Periodic Reporting for period 1 - RethinkingMary (Rethinking Mary in Early Modern Italy: Men's and Women's perspectives on the Virgin Mary (1450-1650))
Período documentado: 2021-09-06 hasta 2023-09-05
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.
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. 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.
This research contributed to the progress of the research on religious and devotional literature as well as on the history of women, the history of Ideas and women writers. the digital repertory produced, which will continue to be updated and improved, can be a useful tool for other scholars. Moreover it could have a cultural impact, contributing to the transformation of the common perception of the figure of the Virgin and her relation with women's identity, that works such as those by Michela Murgia already tried to do.