medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
though perhaps borderline for a Family List, this may appeal to the Prurient
interest of some here.
i like the part beyond "It gets worse."
c
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Received: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 03:09:08 PM EST
From: The Medieval Review <[log in to unmask]>
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Subject: TMR 12.02.29 Waller, The Virgin Mary (Brown)
Waller, Gary. <i>The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern
English Literature and Popular Culture</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011. Pp. xii, 237. $90.00. ISBN: 0521762960,
ISBN-13: 9780521762960.
Reviewed by Rachel Fulton Brown
The University of Chicago
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Womb, birth canal, vagina, hymen, clitoris, breast, menstrual blood,
moisture. Thanks to the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century,
these are words that most modern English-speaking Christians, not to
mention many English-speaking scholars, find it difficult (or daring)
to associate with the Virgin Mary. Horrified (as Waller tells it) by
the sexualization of the Virgin in the later Middle Ages--by the
idolatrous peering into her "pryvytes" in which artists, theologians,
and devotees pruriently (and misogynistically) had hitherto indulged--
the (likewise misogynistic) reformers of 1538 gathered up all the
physical representations of her body (i.e. statues) that they could
find and burned them, hoping thereby to erase the power of the Virgin
along with her images and relics. And yet, Waller argues, "fades" and
"traces" of the presence of the Virgin nevertheless remained in
English poetry, drama, and popular culture well into the seventeenth
century, perhaps even (if Waller's own interest is any indication)
well into the present.
The story, like the tensions evident throughout Waller's provocative
essay, is a familiar one, if not one that has been told of England in
quite this detail or across the great mid-sixteenth century divide.
Most valuable from the perspective of Marian scholarship are the
chapters on the ruins of the Virgin's shrines left scattered about the
Elizabethan landscape and the poems and ballads written about
Walsingham, the most famous of these shrines (chapter 5); on the
introduction of Petrachism into sixteenth-century English poetry and
the traces of the Virgin in the poet's scopophilic (Waller's word)
descriptions of his idealized beloved (chapter 6); on the Mariological
traces in Shakespeare's Helena (<i>All's Well That Ends Well</i>) and
the "opening of new cultural possibilities for women" by way of the
more "humanized" Madonna lurking behind Hermione's "resurrection" at
the end of <i>The Winter's Tale</i> (chapter 7); and on the Marian
tensions and themes still visible in the works of seventeenth-century
poets including John Donne, John Milton, George Herbert, and Richard
Crashaw (chapter 8). Refreshingly (and here he is following Helen
Hackett's work), Waller does not insist, as has been so often
suggested, that Mary, the Queen of Heaven, was simply replaced in
English consciousness by Elizabeth I, the Queen of England. The
question (and, therefore, my principal quarrel with the book) is
whether Waller fully appreciates the degree to which his own view of
the pre-Reformation image of the Virgin Mary--as both misogynist and
idealized, over- and undersexualized, idolatrously exalted and
voyeuristically anatomized--is itself dependent upon the very
criticisms the Reformers once made.
Nor does it help that Waller invokes various modern psychoanalytic and
feminist critiques of the devotion to the Virgin in support of his
argument. Not, as Waller worries, because appeal to present-day
ideological formations is itself a problem (what he calls his "lightly
worn presentism" [22]), but rather because the critiques that he
invokes are themselves part of the story of the denigration and
dismissal of the late medieval exaltation of the Virgin as Queen of
Heaven and Mother of God. Tellingly, this denigration and dismissal is
perhaps most visible in the work that Waller cites by the feminist
Catholic theologian Tina Beattie. As Beattie would have it (as cited
by Waller), Christianity "has never accommodated the fertile, sexual,
bleeding female body into its symbolic life" (41)--despite the fact
(as I have noted elsewhere) that it is the Virgin's very sexuality,
the fact that she was a menstruating woman from whose "shameful exit"
(or so the Jew Leo purportedly once put it in a conversation with the
twelfth-century theologian Odo of Cambrai) the Son of God had come
forth, upon which the doctrine of the Incarnation necessarily depends.
[1] Beattie would contend (again, as cited by Waller) that nothing in
the medieval tradition of devotion to the Virgin actually symbolically
validates or valorizes "woman as body." Indeed, as Beattie reads it,
nothing in the Catholic or Orthodox tradition since the Council of
Ephesus has allowed for such valorization, rooted as even the
acceptance of Mary as <i>Theotokos</i> is in "male Christianity"
(51). For Beattie (again, as cited by Waller), it was only with the
third-century (heretical) Collyridians that there appeared even the
possibility of a true "Marian Christianity," a "woman's religion" that
might have contested the Church's institutional misogyny (11). As it
is, according to Beattie (as Waller cites her), every theological
discussion of the Virgin's body since is suspect because it has been
"mediated and authenticated by men" (42)--more particularly, by
prurient, celibate, gynophobic men.
And so we get Waller trying to "explain the powerful hold the Virgin
had on late medieval men and women" (49) by way of "gynotheology,"
"the high degree of concern, sometimes seemingly obsessive, within
medieval (and later) Mariology, with the gynecological, the female
sexual and reproduction apparatus and functions" (34). We are shown
Mary's breasts becoming "increasingly eroticized" in art and miracle
story (37); we are invited to peer, with the Councils who "decided to
particularize the anatomy of the Virgin Birth," into "the womanly
nature of the Virgin," now "open for men to probe and cast their
curious or prurient eyes into the heart of [the] mystery" (38-39); we
join in the "pious speculation" about the Virgin's "sexual and
reproductive anatomy in the context of her perpetual virginity--her
womb, birth canal, vagina, hymen, and capacity to generate moisture"
(39); and we learn that this pious questioning about the biology of
the Incarnation "was blatantly entangled with gynophobic, misogynist,
and what Jane Caputi labels as 'frankly infantile' (predominantly,
perhaps exclusively, male) fantasies" (39). Necessarily, of course,
this "orthodox understanding of the Virgin attempted to exclude any
explicit affirmation of ordinary female sexuality" (40)--particularly
the Virgin's possession of a clitoris. [2]
It gets worse. Not only did thinking about the Virgin's experience of
conceiving and bearing the Son of God "show a distinctive, and again
we might add infantile and predominantly male, fascination with and
abhorrence of the pollution and impurity of the female body" (41). It
was scopophilic (obsessed with looking), masochistic (obsessed with
"the fear/desire of being dominated and absorbed by women" [44]),
fetishistic (particularly as focused on the Virgin's relics), abject
(because caught between attraction and repulsion, as Julia Kristeva
puts it), and, therefore, "perverse," albeit gently so. ("On the
contrary, as Freud noted, 'a certain degree of fetishism
is...habitually present in normal love, especially in those stages of
it in which the normal sexual aim seems unattainable or its
fulfillment prevented'" [49]). Above all, however, it had almost
nothing to do with actual women, who, by definition, were necessarily
excluded from this patriarchal welter of male fantasies. Nor, thanks
to the ancient exclusion of the Collyridians, was there any real
possibility within medieval incarnational theology for "female flesh
[to] be seen as a path to God rather than an obstacle," except on the
margins and as an act of resistance (51). To be sure, female mystics
like Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich explored the
possibilities of describing Mary as Jesus' bride, "seducing or even
copulating with God," but they did so (according to Waller)
necessarily in opposition to "the dominant Augustinian emphasis on the
sinfulness and the corruption of the female body" (52). "The
reformers, however, saw only perversion and idolatry as they
contemplated these or any sexualizations of the Virgin and her
'womanly' nature" (53). Indeed.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Waller's argument is that he
genuinely means to be not damning (like the Reformers), but helpful.
While he does not profess any particular devotion to the Virgin
himself, he has been involved for some years in a collaborative study
of Our Lady of Walsingham. As he tells it in his Preface (viii), "A
Catholic friend remarked that for someone who has a great deal of
skepticism about the Virgin Mary, I nonetheless seem to have been
given a lot of work to do for (or, as my friend said, 'by') her" (I
would agree with his friend, although I am unclear what the Virgin's
motive might be). Nor does he let the Reformers off the hook for the
extremity of their reaction to the "body-centeredness of Christianity"
(34). Indeed, as he sees it, in their efforts "to replace the
idolatry of the visual and the sensual by the idolatry of the word,
the reformers distorted and destroyed some of humanity's most creative
and nurturing religious feelings--and worse, not just within their own
threatened, anxious reformist selves but for the generations that
followed as well" (204).
And yet, as Waller tells it--and this is also one of the principle
claims of his argument--the Reformers were right: late medieval
devotion to the Virgin <i>was</i> highly sexualized, so much so that
any "creative and nurturing feelings" that medieval Christians might
have experienced in looking to the Virgin for intercession, comfort,
and inspiration could only be expressed <i>in spite of</i> the
dominant theology. Thus, any expressions of a more positive, body-
affirming, humanized Virgin must be somehow subversive, marginal,
still present only despite the efforts of the theologians and artists
to present Mary as "totally 'other'--impassably immaculate, impossibly
ideal--and [all other women] as grotesque and fearful" (70). It is
the same anti-Marian Catch-22 that the Reformers created, only
translated into modern valuations themselves ultimately dependent on
the Reformers' ideals. After all, it was not that the Reformers
denied that Mary had given birth to Jesus; they simply wanted her to
behave decorously, humbly, just like any other woman. They wanted
her not remote on a throne in heaven, reigning with Wisdom over the
world, but down here on earth, taking care of the household; they
wanted women to be able to recognize themselves in her as good
housewives and mothers. They wanted women to be able to identify with
her.
<i>Plus ça change</i>. For Waller, it is the medieval drama that
seems above all to offer this possibility of identification by
bringing Mary back down to earth. "Even when the plays focus on
occasions of high theological significance such as the Annunciation
and the Ascension, the treatment of Mary is frequently staged within
recognizably domestic and familial situation (65)... Staging the
Virgin brought Mary into realms that many women in the audience would
have recognized as like their own. The closer the dramatists of these
plays brought their scenes to ordinary reality, the more integrated
into the everyday life the biblical story might become (66)... In the
physical concreteness of drama--with the Virgin being acted by and
before neighbors--the physicality of sexuality and birthing was thrust
into the daylight where women (and no doubt a few men) recognized the
experience (70)... Women might well have identified with her and
sympathized" (76). The premise necessarily being that the "official
explanations of the mysteries of divine conception and maternity" (69)
could not bear such humanizing or (as in scenes of Joseph's being
tested for impotence) humor (75). As every reader of Erich Auerbach
knows, the dichotomy is a false one. Far from being a revolt against
"hundreds of years of repression and exploitation" (206), such plays
were a wholly orthodox and traditional expression of the central
Augustinian doctrine of <i>sermo humilis</i>, of the mystery of God's
humbling himself by becoming incarnate in the womb of a human woman
and thus elevating the everyday to the status of divine mystery. This
is the "everyday," "humanized," "popular" Christianity embraced by St.
Francis, the Christianity in which (as Auerbach put it) "there is no
basis for separation of the sublime from the low and everyday, for
they are indissolubly connected in Christ's very life and suffering."
[3] The tragedy of the Reformers' attack on the supposed "idolatry" of
the Virgin was to forget this, that the humble wife of Joseph might
also be an exalted Queen, just as the carpenter's son who died on the
cross was also the one through whom the whole world had been brought
into being.
So, in the end, Waller is right, but for the wrong reasons. The
Reformers did indeed "distort and destroy some of humanity's most
creative and nurturing religious feelings," but not the ones Waller
thinks they did. By pointing out (as Waller puts it) "how
intellectually wrong or silly many of the aspects of medieval
Christianity may have been" (204), above all, by drawing attention to
what they saw as the dangerous excesses of meditating on what it meant
to say that God entered into the world through the "shameful exit" of
a woman, they condemned all generations that followed to think of Mary
only in terms of her sex rather than, as medieval Christians had done,
in terms of the miracle that (as the antiphon put it) "He whom the
entire universe could not contain," she contained in her womb.
--------
Notes:
1. Rachel Fulton, <i>From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and
the Virgin Mary, 800-1200</i> (New York: Columbia University Press,
2002), p. 283.
2. Here Waller would have benefited from a closer study of the
medieval sources. It is a commonplace in descriptions of the
Annunciation that Mary experienced great bliss in hearing the angel's
words. As Rupert of Deutz put it in his commentary on Song of Songs
1:1, "What is this exclamation so great, so unlooked for? O blessed
Mary, the inundation of joy, the force of love, the torrent of
delight, covered you entirely, possessed you totally, intoxicated you
inwardly, and you sensed what eye has not seen and ear has not heard
and what has not entered into the heart of man, and you said, 'Let him
kiss me with the kiss of his mouth.'" To be sure, Rupert does not
mention the Virgin's clitoris, but he certainly could be read as
attributing to her an orgasm. See Rupert of Deutz, <i>Commentaria in
Canticum Canticorum</i>, ed. Hrabanus Haacke, Corpus Christianorum
Continuatio Medieualis 26 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1974), p. 10; trans.
Fulton, <i>From Judgment to Passion</i>, p. 324.
3. <i>Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature</i>, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1953), p. 158.
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