Mary

Mary – mother of Jesus – is a truly global figure. Following mission and conquest since the Middle Ages the figure of the mother of the Christian God has been received and domesticated in every continent. Around her even today complex worlds of emotion, vision, nurture, cult and politics revolve. Yet in Christian scripture very little is said about Mary. The stories through which Mary was figured and imagined – with tales of her childhood, motherhood and unusual death – were created in the heat of polemic and persuasion of the first centuries of Christianity, and are preserved in texts deemed ‘apocryphal’. As Christianity became a licit and later official religion in the Roman Empire, and as it continued to spread into northern and western Europe, bearing official forms of belief and worship, the figure of Mary interacted with local cultures. Mary was made and remade in poetry, theology, music and visual imagery; her figure also attracted controversy and debate. Those who rejected the truths she represented – heretics, Jews – became particular enemies to Christians, who favoured Mary as a merciful mediator between sinners and divine judgement. Mary emerged in the Near East and spread around the Mediterranean and northwards in Europe, but she remained familiar to Mediterranean people – Jews and Muslims. In the sixteenth century her fame reached the Americas, even as an altogether new understanding of her was being offered by reformers in Europe This is a version of an inaugural lecture delivered at Queen Mary – University of London on 30 October 2003. It introduces some of the ideas, approaches and materials which will form Miri Rubin’s book Mary – Mother of God to be published by Penguin in 2006.

Ancient history · Art · Christianity · Cult · Empire · Judgement · Literature · Politics · Theology · Worship · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious studies

• Scholastic Affect

  Open Access•Clare Monagle•Scholastic Affect•2020

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