medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Saturday, August 9, 2008, at 4:12 pm, Brenda Cook wrote:
> I have no problem with images of St Anne and the BVM as a (young)
> adult
> woman, with or without the Christ Child.
<SNIP -- removal of a perceptive comment about the transmission of female literacy in upper-income households>
> What does bother / intrigue / puzzle me is the St Anne Trinitaire in
> its
> most extreme form: as the large Mother with the BVM and the Christ
> Child
> seemingly equal in size (small) sitting in her lap.
E.g.
http://tinyurl.com/649e7u
http://tinyurl.com/63wbc6
> There is also a kind of sub-category where the BVM is a child but a
> kind of
> Big Sister to the Christ Child, definitely a pre-pubescent girl.
e.g.
http://www.aug.edu/augusta/iconography/cluny/anneMalines.html
And there are also some that are both, e.g.
http://www.woodart.ch/figurenk/aselb.jpg
Though most of the ones that I've seen in the first category (BVM and the Christ Child approximately the same size) show a Mary arguably old enough to be a mother.
Does Virginia Nixon's book _Mary's Mother_ (Penn State Univ. Pr., 2005) address these differences in size and in age? The blurb here is not altogether confidence-inspiring (thanks to its failure to say that the figural type is two centuries older than Nixon's seeming starting point of 1470):
http://tinyurl.com/67mwfk
Best again,
John Dillon
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