routledge, 1994) 53–61. See also
John Anthony McGuckin, “Introduction,” On the Unity of Christ (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995);
Richard M. Price, “The Theotokos and the Council of Ephesus,” in The Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary, ed. Chris Maunder (New York and London: Burns and Oates, 2008); and
Antonia Atanassova, “Did Cyril of Alexandria Invent Mariology?” in The Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary, ed. Chris Maunder (New York and London: Burns and Oates, 2008). More details of these events can be found in Chapter 1.
Rubin Espinosa, Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Ashgate, 2011), 2.
Theotokos is more properly translated as “God-bearer” or “the one who gave birth to the one who is God,” rather than “Mother of God.” But as Hamington notes, Mary was not officially recognized as “Mother of God” by the Vatican until 1965. Maurice Hamington, Hail Mary? The Struggle for Ultimate Womanhood in Catholicism (New York: Routledge, 1995), 15.
Lois Malcolm, “What Mary Has to Say about God’s Bare Goodness,” in Blessed One: Protestant Perspectives on Mary, ed. Beverly Roberts Gaventa and Cynthia L. Rigby (Louisville, KY, and London: WestminsterJohn Knox Press, 2002), 140.
Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 107.
Judith Dupre, Full of Grace: Encountering Mary in Faith, Art, and Life (New York: Random House, 2010), 39.
Donna Spivey Ellington, “Impassioned Mother or Passive Icon: The Virgin’s Role in Late Medieval and Early Modern Passion Sermons,” Renaissance Quarterly 48.2 (Summer 1995): 241. Ellington records that St. François de Sales preached about the two-bodied unity formed by Christ and his mother: “Mary died in the death of Jesus because although they were two persons, they shared ‘in one heart, in one soul, in one spirit, in one life”; ibid., 244.
Gary Kuchar, “Aemilia Lanyer and the Virgin’s Swoon: Theology and Iconography in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” English Literary Renaissance 37.1 (2007): 58.
Katherine Goodland, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2005), 101.
Eamon Duffy observes that “prayer to the Virgin Mary has often been one of the ways in which an overauthoritarian and judgemental perception of God has been avoided or compensated for.” Eamon Duffy, Faith of Our Fathers: Reflections on Catholic Traditions (London: Continuum Icons, 2004), 30.
Desiderius Erasmus, “Paean in Honour of the Virgin Mother,” trans. Stephen Ryle, in The Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. 69 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 29.
John McGuckin, “The Early Cult of Mary and Inter-Religious Contexts in the Fifth-Century Church,” in Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary, ed. Chris Maunder (London: Burns and Oates, 2008), 5.
Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, “‘Pondering all These Things’: Mary and Motherhood,” in Blessed One: Protestant Perspectives on Mary (Louisville, KY, and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 104.
See Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 2; and Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 24.
Marian Moments is the title of a collection of essays focused on Marian residues in the early modern period: Regina Buccola and Lisa Hopkins, eds., Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2001). Other recent studies of Mary and Mariology in the early modern period include Espinosa, Masculinity; and
Katharine Goodland, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2005).
Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), remains a bible for scholars working on Elizabeth and virgin identity. Dolan, Whores of Babylon, is an invaluable study of Mary and Catholicism in the early modern period.
Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology & Cultural Fantasy: Catholic andAnti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), is likewise a great resource. See also
Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination 1558–1660 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Copyright information
© 2012 Sid Ray
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ray, S. (2012). Introduction: Madonna, Child, and Early Modern Accolated Bodies. In: Mother Queens and Princely Sons. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137003805_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137003805_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43437-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-00380-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)