The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture
The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture

Author: Gary Waller

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-01-20

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1139494678

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This book was first published in 2011. The Virgin Mary was one of the most powerful images of the Middle Ages, central to people's experience of Christianity. During the Reformation, however, many images of the Virgin were destroyed, as Protestantism rejected the way the medieval Church over-valued and sexualized Mary. Although increasingly marginalized in Protestant thought and practice, her traces and surprising transformations continued to haunt early modern England. Combining historical analysis and contemporary theory, including issues raised by psychoanalysis and feminist theology, Gary Waller examines the literature, theology and popular culture associated with Mary in the transition between late medieval and early modern England. He contrasts a variety of pre-Reformation texts and events, including popular mariology, poetry, tales, drama, pilgrimage and the emerging 'New Learning', with later sixteenth-century ruins, songs, ballads, Petrarchan poetry, the works of Shakespeare and other texts where the Virgin's presence or influence, sometimes surprisingly, can be found.

Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama
Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama

Author: Katharine Goodland

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 1351936646

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Grieving women in early modern English drama, this study argues, recall not only those of Classical tragedy, but also, and more significantly, the lamenting women of medieval English drama, especially the Virgin Mary. Looking at the plays of Shakespeare, Kyd, and Webster, this book presents a new perspective on early modern drama grounded upon three original interrelated points. First, it explores how the motif of the mourning woman on the early modern stage embodies the cultural trauma of the Reformation in England. Second, the author here brings to light the extent to which the figures of early modern drama recall those of the recent medieval past. Finally, Goodland addresses how these representations embody actual mourning practices that were viewed as increasingly disturbing after the Reformation. Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama synthesizes and is relevant to several areas of recent scholarly interest, including the performance of gender, the history of emotion, studies of death and mourning, and the cultural trauma of the Reformation.

Female Mourning in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama
Female Mourning in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama

Author: Katharine Goodland

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780754651017

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Looking at the plays of Shakespeare, Kyd, and Webster this book presents a new perspective on early modern drama grounded upon three original interrelated points. The author explores how the motif of the mourning woman on the early modern stage embodies the cultural trauma of the Reformation in England; brings to light the extent to which the figures of early modern drama recall those of the recent medieval past; and addresses how these representations embody actual mourning practices that were, after the Reformation, increasingly viewed as disturbing.

Gender and Medieval Drama
Gender and Medieval Drama

Author: Katie Normington

Publisher: DS Brewer

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 9781843840275

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Evidence from Records of Early English Drama, social, literary and cultural sources are drawn together in order to investigate how performances within the late Middle Ages were both shaped by, and shaped, the public image of women."--BOOK JACKET.

Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama
Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama

Author: Lisa Hopkins

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-06

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1317100662

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Concerning itself with the complex interplay between iconoclasm against images of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England and stage representations that evoke various 'Marian moments' from the medieval, Catholic past, this collection answers the call for further investigation of the complex relationship between the fraught religio-political culture of the early modern period and the theater that it spawned. Joining historians in rejecting the received belief that Catholicism could be turned on and off like a water spigot in response to sixteenth-century religious reform, the early modern British theater scholars in this collection turn their attention to the vestiges of Catholic tradition and culture that leak out in stage imagery, plot devices, and characterization in ways that are not always clearly engaged in the business of Protestant panegyric or polemic. Among the questions they address are: What is the cultural function of dramatic Marian moments? Are Marian moments nostalgic for, or critical of, the 'Old Faith'? How do Marian moments negotiate the cultural trauma of iconoclasm and/or the Reformation in early modern England? Did these stage pictures of Mary provide subversive touchstones for the Old Faith of particular import to crypto-Catholic or recusant members of the audience?