Miri Rubin, Queen Mary's College, University of London
From Theotokos to Mater
Dolorosa
Continuity, rupture or change in the images of Mary
The global image of the Virgin Mary is the product of long and complex processes of transformation. It began in the earliest communities of Christ’s followers, was adopted by the imperial state once Christianity became a licit, and then the official religion of the Roman Empire. It was formulated within discourses of imperial authority and incarnational theology, as MAry became Theotokos within a Greek intellectual milieu that coexisted with local cultures: Egyptian, Jewish, Syriac. The resulting ideas about Mary were considered and absorbed by those thinkers who produced the Latin tradition, but which dwelt little in their making of Latin Christianity upon the Mother of God.
After the year 1000 more stable institutions of church and state emerged and in them a societas christiana was conceptualised and experienced. Hegemonic monastic cultures transformed the content of Mary and the modes of expression – liturgical, poetical, homiletic, visual – appropriate for her. Theotokos was transformed into a series of poignant narratives, about Mary and her son at birth an at death, at the foot of the cross. The vernacular turn of the thirteenth century worked another transformation, and produced a Mary of home and hearth, and a Holy Family too. Attempts to reunite East and West in the face of fifteenth century challenges – sometimes around the idea of the Immaculate Conception – foundered, but in Western Europe that century marks the most fertile and multifarious period of creativity around Mary. The abundance of Mary-related practises were rethought in the sixteenth centuries: Protestants diminished the place and scope for appropriate engagement with her; at the same time a whole new world of ‘new’ Christians, in Africa, America and Asia, was offered Mary in the aftermath of conquest, disease and destruction.