The Subjective Eye

Essays in Culture, Religion, and Gender in Honor of Margaret R. Miles

Valantasis, Haynes

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781630878702
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

One of the great joys of the academic life is to pay homage in a Festschrift to a scholar who has influenced both colleagues and students over years of interaction and friendship both professional and personal. This volume honors a scholar and theologian of historical theology, a theorist and a practitioner of religion and the arts, and a keen analyst of cultural trends both ancient and modern.... [Margaret R.] Miles's prodigious production as a scholar has legendary qualities. Her dozen-plus books alone explore history, patristics, ancient philosophy, art and art history, spiritual formation and religious practice, critical theory, film, ethics and values, personal growth, gender and women's studies, as well as her true academic loves, Augustine and Plotinus.... The breadth and depth of her own work and her influence upon others demands an expansive volume, which the editors of this Festschrift unfortunately had to restrict to four categories--Historical Theology, Religion and Culture, Religion and Gender, and Religion and the Visual Arts--in order to capture the heart of our appreciation for her. --from the Introduction

Critical Generosity

The Significance of Mary’s Presentation to the Temple for Medieval Women Surviving Plague

Kimberly Vrudny

In her book Image as Insight, Margaret R. Miles develops a method for image analysis she elsewhere calls “critical generosity.”1 Miles argues with generosity that, though many of the medieval images historians examine were made by men and therefore express the worldview from a male perspective, these images nonetheless convey aspects of experience not always accessible to historians in texts; they are, therefore, rich sources for historical inquiry. Even so, she argues that it is the responsibility of the historian to critique these visual sources for ways in which they diminished the humanity of those men and women whose lives were both reflected in and shaped by their existence. After constructing her method, she turns to its application by analyzing images from the fourth, fourteenth, and sixteenth centuries.

In this essay, written with appreciation for the integrity with which Miles has proven that images can serve as historical evidence and with respect for the manner in which Miles has exemplified her critical and generous methodology, I would like to develop a point Miles makes briefly in her essay on “Images of Women in Fourteenth-Century Tuscan Painting” in her book Image as Insight.2 Miles argues with generosity that Italian women could identify with Mary at each stage of their lives, for surrounding them were numerous paintings of Mary’s conception, childhood, betrothal, childbirth, and death. But with criticism, Miles goes on to assert that these images deny the very experiences of fourteenth-century women, for in nearly every circumstance, Mary’s experiences were otherworldly and were, therefore, set apart from their own.

Certainly I do not dispute that Mary’s experiences, including her own conception in the womb of Anna without the stain of sin as well as her virginal conception of Jesus and assumption into heaven, were extraordinary and unable to be replicated in the lives of medieval women. However, Mary was accessible to women especially in one experience that became all too familiar in the latter half of the fourteenth century: grief over the loss of a child. Mary’s anguish over her brutalized son, and her grief over his subsequent death, made her accessible to a population whose infant mortality rates were high in regular circumstances, but who were particularly confronted with the death of children when plague revisited Europe in 1361, and roughly once a decade for the next century, killing infants, toddlers, and children at an overall death rate of three times the average.3 Whereas Miles emphasizes how Mary was unlike the medieval women who were devoted to her, it is my contention that the experience of grief, with which the medieval population in the latter half of the fourteenth century could readily empathize, pervaded each stage of Mary’s life, making her more accessible to the public despite the otherworldly nature of much of her experience.

This context of plague is important to keep in mind when considering fourteenth-century Marian piety, for Mary’s experience of Christ’s death extended beyond the year of his passion. In medieval understanding, his death overshadowed her entire life. She was born without the stain of sin—a feat made possible by the application of Christ’s redemptive merits to Mary while she was still in Anna’s womb. She was presented to the Temple, an exemplification of her own sacrifice, in order to prepare for his sacrificial atonement on the cross. And her sorrow was predicted in the first weeks of his life, when Simeon proclaimed at Christ’s presentation that a sword would pierce Mary’s own heart (Luke 2:35). Though Mary would not experience Christ’s actual death until, tradition maintains, thirty-some years later, Simeon’s prophecy cast its shadow. She knew of his death at least from the moment of his circumcision and experienced the intensity of her grief at the cross. But medieval Christians understood the experience of loss to color the years leading to her own death as well, for legends say that, despite the joy she experienced upon Christ’s resurrection, she spent the two decades after his ascension yearning for her son, visiting the sites where he preached and performed miracles.4 Upon her assumption, medieval Christians understood Mary to care for the souls of the blessed in heaven. Thus, the crucifixion of Christ overshadowed the entirety of Mary’s life. Less than diminishing her accessibility to the medieval populace, the pervasive sense of sorrow throughout her life made her existence, despite the otherworldly nature of her experience, an advantage for those medieval Christians who hoped their deceased and beloved children were in this nanny’s care in paradise.

In asserting that Mary’s experiences were extraordinary, Miles admits that Mary becomes most accessible to women in the experience of the loss of their own children. “Only in motherhood, in her human pain over the death of her son, does Mary become a “typical’ woman.”5 Miles goes on, despite this admission, to emphasize how Mary was unlike medieval women:

A bewilderingly vast spectrum of images of women existed in fourteenth-century Italy. Among them, as we have seen, were idealized images of Mary, the “perfect” woman at each biological stage of her life. Thus a series of images was available with which a medieval woman might identify and in which she might find articulated the interests and values peculiar to her stage of life. Yet the clear message of these images, both verbal and visual, is the freedom of the Virgin from biological necessity at every stage of her life. She was conceived in a “special” way and was physically and religiously precocious in childhood. Her betrothal was attended with supernatural signs. She conceived without sexual intercourse and experienced childbirth without discomfort or loss of virginity. . . . Even her death was not a real human death; from the twelfth century on, she is shown ascending bodily on clouds into heaven. Mary, the Virgin/Mother, has a characteristic female life cycle but does not experience the biological life of human women. . . . On the one hand, women’s experience and life cycle are articulated in a sequence of nuanced and profound images. On the other hand, women’s sexuality and biological experience are pointedly rejected.6

Miles goes on to argue critically and convincingly that these idealized images of Mary were destructive to medieval women, who could not compare with the standard for the spiritual life set by Mary.

Male anxiety concerning the physicality and sexuality of real women, in addition to the threat of women’s changing social roles, was translated into fantasies of women as purely spiritual and purely visual. These images did not, however, promote a transfer of esteem, affection, and acceptance by men from the images to actual women but emphasized the inferiority of women in comparison with the images.7

Even so, Miles acknowledges with generosity that these images, while devoid of inspiration for some present-day men and women, may have been admired nonetheless by medieval women for legitimate social reasons.

An image that to many modern women has come to carry a repressive content may have meant something very different to medieval women. The idealization of the virginal woman, for example, may have symbolized to medieval women freedom from the burden of frequent childbearing and nursing in an age in which these natural processes were highly dangerous.8

In making these generous and critical observations, Miles downplays the example of Mary’s sorrow. I propose the context of the loss of children during the second and subsequent outbreaks of plague in the fourteenth and subsequent centuries is a critical consideration in assessing the impact of images on fourteenth-century men and women. The experience of the loss of a child, which overshadowed every stage of Mary’s life just as it profoundly impacted the lives of men and women in the fourteenth century, made Mary less the idealized image Miles characterizes her to be and more a figure of hope for a grieving population confronting the horrors of contagious disease. Instead of damaging women’s self-image, depictions of Mary—even in stages considered biologically fantastic—may have served to give life and hope to men and women whose children did not survive to adulthood.

By focusing on images of the Presentation of the Virgin from the medieval epic poem Speculum humanae salvationis (The Mirror of Human Salvation), images representing loss in Mary’s life long before her experience of Christ’s passion, we can gain insight into the medieval practice of Marian piety, which understood the Presentation of Mary as an initiation of salvation history. Mary’s sacrifice of her own aspirations made salvation, even the salvation of children, possible in the Middle Ages. Such a reality surely made more biologically feasible representations of Mary undesirable for women experiencing loss in the fourteenth centur...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Frontispiece: “Across the Miles,” words by Victoria Sirota, music by Robert Sirota
• Studebat
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Foreword: The Eye of the Beholder
• Introduction
• Interlude: Christian Spirituality Envisioned A Pastoral Appreciation of Ernst Kitzinger, Margaret Miles, and Henri Nouwen (Harvard, 1976–85)
• Historical Theology
• Antigone (Can a Woman Be a Hero?)
• On Being Beautiful and Religious at the Same Time Plotinus’s Aesthetics for the Present
• The Image in Tandem Painting Metaphors and Moral Discourse in Late Antique Christianity
• Using Philosophers to Think With The Venerable Bede on Christian Life and Practice
• “As long as that song could be heard”Eternal Time in the Trinity of Augustine
• Interlude: Toward a Pedagogy for Comparative Visual Studies
• Religion and Culture
• Calypso, Revisited
• Lay Asceticism as Social Critique The Sixteenth-Century Anabaptists and Twenty-First-Century Dissent
• Expressing Life: Dancing Toward the Feminist Philosophy of Religion
• A Samaritan, a Mother-in-law, and an Addict Insights on Vision and Attention
• On Doing Theology during a Romantic Movement
• Asceticism or Formation Theorizing Asceticism after Nietzsche
• Interlude: Insight as Image: My Ongoing Conversation with Margaret Miles
• Religion and Gender
• Susannah
• Religious Gender Models and Women’s Human Rights
• Gender Justice and the Transformative Power of Mutual Vulnerability
• The Violence of “Perfection” Power, Images, and the Female Body in American Popular Culture
• Rapt by God The Rhetoric of Rape in Medieval Mystical Literature
• Of Martyrs and Men Perpetua, Thecla, and the Ambiguity of Female Heroism in Early Christianity
• Interlude: My Life in Pictures
• Religion and the Visual Arts
• Psyche
• To Touch or Not to Touch Perceiving in Art the Intertextuality of a Faithful and Wise Mary Magdalene with a Doubtful Thomas and a Faithful Miriam
• Pictures and Popular Religion in Early Christianity Art as the Bible of the Illiterate?
• Blessed Irreverence What Black Theology Can Learn from the Visual Arts
• Answering the Call of Goya’s Dog Seeing with Vision, Seeing with Responsibility
• Critical Generosity The Significance of Mary’s Presentation to the Temple for Medieval Women Surviving Plague
• Shamhat
• Bibliography of Margaret R. Miles