I have built up a corpus of more than 200 literary and devotional works on the Virgin Mary by men and women published in Italy between 1471 and 1661. I collected data on the characteristics of the Virgin and how she was presented as a role model for women in Marian literature. In addition to the physical and moral virtues constantly recurring in every text, I also considered the representation of the emotions of the Virgin in the moments of the Annunciation and Passion and their relationship with the literary representation of women's emotions. I then considered the ways and the reasons for what Mary was offered as a model for wives and nuns, as well as a model for powerful women (rulers and prophets) and learned women.
An important part of the project concerned women’s perspectives on the figure of the Virgin. I considered both literary texts and letters, both printed and manuscript by writers and visionary women, lay and religious.
The final part of the project aimed to contextualise the connections between the Virgin Mary and women. It was carried out by comparing how the Virgin was related to women in Marian Literature and texts about the role of women and their nobility and excellence; by comparing Mary’s virtues with women’s virtues as described in some examples of conduct literature and praises of women in different moments; by comparing the characteristics of the Virgin in literary representations and their transformations over time, with some contemporary artistic representations.
The analysis of Marian literature written by men and women on the period taken into consideration confirmed that In Early-Renaissance Marian literature, The Virgin was exceptional, full of all the possible moral virtues, but still human, and could offer a model of virtue, motherhood, and power to women rulers, as well as an inspiring image of a woman with the book in her hands, as it appears in the iconography of the moment of the Annunciation. After the Council of Trent, we can see a transformation in her cultural role as an exceptional, divine, creature, to be venerated, and detached from real women. This image of Mary, as underlined in previous studies, dominated Western culture. When connected to women, Mary was proposed only as a model of perfection for nuns, mothers and wives with specifically feminine, submissive, characteristics and rarely with a book in her hands. However, women writers, both lay and religious, and visionary women continued to use the Virgin Mary as a legitimizing and powerful example, able to offer to them and other women, a model of political authority and a crucial reference point even later.
The results of the project have been disseminated in numerous international conferences and six articles/chapters of books were published. A conference on Women Voices and the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Europe took place at The Norwegian Institute in Rome in June 2023 and a collective volume on the same topic was proposed to Brepols. Moreover, the corpus is included in a repertory now available on the platform Zotero
https://www.zotero.org/groups/5246000/rethinking_mary._repertory_of_early-modern_italian_marian_literature/library(opens in new window). It is possible to search the repertory by bibliographical data, but also by “tags” concerning literary genres, gender of the author and gender of the dedicatee. Moreover, when the PDF is available online it is possible to access the link from the repertory. The research deserves to be continued from a European perspective and I plan to write a book on the Virgin in Italian literary works.
