Mary, mother of Jesus

"Of one that is so fair and bright, Velut maris stella, Brighter than the dayės light, Parens et puella, I cry to thee; thou see to me! Lady, pray thy son for me, Tam Pia, That I motė come to thee, Maria.Lady, flower of allė thing, Rosa sine spina, Thu borė Jesu, hevenės king, Gratia divina. Of allė thou bear’st the prize, Lady, queen of Paradise Electa. Maidė mildė, mother is Effecta.Of carė conseil thou art best Felix fecundata, Of allė weary thou art rest Mater honorata. Biseech him with mildė mood That for us allė shed his blood In cruce, That we moten comen to him In luce.Al this worėld were forlore, Eva peccatrice, Till our Loverd was y-bore De te genetrice. With ‘Ave’ it went away Thuster night, and com’th the day Salutis. The wellė springet hut of the Virtutis.Well he wot he is thy son Ventre quem portasti; He will nout wernė thee thy boon, Parvum quem lactasti. So hendė and so god he is, He haveth brought us to blis Superni, That hath y-dit the foulė pit Inferni."

"The aungil came fro hevene tour To grete Marye with gret honour, And seyde sche xuld bere the flour That xulde breke the fyndes bond."

"The rose is Mary, hevene qwen, Out of here bosum the blosme sprong."

"And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,"

"The one who accepted "Life" in the name of all and for the sake of all was Mary, the Virgin Mother; she is thus most closely and personally associated with the Gospel of life. Mary's consent at the Annunciation and her motherhood stand at the very beginning of the mystery of life which Christ came to bestow on humanity (cf. Jn 10:10). Through her acceptance and loving care for the life of the Incarnate Word, human life has been rescued from condemnation to final and eternal death. For this reason, Mary, "like the Church of which she is the type, is a mother of all who are reborn to life. She is in fact the mother of the Life by which everyone lives, and when she brought it forth from herself she in some way brought to rebirth all those who were to live by that Life".138 As the Church contemplates Mary's motherhood, she discovers the meaning of her own motherhood and the way in which she is called to express it. At the same time, the Church's experience of motherhood leads to a most profound understanding of Mary's experience as the incomparable model of how life should be welcomed and cared for."

"The mutual relationship between the mystery of the Church and Mary appears clearly in the "great portent" described in the Book of Revelation: "A great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars" (12:1). In this sign the Church recognizes an image of her own mystery: present in history, she knows that she transcends history, inasmuch as she constitutes on earth the "seed and beginning" of the Kingdom of God. 139 The Church sees this mystery fulfilled in complete and exemplary fashion in Mary. She is the woman of glory in whom God's plan could be carried out with supreme perfection. The "woman clothed with the sun"-the Book of Revelation tells us-"was with child" (12:2). The Church is fully aware that she bears within herself the Saviour of the world, Christ the Lord. She is aware that she is called to offer Christ to the world, giving men and women new birth into God's own life. But the Church cannot forget that her mission was made possible by the motherhood of Mary, who conceived and bore the One who is "God from God", "true God from true God". Mary is truly the Mother of God, the Theotokos, in whose motherhood the vocation to motherhood bestowed by God on every woman is raised to its highest level. Thus Mary becomes the model of the Church, called to be the "new Eve", the mother of believers, the mother of the "living" (cf. Gen 3:20)."

"Like the Church, Mary too had to live her motherhood amid suffering: "This child is set ... for a sign that is spoken against-and a sword will pierce through your own soul also-that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed" (Lk 2:34-35). The words which Simeon addresses to Mary at the very beginning of the Saviour's earthly life sum up and prefigure the rejection of Jesus, and with him of Mary, a rejection which will reach its culmination on Calvary. "Standing by the cross of Jesus" (Jn 19:25), Mary shares in the gift which the Son makes of himself: she offers Jesus, gives him over, and begets him to the end for our sake. The "yes" spoken on the day of the Annunciation reaches full maturity on the day of the Cross, when the time comes for Mary to receive and beget as her children all those who become disciples, pouring out upon them the saving love of her Son: "When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, ?Woman, behold, your son!' " (Jn 19:26)."

"In the Book of Revelation, the "great portent" of the "woman" (12:1) is accompanied by "another portent which appeared in heaven": "a great red dragon" (Rev 12:3), which represents Satan, the personal power of evil, as well as all the powers of evil at work in history and opposing the Church's mission. Here too Mary sheds light on the Community of Believers. The hostility of the powers of evil is, in fact, an insidious opposition which, before affecting the disciples of Jesus, is directed against his mother. To save the life of her Son from those who fear him as a dangerous threat, Mary has to flee with Joseph and the Child into Egypt (cf. Mt 2:13-15). Mary thus helps the Church to realize that life is always at the centre of a great struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness."

"The angel's Annunciation to Mary is framed by these reassuring words: "Do not be afraid, Mary" and "with God nothing will be impossible" (Lk 1:30, 37). The whole of the Virgin Mother's life is in fact pervaded by the certainty that God is near to her and that he accompanies her with his providential care. The same is true of the Church, which finds "a place prepared by God" (Rev 12:6) in the desert, the place of trial but also of the manifestation of God's love for his people (cf. Hos 2:16). Mary is a living word of comfort for the Church in her struggle against death. Showing us the Son, the Church assures us that in him the forces of death have already been defeated: "Death with life contended: combat strangely ended! Life's own Champion, slain, yet lives to reign".141"

"O Mary, bright dawn of the new world, Mother of the living, to you do we entrust the cause of life Look down, O Mother, upon the vast numbers of babies not allowed to be born, of the poor whose lives are made difficult, of men and women who are victims of brutal violence, of the elderly and the sick killed by indifference or out of misguided mercy. Grant that all who believe in your Son may proclaim the Gospel of life with honesty and love to the people of our time. Obtain for them the grace to accept that Gospel as a gift ever new, the joy of celebrating it with gratitude throughout their lives and the courage to bear witness to it resolutely, in order to build, together with all people of good will, the civilization of truth and love, to the praise and glory of God, the Creator and lover of life."

"Here is confounded and overthrown the foolish opinion of the papists, which would have us to worship a creature before the Creator; Mary before her Son. These wise men do not so; they worship not Mary and wherefore? Because God only is to be worshipped: but Mary is not God."

"Julia Kristeva calls the Virgin a "combination of power and sorrow, sovereignty and the unnnameable," making up "one of the most powerful imaginary constructs known in the history of civilization" It is Kristeva's "unnameable" by which I am primarily fascinated, both in relation to the Virgin herself (insofar as we can speak of "her" as dissociated from any construct of her), and in relation to the reactions of attraction and repulsion to the Virgin in early modern England. The force of that "unnameable" may at times be explicit, but more likely has to be inferred, forcing us to search for the non-saids and the unsayables as well as the saids, probing silences (what was not said_ and the absences (what was not able to be said) of recorded events, records, and literary and other "cultural" texts."

"As Lyndal Roper states, the body of the Virgin was a "litmus test of the separation of the divine and the human" for Catholics and Protestants and what became their "radically differenyt theologies of the body." All sides of the Reformation struggles agreed that deep and mysterious powers had been attributed to the Virgin and to relics and places especially associated with her. For Catholics such attributions were, with the exception of some marginal and pardonable exaggerations and a little corruption, truthful and reflected God's purposes; for Protestants such claims were false and demonic, slippages into paganism and evidence of the irredeemable corruption of the Roman Church. Reformers generally acknowledged Mary as God's chosen instrument, but rejected what Latimer saw as the: foolish opinion and the doctrine of the papists, which would have us to worship a creature before the Creator." The continental reformer Melanchthon regretted that "in popular estimation the blessed virgin has completely replaced Christ"; Bishop John Jewel referred to the blasphemy of regarding Mary as :our lady and goddess"; William Perkins attacked the view of Mary as "a Ladie, a goddesse, a queene whom Christ her sonne obeyethin heaven, a mediatresse, our life, hope, the mediccine of the diseased"; it is, he thundeers, a blasphemy that "they pray unto her thus" The degree of hostility toward Mary varied greatly across Reformation Europe in both time and place, with Lutherans more amenable to modifying rather than radically reducing her rle, but a not uncommon note in Reformed polemic was that under papist superstition - in the words of Puritan polemicist William Crashaw, who, along with his son Richard, will be mentioned frequently in this book - "the paps of a woman" were blasphemously "equaled with the wounds of our Lord, and her milke with his blood," even though "the holy scriptures speak no more of her, but as a creature," and, in a significant slur, as merely "a woman.""

"Even so "catholic" an intellectual as John Donne - who, it is surmised, kept a painting of the Virgin in his study - could preach in 1622 that by then, god had been "a hundred years" in his "repairing" of the Church, and had ordered "not a faint discontinuing of idolatry, but...utter destruction,: and not just mentally or spiritually but "the utter destruction of the very placce, not a seising of the riches of the place, but the place it self." What lay behind the reformers' uneasiness about the place of the Virgin was not an upsurge of entirely new views. As Beattie comments, they believed indignantly that "the ancient goddesses and their female devotees still whisper[ed] and beckon[ed] in the cult of Mary," and saw their attacks as a return to the principles of the early Church."

"In his biblical commentaries, Latimer attacks Mary for what he sees as pride, bad manners, arrogance, and - in an extraordinarily revealing remark given the history of Christianity and its emphasis on motherhood - for reprimanding Jesus "like a mother." As MacCulloch comments,the very phrase forms "a clue to Latimer's unconscious feelings," especially his need to neutralize or destroy specifically female or motherly power."

"Kristeva asserts that although the image and associated stories of Mary constructed by the Church may have been a primary means by which it has tried to keep potential power of the female under paternal control, and so helped to "infantalize half the human race by hampering their sexual and intellectual expression," we should nevertheless consider that the stories embodying such religious beliefs are projections of fantasies which reveal the primal bedrock of our identities, and therefore should be listened to with care. Quoting Philippe Sollers, Kristeva puns that the hole" of the Virgin, both the genital gap and the "empty space left for Mary" around which "the members of the Christian Trinity revolve," is the center of the most profound of human fantasies. That (w)hole represents where we come from and where we will return."

"[W]hat are the stories which we have projected upon the elusive figure of the Virgin? And to what extent were there alternate stories that might have been more liberatory than repressive? One on which Kristeva focuses is the "censorship of Mary's sexuality" which, she asserts, has been the most devastating erasure of human pleasure and fulfillment in our history. Another powerful story of which the Virgin has been the center and by which our history has been haunted, is the fantasy that we can overcome "the unthinkable of death by postulating maternal love in its place," and so move beyond the rule of the father."

"Richard Marks points to the "massive expansion" of representations of the Virgin in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century parish churches. But Madonnas, he points out, "not only multiplied," they also "diversified." Sir Thomas More pointed out to reformers such as Dyndale that the various ladies - such as those of Walingham, Ipswich, and, nearer to his home in Chelsea at Willesden, to which he made a pilgrimage just before he was imprisoned - were "but the images of our Lady herself.""

"Why, asked Luther, was Mary venerated when her role was at best an example of obedience and essentially that of providing Jesus with a womb for nine months? Or, as it was put more disparagingly by Latimer and others, when she was but a pudding sack or a "bag of saffron...when the spice was out," a slur that was sufficiently au courant in 1536 to be specifically named and banned as heretical."

"The reformers believed that medieval theology and devotion had sexualized the Virgin by excessive idolatrous attention to her body, and by venerating the material details, however trivial or aprocryphal, of events in Mariological history. As Donna Ellington puts it, "Marys bodily human nature was the cornerstone of the entire medieval edifice of the virgin's cult." At a further level of idolatry, the veneration of bodily and material objects associated with Mary's body - a term that might appear as a modern anachronism but which was, in fact, already becoming current among Protestant polemists to deride what they saw as superstitious religious practices of pagans and catholics alike."

"Quite apart from the question of the truth of the diverging traditions of Christianity, the Protestant view of Mary, argues Beattie, "easily lends itself to the denigration of the female body," not only "its sexual and maternal functions," but also as the basis for both individual and relational being. That dual claim that the reformers were, in effect, empirically correct about the medieval sexualization of Christianity but at some deeper level mistaken about human sexuality - will be a major suggestion of this study."

"In her discussion of the art of the High Middle Ages, Madeline Caviness comments on the hidden "gynecological power" underneath the "heavily draped idealized figure" of the Virgin. I use the similar term gynotheology to refer to a high degree of concern, sometimes seemeingly obsessive within medieval (and later) Mariology, with the gynecological, the female sexual and reproductive apparatus and functions. It is an emphasis shared, paradoxically, by both late medieval Mariology and its Reformation opponents."

"As Frank Graziano comments, in the 1980s Steinberg's views provoked much polemical scholarship concerning the relationship between theology and eroticism. Carolyn Walker Bynum argued indignantly that medieval viewers of Christ's flesh did not understand the art as sexual: they did not see the representation of Christ's penis in sexual terms, and they viewed the Virgin's breasts "primarily" as food."

"Boss echoes Steinberg's observation that "the modern aversion from Mary's physical motherhood" is accompanied by "a certain embaressment of such commentators in the face of descriptions of pregnancy and parturition." In her reading of the Gospel of Matthew, Jane Scharberg comments on a reviewer's indignation that she should discuss intimate details of Mary's pregnancy as a topic inappropriate for "polite company.""