RethinkingMary · Rethinking Mary in Early Modern Italy: Men's and Women's perspectives on the Virgin Mary (1450-1650)

Rethinking Mary in Early Modern Italy: Men's and Women's perspectives on the Virgin Mary (1450-1650)

Rethinking Mary offers the first comprehensive research on the role of early modern literary representations of the Virgin Mary by men and women in the construction of early modern Italian women’s identity. The Virgin Mary is the most important, controversial and ambivalent female symbol in Western culture, and since the Middle Ages, her literary and artistic representations have been connected with womanhood. However, her crucial role in the construction of the ideas of maternity, virginity, women’s bodies, as well as women’s knowledge, faith and power in Italy had never been studied in depth. Besides being a crucial object of devotion in Christian culture, Mary has mostly been regarded as a model of a passive and controlled woman. However, the figure of the Virgin can be interpreted as an extremely empowering model for women and can be related to the very Italian phenomenon of Renaissance women writers. RethinkingMary fills this gap, offering a new interpretation of the cultural role of the Virgin Mary in early modern Italy. The period between c.1450 and 1650 was crucial for the foundation of European modernity, in which enormous cultural, socio-political, and religious changes took place. In this period of great political, social and religious transformations and definitions, the discourse on women was decisive, while women writers entered massively the literary system, especially in Italy. Understanding what happened to women and their relationship with the figure of the Virgin in this crucial and foundational period, can tell us a lot about women in our time and Western culture and society. RethinkingMary analysed systematically for the very first time a corpus of overlooked Italian literary and devotional works on the Virgin Mary, with three main objectives: 1) to explore the ambiguity of the Marian model 2) to focus on the women writers’ point of view on the Virgin 3) to compare how Mary is presented as a gender role model in devotional literature with those in which women were described and represented in the contemporary literature on the role of women in society. RethinkingMary has focused on the connections between the representation of the Virgin as a woman, including her relationship with body and sexuality, and the early modern idea of womanhood, both synchronically and diachronically, and illustrated that the figure of Mary, as represented in literature and art, was not just responsible of the construction of a patriarchal idea of womanhood, but was a crucial empowering role model for women, used by Italian women writers to legitimate themselves.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз