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Mary appears seated (the 'Throne of Wisdom' image) and feeding a toddler-sized Jesus on her left breast on a group of Welsh convent seals. One of the breast-feeding seals comes from the Benedictine women's house at Usk (Mon). Roberta Gilchrist in Gender and Material Culture notes a few nunnery seals depicting the standing Virgin and Child but far more with the Throne of Wisdom, though she does not record how many of the seated figures are actually breast-feeding. However, Mary is also depicted seated and feeding her son on the seal of the Tironian men's house at St Dogmael's (Pembs), a seal so similar to that of Usk that David Williams (in A Catalogue of Seals in the National Museum of Wales. Cardiff: National Museum of Wales1993) has suggested the matrix came from the same designer or engraver. The image on the common seal of the Cistercian men's house at Tintern is less clear but is very similar to the other two and is probably of Mary feeding Christ (for a photograph see Williams 1993, 88, though he suggests on p 46 that she is holding an orb. This may in fact be an instance of reluctance to recognise what he is seeing). Back to the Pieta. The only examples I know of the conventional Pieta - Mary with the body of the dead Christ - have his head to her right. However, Our Lady of Pity at Long Melford is I think the other way round (assuming the copy I've seen hasn't been printed back to front). Like a lot of late medieval devotional imagery this is strangely proleptic. Christ's body is covered in wounds and his hands and feet are clearly pierced. But he is smaller than Mary, and is clearly alive. Mary holds him in her arms with his head on her left shoulder and he looks up at her face and extends a hand to touch her robe. A very odd image. (There is a picture in The Stripping of the Altars - where else!) Maddy Dr Madeleine Gray Department of Humanities and Science UWCN 'Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought' %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%