Abstract
This chapter begins with the suggestion that the Rogue Madonna of Ephesus—Mary as Theotokos—inspired a version of queenship that challenged traditional gender roles, spawning a line of political queens who appropriated her “Mother of God” precedents to gain sovereignty outside the bounds of law and custom. It has long been noted that the Virgin Mary helped to legitimize the authority of political queens (regnant, regent, and consort), but the specific version of the Virgin Mary on whom earthly queens modeled their reigns has not been fully elaborated. Regent queens in particular—those ruling for their underage sons or brothers—such as Pulcheria of Constantinople (ca. 398–453), Blanche ofCastile (1188–1252), Isabeau ofBavaria (ca. 1370–1435), and Catherine de Medici (1519–1589) appropriated certain traits from the Mary who emerged from the Ephesian Council. They derived an authority from their incipient two-bodied ruling sons that controverted traditional beliefs about conception; they constructed themselves as exceptional, set apart from other women; and they garnered for themselves a tincture of the divine.
Had the Word not dwelt in a womb, the flesh would never have sat on a throne.
—Proclus of Constantinople, Homily 1
How gladde is a woman, yf she beare in her wombe a chylde, which shall be a kynge?
—Juan Luis Vives, Instruction of a Christen Woman
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Notes
“Usurping Matriarchs” is Hackett’s term; she is paraphrasing the anti-Marian reformer John Jewell. Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Macmillan, 1995), 29.
See Theodora A. Jankowski, Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 71.
Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976; Vintage Books Edition, 1983), 14.
Luigi Gambero, Mary and the Fathers of the Church: The Blessed Virgin Mary in Patristic Thought, trans. Thomas Buffer (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 29.
Cleo McNelly Kearns, The Virgin Mary, Monotheism, and Sacrifice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ix–x.
Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 50.
As Maurice Hamington notes, “The conservative male hierarchy of Roman Catholicism has a vested interest in maintaining the traditional imagery that permeates the Cult of Mary.” Maurice Hamington, Hail Mary? The Struggle for Ultimate Womanhood in Catholicism (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 1.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 189.
See Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 83–84.
Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 85. See also Hamington, Hail Mary?, 78.
Kristeva finds some agency in the Madonna: “The Virgin assumes the paranoid lust for power by changing a woman into a Queen in heaven and a Mother of the earthly institutions (of the Church). But she succeeds in stifling that megalomania by putting it on its knees before the child-god.” She notes further that “The Virgin especially agrees with the repudiation of the other woman.” Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 161–186, 180–181.
See Lisa McClain, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 100.
Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 20 and 24.
See Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 184. It should be noted, however, that Bernard was an advisor to Queen Melisenda, who refused to yield her authority as regent when her son aged into the position of king. See
Lois L. Huneycutt, “Female Succession and the Language of Power in the Writings of Twelfth-Century Churchmen,” in Medieval Queenship, ed. John Carmi Parsons (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993; repr. 1998), 199.
Parliament of Heaven; Salutation and Conception, s.d. and ll. 305–307. The N-Town Plays, ed. Douglas Sugano (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007). The editor glosses, “The impregnation of Mary is presented in remarkably erotic terms…. Part of the miracle here is that this triple member [the beams of light] that enters simultaneously causes her no peyn in flesche and bon (l. 300), but only an all-surpassing pleasure”; ibid., ll. 373–374.
Daniel L. Migliore, “Woman of Faith: Toward a Reformed Under standing of Mary,” in Blessed One: Protestant Perspectives on Mary, ed. Beverly Roberts Gaventa and Cynthia L. Rigby (Louisville, KY, and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 117.
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1992; 2nd ed. 2005), 256.
Stafford, Femall Glory, sig. D. Stafford hailed from Northamptonshire and probably had Catholic leanings. His tract was “esteemed egre-giously scandalous among the Puritans, who looked upon it as purposely published to encourage the Papists.” Orby Shipley, ed., “Preface to the New Edition,” Life of the Blessed Virgin (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869), ix.
Arthur Marotti cites John Donne’s “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” as one example of Donne’s depiction of Mary as co-redemptrix: ” durst I/ Upon [Christ’s] miserable mother cast mine eye / Who was Gods partner here, and furnish’d thus / Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransomed us?” Arthur Marotti, “Forward,” in Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama, ed. Regina Buccola and Lisa Hopkins (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), xiv. For an excellent discussion of Aemilia Lanyer’s depiction of Mary as “priestly co-redemptrix,” see
Gary Kuchar, “Aemilia Lanyer and the Virgin’s Swoon: Theology and Iconography in Salve Deus Rex judaeorum,” English Literary Renaissance 37.1 (2007): 47.
See Mary Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 177–178.
Judith Dupre claims that “[a]lthough the golden age of Marian art has peaked, its influence remains pervasive, because depictions of Mary continue to be displayed, protected, and honored at churches, in museums, and in photographs.” Judith Dupre, Full of Grace: Encountering Mary in Faith, Art, and Life (New York: Random House, 2010), 35.
See J. K. Elliott, “Mary in the Apocryphal New Testament,” in The Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary, ed. Chris Maunder (London: Burns and Oates, 2008), 65.
As Katherine Goodland observes, the Virgin’s “image was subject to the most vitriolic attacks by Reformers. The break with Rome and the eradication of the doctrine of Purgatorynecessitated a break with the mourning mother of God because she was not only the mother of the Catholic Church in this world but also the mediator for the suffering souls in the next. Diatribes against Mary recast her, along with the ‘Romish’ Church, as the ‘Whore of Babylon.’” Katherine Goodland, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 4.
Desiderius Erasmus “The Religious Pilgrimage,” The Whole Familiar Colloquies of Desiderius Erasmus, of Rotterdam, trans. Nathan Bailey (London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 1877), 240.
See Stephen J. Showmaker, “The Virgin Mary in the Ministry of Jesus and the Early Church According to the Earliest Life of the Virgin,” Harvard Theological Review 98:4 (October 2005): 441–467. The story of Mary found in The Golden Legend derives from De nativitate Mariae, a text of the apocrypha also called The Gospel of the Birth of Mary. See Elliott, “Mary,” 61. Maximus the Confessor, according to Rubin, was exiled and tortured for “[c]asting doubt on the delicate balance between Christ’s humanity and divinity.” He later penned his “audacious” biography of Mary “as her son’s partner in ministry and even in death”; Rubin, Mother of God, 69.
Kate Cooper, “Contesting the Nativity: Wives, Virgins, and Pulcheria’s imitatio Mariae,” Scottish Journal of Religious Studies 19 (1998), 36.
Chris Maunder, “Origins in the New Testament,” in Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary, ed. Chris Maunder (London: Burns and Oates, 2008), 30.
Scholar, Elaine Pagels asserts that “in the earliest years the Christian movement showed a remarkable openness toward women. Jesus himself violated Jewish convention by talking openly with women, and he included them among his companions.” She adds, “Some ten or twenty years after Jesus’ death, certain women held positions of leadership in local Christian groups; women acted as prophets, teachers, and evangelists.” However, “[b]y the end of the second century, women’s participation in worship was explicitly condemned: groups in which women continued on to leadership were branded as heretical.” Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage Books, 1979; repr. 1989), 61 and 63.
See James Keith Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in English Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 50.
Mary Foskett, A Virgin Conceived: Mary and Classical Representations of Virginity (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), 160.
Antonia Atanassova, “Did Cyril of Alexandria lnvent Mariology?,” in Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary, ed. Chris Maunder (London: Burns and Oates, 2008), 107.
Vasiliki Limberis, Divine Heiress: The Virgin Mary and the Creation of Christian Constantinople (New York: Routledge, 1994), 54. John Anthony McGuckin claims that Nestorius had alienated many of the people of Constantinople, too, when he curtailed racing and the number of dancing girls allowed at the circus. See
John Anthony McGuckin, “Introduction,” in Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, trans. John Anthony McGuckin (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), 16.
See Susan Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy: The Making of a Saint and of a Heretic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 101–102.
Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, trans. John Anthony McGuckin (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), 77.
See Liz James, “Goddess, Whore, Wife or Slave: Will the Real Byzantine Empress Please Stand up?,” in Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe, ed. Anne Duggan (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1997), 125.
See Cooper, “Contesting the Nativity,” 31–43; and Kenneth Holum, Theodosian Empresses: Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), chapter 3.
See Richard Price, “The Theotokos and the Council of Ephesus,” The Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary, ed. Chris Mauder (New York and London: Burns and Oates, 2008), 91–99.
Ada B. Teetgen, The Life and Times of the Empress Pukheria, A.D. 399–A.D. 452 (London: S. Sonnenschein, Co., 1907; repr. Memphis, TN: General Books, 2010), 110.
Tracy Adams, Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 3.
See John Carmi Parsons, “Family, Sex, and Power: The Rhythms of Medieval Queenship,” in Medieval Queenship, ed. John Carmi Parsons (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993; repr. 1998), 7.
Ruth Vanita, “Mariological Memory in The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII,” Studies in English Literature 40.2 (2000): 313.
Christine de Pizan, The Book of the Three Virtues, in The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan, trans. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kevin Brownlee, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1996), 164.
Andre Poulet, “Capetian Women and the Regency: The Genesis of a Vocation,” in Medieval Queenship, ed. John Carmi Parsons (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993, repr. 1998), 109.
See Mary Stroll, “Maria Regina: Papal Symbol,” in Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe, ed. Anne Duggan (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1997), 188.
See Martha W. Driver, The Image in Print: Book Illustration in Late Medieval England and Its Sources (London: The British Library, 2004), 149.
See W.G. Boswell-Stone, Shakespeare’s Holinshed: The Chronicles and the Historical Plays Compared (New York and London: Benjamin Bloom, 1896, rpt., 1966), 200–203.
Leoni Frieda, Catherine de Medici, Renaissance Queen of France (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 36.
Elizabeth McCartney, “The King’s Mother and Royal Prerogative in Early-Sixteenth-Century France,” in Medieval Queenship, ed. John Carmi Parsons (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993, repr. 1998), 120.
D. R. Edward Wright, “Benedetto Pagni’s ‘Medici Madonna’ in Sarasota: A Study in Medici Patronage and Iconography,” Burlington Magazine 128.995 (February 1986): 95.
Katherine Crawford, “Catherine de Medicis and the Performance of Political Motherhood.” Sixteenth Century Journal 31:3 (2000): 658.
Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 138.
George H. Tavard, The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996), 126.
See Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 346.
Eamon Duffy, Faith of our Fathers: Reflections on Catholic Traditions (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 30.
Mary E. Fissell, “The Politics of Reproduction in the English Reformation,” Representations 87 (2004): 54.
Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 289.
Tavard claims, “the external pictures that both Zwingli and Calvin ruled out of church buildings can be smoothly replaced by mental images”; Tavard, Thousand Faces, 127. See also Christopher Haigh, who writes that the events of the Reformation “did not come in swift and orderly sequence … they came (and went again) as the accidents of everyday politics and the consequences of power struggles.” Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 13. He notes, “The political Reformations had succeeded in driving Catholic public worship from the churches; but the Protestant Reformation did not destroy essentially Catholic views of Christian life and eternal salvation”; ibid., 289.
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© 2012 Sid Ray
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Ray, S. (2012). “Above God Himselfe”: The Rogue Madonna and Her Daughter Queens. In: Mother Queens and Princely Sons. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137003805_2
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