For early modern society, there was no consensus on how to understand the sexes. Even the inheritance from ancient wisdom was divided. Aristotle had emphasized sexual difference, perceiving women as more-or-less under-developed men. By contrast, the second-century Roman physician Galen emphasized commonality, seeing women’s genitals as essentially inverted male genitalia (Lacqueur 1992: 25–35). Galen did, however, promote the humoral theory in a way that demonstrated that a woman’s temperament made her intellectually and morally inferior. Some contemporary physicians thought that the humoral balance alone accounted for the different sexes, and worried that ‘unmanly’ behaviour could cause a man to regress into a woman. Consequently, any appropriation of a masculine role by a non-male immediately manifested gender anxiety concerning androgyny, couched in the language of the virago and the shrew.
These fundamental assumptions about gender difference did not go unchallenged. Allegorical figures such as Music, Grammar, and Prudence remained female: all lawyers were men, but Justice was a woman. Moreover, there were viragos in the biblical corpus, notably Deborah and Judith; but it was the special place of the Virgin Mary in popular piety that fundamentally restricted misogyny, since her immaculate status significantly qualified all generalized references to female weakness. The Virgin is often considered as an instrument of female subjection (Warner 1976: 49), but this chapter will argue that late medieval men and women and, indeed, the first generations of English evangelicals were happy to consider Mary as an object of imitation. Of course later generations continued to see her as exemplary as regards her humility, but for quite far into the Reformation, and certainly with regard to the reforming wing of the Church before Luther, considering Mary as a perfect Christian to be imitated was acceptable and, indeed, useful. In particular Mary, as the perfect human, remained gender neutral as an object of imitation—in other words, Mary was the perfect man.
Continuities with pre-Reformation devotion were pastorally expedient by helping to avoid dissonance, something that the work of the late Bob Scribner helpfully taught us in the context of Reformation Germany. Seeing this in Marian piety should readjust our thinking about the period in two ways. First, emphasizing that the Virgin’s role as a lodestone for moral behaviour was something accessible to men, as well as women, demonstrates considerable overlap in forms of piety for both sexes, supporting the conclusions of Christine Peters among others (Peters 2003: 4). Contemporary minds must have considered the Marian ideal attainable, or at least improbable rather than impossible. In other words, people used imitating the Virgin as a methodology for becoming like the Virgin. Secondly, foregrounding such continuity contributes to the view that reformers did not need to knock down a Catholic edifice and build their own from scratch. It should be an axiom—but it isn’t—that the first generations of Protestants were late-medieval Catholics. It was possible for them to examine existing plans and select materials from a basket of possibilities. They appropriated and re-imagined, rather than innovated.
In the Divine Comedy, the ardent Marian enthusiast Bernard of Clairvaux directed Dante towards ‘the face that resembles Christ the most’ (Paradiso XXXII, ll. 85–6). This was not merely the suggestion that the Son of God had inherited the structure of his mother’s cheekbones. The comparison suggested that Mary might have shared in Christ’s essence, just as he had partaken of her accidents. At the heart of Christian ethics sat the idea of humanity restored to the position of the prelapsarian Adam and Eve if only humanity was capable of realizing or recovering its telos, its intended character. Such a restoration was recognized as the culmination of sanctification (Bonde 1531: 217v–18r), but of course this happened at death, and by the late Middle Ages was closely tied up with the process of Purgatory. Uniquely, the Virgin achieved humanity’s teleological ideal in life. There were infamous rows between late medieval Mariologists concerning exactly when this had happened—at conception, in the womb, at the Annunciation—but no one seriously argued that Mary was anything other than immaculate.
From a relatively early date, speculation concerning the Virgin concluded that such an idealization of her character was appropriate for the woman chosen to be the vehicle for the Incarnation. Gabriel, in addressing her as ‘full of grace’, alluded to her acceptability as the vessel by which God would enter the world; as the Bridgettine monk William Bonde declared in his Pilgrymage of perfeccyon, ‘as the most chosen vessel of grace, thou contained in the all goodness’ (Bonde 1531: 183r). Such cogitation fell short of considering Mary’s sinlessness, although the two concepts—a sinless woman, and a sinful woman who didn’t sin—remained closely associated. Instead medieval writers conceived the Virgin as the realized potential of humanity without the vitiating elements associated with the Fall. Indeed, there is an extant fifteenth-century sermon for Advent which explains the timing of the Incarnation as the want of a woman, before Mary, who was pure enough to bear Christ and attributing the argument to St Anselm, presumably disingenuously (Ross 1940: 187). Panegyric poetry from the late medieval period consistently set the Virgin alongside Adam, Eve, and Christ as the only perfectly created human beings, the latter at least as regards his humanity. This discourse leant itself to the presentation of the Virgin as a second Eve. Mary recovered that which Eve had lost: Eve, our physical mother, had brought sin into the world while Mary, our spiritual mother, had brought salvation. Within this quartet of perfect humanity, Adam and Eve had lapsed while Christ and the Virgin had not. This reaffirmed the affiliation between the woman Mary and the second person of the Godhead and, in the process, opened up the possibility of her apotheosis (Oberman 1983: 311–14). More than anything it established Mary as the idealized telos of humanity: the perfect man.
Good Christians were obviously trying to be sinless, conforming to behavioural norms set out in mnemonics such as the seven deadly sins and the seven works of mercy. Late medieval sermons are replete with representations of Mary and the saints as models for such pious behaviour, but from the late fourteenth century lay piety made a conscious turn towards contemplation in the hope of experiencing the union of the soul with God. Mary the sister of Martha, conflated by contemporaries with Mary Magdalene, is the ubiquitous model of contemplative practice for both men and women. English mystical writers drew heavily on the image of Martha busying herself with domestic duties and complaining to Christ of her sister’s laziness, only to be told ‘Mary has chosen the better way’ (Luke 10:38–42). In this moment, a dichotomy was presented between active Marthas and contemplative Marys in which Christ had affirmed contemplation over action. The doyen of English mysticism, Walter Hilton, wrote To a deuoute man in temperall estate in just this context. Written at the end of the fourteenth century but put into print in 1516, 1525, and 1530, Hilton’s treatise affirmed that through thinking on ‘the mynde of our Lady saynt Mary aboue all other sayntes … might a mannes herte be styred into ghostly comforte greatly’; for ‘she was fulfylled with al vertues without wem of synne’ (Hilton 1530: 28–9). Contemplating and emulating the Virgin were practices that moved the individual up the ladder of perfection.
Mary’s physical, emotional, and spiritual weaknesses humanized her, creating the potential for fostering a close personal relationship with her. Devotees could empathize with Mary’s distress as a witness to the Crucifixion, as a mother and therefore susceptible to the suffering inherent in life, and as a woman vulnerable to doubt. They could emulate her even as she emulated Christ, creating an imitatio Mariae as a path to imitatio Christi piety. Empathizing with the Virgin Mary helped one to become like her. This context may explain Margery Kempe’s highly emotional responses to seeing images of the Crucifixion (Meech and Allen 1940: 173). The Mater dolorosa was regularly swooning by Kempe’s day, one might say the stabat mater was no longer standing, overcome as she was with grief and compassio. There is, in fairness, an additional discourse here in which the Virgin’s agony on Calvary alluded to the pains of childbirth endured by the woman in Revelation 12:2 and Simeon’s prophecy that a sword would pierce her heart (Luke 2:34–35). Her travail was bearing all humanity: mankind’s spiritual birth was not only through the death of Christ, but also through the anguish of the mother. Kempe was clearly not imitating that, but she was imitating the suffering per se. Kempe saw the Virgin and Christ suffering together on the Via Dolorosa, she saw the Virgin swoon, and she appropriated those emotions into her own affective piety.
The discourse of late medieval English mysticism runs close to what we call Neoplatonism, a Victorian term for thinkers who regarded themselves as decidedly Platonist and their interpreters in the fifteenth and sixteenth century: men such as Ficino and Pico and, in England, John Colet. Both English mystics like Hilton and English humanists like Colet were particularly influenced by the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (cf. Bonde 1531: 217v), a composite figure who was thought to be the Greek thinker converted by St Paul in Athens, as recorded in Acts 17 and known in France as St Denis. In fact the great fifteenth-century philologist Lorenzo Valla had refuted this, dating the Dionysian commentaries to the fifth or sixth century: in other words, Pseudo-Dionysius was a Neoplatonist (remarkably, Colet remained oblivious to this). The principles that were subsequently assumed into lay piety involved ascending levels of spirituality with the purpose of ultimately achieving the human telos. Matter was evil whereas the spiritual was good, a system that had more than an echo of St Paul’s dichotomy between ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’. Christian contemplation was a methodology for moving from one condition into another with an almost sacramental quality: the Holy Spirit was the Platonic Architect of a second creation through the work of sanctification. This laid great emphasis on internal piety as opposed to external ritual.
Having realized the sanctified ideal, the Virgin became a role model for this sort of piety. Since Christ was fully God as well as fully man, he could not reflect the human condition as closely as his mother. So, for example, when coloured with the trope of Christ the Judge, he lacked her maternal compassion. Becoming like Mary was a devotional aspiration, however ambitious. It may be that the prevalence of accusations against evangelicals, in which they are said to have described the Virgin as an ordinary and powerless woman, testified to the popularity of this mental framework. In the autumn of 1536 John Kene, vicar of Christchurch, Bristol lamented that ‘some women do say they be as good as Our Lady; for we have borne four or five children and know the father of them, and she bare but one and knew not the father’ (Gairdner 1890: 528). Evidently the husbands of these women concurred. Thomas Multon affirmed in November 1536 that ‘Our Blessed Lady was no better than his wife’ and, likewise, Thomas Merial claimed his wife was as good as our Lady (Brigden 1989: 255–6, 272). One examination from 1538 included the charge that the suspect had asserted ‘that his mother was so good as Our Lady and better, for she had five children and Our Lady but one’ (Gairdner 1893: 498), implying child-bearing remained at the centre of a female identity shared with the Virgin. For these evangelicals Mary was an ordinary woman, but they still desired to equate themselves with her morally. They did this by reducing her standing on the ladder of sanctity yet they continued to measure their spirituality against her. Mary remained both the means to an end and the end in itself.
Obviously the Virgin was an exemplar in her behaviour and, especially, in her virginity. As a model for piety, humble obedience, and faithfulness, she provided a moral compass for both sexes. Geoffrey de la Tour Landry (1484: i8v–k1r) wrote that ‘this blessyd vyrgyne is of soo hyghe exemplary that none maye wryte the good, the bounte and the hyghenesse wherin her swete and blessyd sone enhaunceth her daye by daye’. Of course, he was establishing a behavioural framework for his daughters; a parallel text for the edification of his sons is, frustratingly, lost to us. At length he offered the Virgin as an exemplar of piety, purity, charity, and humility, even as an example of how we ought to visit our relatives as Mary visited Elizabeth. These sorts of virtues are clearly applicable on either side of the gender boundary and we should not be surprised to see them in sermons (e.g. Mirk 1508: 110) as well as devotional texts as the pious are exhorted to imitation.
Even within Lollardy, the Virgin had a place as an exemplar. The Lantern of Lyght (Anon. 1535: 15) placed Mary as the prototype for model Christian spirituality; ‘who shall not auance his feble wyttes to thynke on that louely company that prayseth in heuen the goodnes of thys inscrutable godhede, father and sonne and holy goste’ it asked rhetorically, advising ‘begynne at Mary Christes mother, quene of heuen, lady of therthe and Impresse of hell’. One extant Wycliffite sermon highlighted that in spite of her royal pedigree, the Virgin remained obedient to Caesar. It suggested that ‘here men may learn of Our Lady, Saint Mary … great example of meekness and of obedience to temporal lords’ (Cigman 1989: 56). This had an obvious resonance in the context of the Lollard challenge to the power of the Church, best exemplified in the Dialogue between a Clerk and a Knight. Yet it also promoted a standard of secular loyalty, one that a rebellious figure such as Sir John Oldcastle would have benefited from hearing. Lollard sermons also used the Virgin to reflect social concerns. The poor should imitate Mary, for she was ‘glad in her pouerte and bere mekely hire astaat’. Conversely, the rich should not misuse their wealth at the expense of ‘Cristis pore breþeren’ (Cigman 1989: 60). Here Mary is a cultural symbol for social as well as devotional attitudes.
One key aspect of Mary’s exemplary behaviour is her steadfastness between Christ’s death and resurrection: as the Golden Legend put it, ‘in his passion sauf our lady, alle lost fayth’ (Voragine 1483: 19v). In the Wycliffite Dialogue between a Clerk and a Knight, the latter asserted that for, ‘þre daies þat Cristes bodi was dede and laie in þe sepulcre, all þe bileue of holi chirch failid in all þe apostils and all oþer men, saue onelich in oure ladi saint Mari, and ȝit was scho no preste’ (Somerset 2009: 63). Thomas More described the view that ‘faythe abode at any tyme onely in our lady’ as ‘the comen opynyon of good Chrysten people’ (More 1533: 163). It bears highlighting that the faithfulness of the apostle John, although recorded in the gospels, is persistently overlooked in advancing Mary’s singular faith during those hours: the perfect woman trumping a mere male apostle.
In spite of a fresh emphasis on classical exemplars (Woodbridge 1984: 15), the imitation of Mary remained appropriate in the Christocentric piety advocated by Renaissance humanists. In The instruction of a Christen woman, Juan Luis Vives established the Virgin as the telos for girls, wives, and widowers graduating from his programme of study (Vives 1529: M2r). The virtues of Vives’ Virgin are the essentials drawn from the New Testament, above all her perpetual virginity. He emphasized chastity as a woman’s defining precept and knowledge as its best safeguard (Taylor 2011: 105). Translated into English in 1529, The instruction of a Christen woman had a long and successful history, contributing to developing lay piety by affirming that educated women were virtuous women. By reading books, both Christian and classical, they would find moral exemplars, especially the Virgin (Vives 1529: L4r). Yet, once again, these principles could and did extend to men. In his Handbook of a Christian Knight, written in 1503 and published eight times in English translation between 1533 and 1553, Erasmus challenged his readers, male and female, to use the Virgin as a template for their own lives. ‘Thou honourest sayntes, and art ioyous & glad to touche theyr relykes’, he concedes, ‘but thou dispysest the chef relykes whiche they left behynde them, that is to vnderstande, the examples of pure lyuynge. There is no honour more pleasaunt to Mary than if thou woldest counterfayte her humylite. No religyon is more acceptable to sayntes or more appropriate, than if thou dydest labour to represent and folowe their vertues’ (Erasmus 1534: I3v).
In 1525 Erasmus added a homily to his litany for the Holy House at Loreto. Here he set out his view that veneration of the Virgin consisted in praise, honour, invocation and imitation but that of these activities, imitation was ‘the moste chefe and pryncypall: that without it all, the other .iiii. are vnfruytefull or vnprofytable, and this one also contayneth al the other .iiii. within it selfe’ (Erasmus 1533: 3r). In this sermon, Mary herself called on her devotees to imitate her virtues and warned that ‘not euery one that saythe to me lady lady, shall entre into the kyngdom of my sone, but they onely whiche folowynge the example of my sone, do obey the commaundementes of god, and whiche endeuourynge them selues to expresse and counterfayte the example gyuen of me do laboure to obtayne the fauour of my sone by folowynge of his mother’ (Erasmus 1533: 4v). Even as Reformation was breaking out, the Erasmian Virgin was calling on men and women to imitation. Once again, the gender of devotees is of no relevance to this exhortation.
Consequently, we may need to qualify our sense that the Virgin was a burdensome role model or an oppressive and unrelenting misogynistic yardstick. Undoubtedly, this could be the case. True, the Golden Legend stated that Mary was ‘moche abasshid’ at the Annunciation and that ‘thys was a good maner of a vyrgyne, that so wysely held her stylle, and spack not, and shewyng example to virgynes whiche ought not lyghtly to speke’, and that just as Gabriel found Mary ‘enclosed in her chambre’, so ‘maydens & virgynes ought to abyde in theyr howses’. Yet it also affirmed that her response at the Annunciation ‘hath gyuen to vs’, that is, all of us, ‘example to be humble whan prosperyte of hye rychesse cometh to vs, for the first word that she spack or said whan she was made moder of god and quene of heuen, that was that she callid her self ancylle or handmayde’ (Voragine 1483:150v–151r). This sort of exemplar was more constructive and more equitable, extending in application beyond the boundaries of both gender and estate.
Protestantism ultimately attempted to retrieve a Chalcedonian image of the Virgin and evangelicals therefore stripped away those things identified as accretions. As a result, Mary no longer had any special prerogatives on account of her relation to Christ. However, the Virgin’s place as moral exemplar survived the cull on her religious role. While reformers stopped her from misleading the public with ‘feigned miracles’ and denounced the intercession of the saints, including Mary, they found that she was already conformed into the model spiritual pilgrim. For example, Andreas Osiander’s 1547 sermon On the Saints and How They Should Be Honoured retained Mary as an exemplary recipient of God’s grace and a model of faith, obedience, and humility (Heal 2007: 60). In promoting this idea, evangelicals could emphasize a theme already manifest in orthodox medieval piety.
For reformers, the Virgin was available as a paradigm of godliness for both sexes (Peters 2003: 243). The language of mimeticism transcended gender in a manner evocative of the Neoplatonic telos for all of humanity. Luther asserted that in the Magnificat, ‘the beloved mother of Christ … teaches us how we should acknowledge, love and praise God’ (Luther 1538: 7r). English evangelical writers of the 1540s were of the same accord. John Pylbarough exhorted his readers to ‘imprint the memorial’ of the light of God ‘in our hartes, with perfect belefe therof, & magnifie god therfore, that it may fructifie in vs good workes, and make vs blessed through the same, before all nations, as was the holy virgyn Mary’ (Pylbarough 1540: B1r). Similarly Richard Taverner felt ‘we may truly saye with ye blessed virgine Marye: et exultauit spiritus meus in deo salutari meo’ (Taverner 1540: 31r). He exhorted, ‘let vs then my frendes folow the humilitie of thys blessed virgine’ (Taverner 1542: 14v). Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s desexualized assessment of the Virgin, printed in English translation in 1542, had male devotees in mind: her fair beauty ‘moued the myndes, and lykewyse the eies of all men’ but never to ‘thynke amysse’ (Agrippa 1542: B6v). Even Henry’s idiosyncratic reform, illustrated in the King’s Book, stressed that churches and altars named after Our Lady or the saints were merely ‘a memoriall, to put vs in remembraunce of them, that we maye folowe theyr example and lyuynge’ (Henry VIII et al. 1543: Q4v). All of these affirmations of the Virgin as the model for godly living were as applicable to men as they were to women.
Luther’s validation of the Magnificat set it on course to become the defining Reformation text for humility. As a song of consensual submission to divine will, the Magnificat became the hymn of Protestant martyrs. Before the stake in 1546, Roger Clarke ‘kneeled downe & sayd Magnificat in the English toung’ (Foxe 1570: 1411). So too Cicelie Ormes as the flames reached her in 1557 (Foxe 1570: 2219). From prison John Philpot wrote to his consoler, Elizabeth Fane, comparing her to the Virgin (Freeman 2000: 25–6). In similar vein, Philpot utilized Simeon’s image as a metaphor for Fane’s suffering: ‘the swordes which pearced Maries hart in ye passion of our Sauiour, which daily also go through your faithfull hart’ (Foxe 1570: 2011). Thomas Whittle went further in appropriating Simeon’s words as a prophecy for the martyred Protestant saints, asserting, ‘of this opening of the hart by persecution, spake holy Simeon to Mary Christes mother when he sayd: the sword, that is, the crosse of persecution shall pearse thy soule’ (Foxe 1570: 2020). The most committed of Protestants therefore continued to imitate Mary and appropriate her spiritual eminence.
Perhaps more than anywhere, English Protestantism’s willingness to utilize the Virgin as a model for godly submission is seen in the two Books of Homilies. The first was originally published in 1547 and revised and reissued at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign to coincide with the reintroduction of the Prayer Book. The ‘Sermon of Obedience’, endorsed if not written by Thomas Cranmer, summoned the example of Mary when exhorting readers to deference to secular authority: ‘let vs not forgette the blessed virgin Maries obedience’, who in spite of her pregnancy and poverty submitted herself to Roman rule by travelling to Bethlehem (Cranmer et al. 1559: T2r). The second compilation was assembled in 1563 to coincide with the Thirty-Nine Articles, but an additional sermon ‘agaynst wilfull rebellion’ was written in 1570 in the wake of the Northern Rising and added to a new edition of the Homilies the following year. ‘Neyther dyd the blessed virgin’, it asserted, ‘disdayne to obey the commaundement of an heathen & forraigne prince, when God had placed suche a one ouer them’. Elizabeth, of course, compared favourably with the unchristian Caesar: ‘this obedience of this most noble, and most vertuous Ladye, to a forraigne and Pagan Prince, doth well teach vs (who in comparison to her are moste base and vyle) what redye obedience we do owe to our naturall and gratious Soueraigne’ (Jewel et al. 1571: 570–1). Here we have the authentic voice of appropriation as the Protestant establishment employed Mary as the example by which to call dissident Catholics to heel.
Mary, then, continued to represent not just the possibility of human sanctity but also the ideal of good citizenship. A consequent question, however, especially given the evolving Reformation emphasis on a Virgin who was maculate, was her impact on contemporary attitudes to women. The gendered telos of the godly layperson was inescapable, but even Hugh Latimer in accusing Mary of arrogance, ‘pricked with vain-glory’, was constructing a more realistic model for others to follow (Peters 2003: 225–6; MacCulloch 2004: 204–5). Latimer consistently portrayed the Virgin as a sinner, saved by Christ rather than through the theological construction of the Immaculate Conception, but knocking Mary down a rung or two on the ladder of perfection still left her further up than anyone else. Moreover, there was nothing innovative in Protestantism comparing the limits of Mary’s moral achievements with those of other women, even when that criticism drew on contemporary misogyny. In the Towneley play of the Assumption for example, Joseph assumed that the mysteriously pregnant Mary had been unfaithful as was the way of women: ‘I blame the not, so god me saue, woman maners if that thou haue’ (England 1897: 92). Unwittingly, the critique that Mary was an ordinary, sinful woman only succeeded in making her more imitable. This meant ordinary, sinful women were more capable of drawing close to, if not attaining, the well-established epitome of Christian life, which served to emphasize the spiritual equality of the sexes.
The French Benedictine Guillaume Alexis is associated with misogynistic writing, particularly Le Grant Blason des faulces amours, but his only printed work in English was An interlocucyon, with an argument, betwyxt man and woman, published in 1525. Anne Coldiron describes this text as ‘nearly protofeminist’ (Coldiron 2009: 70). The female protagonist is articulate and keen to get on the front-foot by assaulting the vices of men. In defending the virtues of women, however, and in response to the use of Eve as the archetype of their sinful character, she points repeatedly to the Virgin:
Woman is honoured in every place
For queen of earth and of heaven high
Which is petitioner for mans trespass
To God on their souls to have mercy
(Alexis 1525: A3r).
For Alexis, the Virgin appeared to represent womanhood. Her honours as queen reflect glory on all women. He even lets his woman have the last word, a long and stinging soliloquy condemning men. She begins:
For all the blames and offence
That against us women you can lay
Consider the bounty of our lady’s excellence
And all our evils her goodness doth delay
(Alexis 1525: A5r).
These lines evoke an image of the vices of each sex being weighed against each other in St Michael’s scales: men have nothing with which to compare the redeeming virtues of the Virgin. Such an idea works because Mary is fully human, unlike her Son, and sinless, unlike the male saints. Alexis evidently understood women to identify with Mary as one of them, ordinary in her femaleness. As a man he could empathize with but not experience this identity, but it is reasonable to suggest that he also identified with the Virgin as regards their shared humanity. Such a phenomenon is in keeping with the late medieval devotional praxis of imitating Mary and, of course, women imitated her simply by being women.
In 1541 a contentious debate on gender followed the publication of an anonymous treatise, The Schole House of Women (Anon. 1541). Its misogynistic character meant it avoided mentioning Mary altogether. Responses to it, however, pointed to her as the archetypal godly woman, wilfully ignoring her exceptional sinless condition. The poet Edwarde Gosynhyll may well have been the author of The Schole House in a publishing ploy. Writing against it in The prayse of all women, Gosynhyll reminded readers that humanity’s reconciliation with God was dependent on Mary, ‘by means of her great humbleness’ (Gosynhyll 1542: B4r). God had chosen and favoured her, demonstrating divine acceptability. Gosynhyll also drew on the discourse of Mary as the retainer of Christian faith qua woman (indeed as representative of mothers, wives, and unmarried women) during the Easter triduum:
Faith in man was clear decayed
In Mary his mother, both wife and maid
It never failed, for the feminine,
In Thomas it failed for the masculine
(Gosynhyll 1542: D3v).
Robert Burdet’s verse Dyalogue Defensyve for Women agaynst Malycyous Detractoures concurred:
At Christ’s death, when the Apostles all
Their master did leave, through mutability
Men were found light, and trundling as a ball
In them was no faith, but infidelity
In one woman then, all faith did remain
When men did shrink, and turn as the wind
Mary Christ’s mother, it is that I mean
No sorrow could cause her faith to untwine
(Burdet 1542: B4v–C1r).
Thus the respondents to The Schole House were of one mind: the Virgin represented the greater faithfulness of women over men in the face of persecution. According to the Dyalogue, only a ‘railing heretic’ would be shameless enough to accuse the Virgin of ‘light living’. Consequently it cautioned against generalizing upon the existence of a few lustful women, that ‘if one be nought, so be all the rest’ and, as such, attempted to wield the Mother of God as the ultimate counter-example. The author drew short of considering that this argument against illustrative induction could work both ways, and that Mary was not an apposite sample of womankind especially since, unlike the few ‘found to do amiss’, she remained exceptional (Burdet 1542: D3r). The debate over The School House demonstrated a willingness among male writers to see the Virgin as representatively normal and therefore an achievable telos in female moral behaviour.
The first Englishwoman to write a defence of her sex was Jane Anger, whose Protection for Women was published in 1589. Anger argued that women’s wisdom surpassed men’s since it was a principle that wisdom comes only by grace and ‘grace was first giuen to a woman, because to our lady: which premises conclude that women are wise’ (Anger 1589: C2r). Interestingly, this argument also appeared in a prose compilation by Nicholas Breton, The Will of Wit, first entered in the Stationer’s Register in 1580 (Woodbridge 1984: 69–70). ‘Women haue Witte naturally: wisedome must be hadde by Grace, Grace was giuen to our Lady: then who wiser then a woman?’ (Breton 1597: 68r). This was not the only passage shared between the texts and it seems probable that Anger consulted contemporary defence literature, including a now lost edition of Breton’s The Praise of vertuous Ladies, in compiling her own response. If so, it offers a compelling narrative in which the use of the Virgin by a man to defend women is imitated by a protofeminist at the end of the sixteenth century.
There was an increasing distrust of mysticism and Neoplatonism in Elizabethan and early Stuart England, a more pessimistic view of the potentiality of the material world, closely tied up with Calvinist thinking. Moreover, the cultural contribution offered by the Virgin was tainted because of its close association with the Spanish during the Marian restoration (a link cultivated by Elizabethan Protestants) and because the immaculate Mary was the object of aggressive promotion in post-Tridentine Catholicism. In 1595, Breton wished ‘that all men and women woulde learne to imitate Mary’ (Breton 1595: B6r) but now he meant Mary Magdalene. She offered a very different type of role model—the penitent sinner. Her dolour was that of contrition rather than maternal grief, her position under the Cross was also more ambivalent than the medieval Virgin who never lost her faith, and she had a male counterpart in St Paul, the chief of sinners. It is therefore arguable that the Virgin was becoming an increasingly female model at the turn of the seventeenth century. However, as Christine Peters points out, Stuart writers such as Anthony Stafford (Stafford 1635) and John Taylor (Taylor 1620), the water poet, were keen to emphasize the appropriateness of the Marian role model for men (Peters 2003: 241–4). Stafford, for example, in the preface to his The Femall Glory, tells male readers that the Virgin is someone ‘whose meanest perfection farre excels all your so long vaunted masculine merits’ (Stafford 1635: B6v). This suggests that the Virgin remained available, but unfashionable, for imitation in post-Reformation England.
Mary was an ideal, not only for women but for men, who modelled the definitive Christian life. Contemporaries knew they were wrestling with sin but that the immaculate Virgin stood above this struggle. Unlike her son, Mary had an ordinary human nature and she threatened to replace him as the telos of humanity. In a sense, the endgame for spiritual development was to be like the second Eve, rather than the second Adam. Yet Mary also appears to have been the means to achieving that end. This thesis contends that there was a developing imitatio Mariae in late medieval spirituality, but such devotion could either be a stepping stone towards imitating Christ, the next rung up on the scala perfectionis, or a substitute for it altogether. It suggests that more work is needed on the relationship between the Neoplatonic paradigm, lay piety, and the concerns of the Reformation. It also suggests there was a great deal of continuity in this approach to lay piety even after the Reformation’s cleansing of medieval accretions to Marian devotion. If anything, the process of reform rendered the Virgin more ordinary and therefore more capable of imitation and, consequently, writers continued to use her to defend women from the assumptions of contemporary misogyny.