-
Mary
- History Workshop Journal
- Oxford University Press
- Issue 58, Autumn 2004
- pp. viii-16
- Article
- Additional Information
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History Workshop Journal 58 (2004) viii, 1-16
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Mary
Miri Rubin*
Click for larger view | Figure 1 An image of the Virgin and Christ Child, from the Reydon Hours, c. 1320-24, Cambridge University Library, Dd IV 17, fol. 11v. |
In October 1994 the Israeli chanteuse Ahinoam Nini performed at a Concert marking the Vatican's Year of The Family. She sang verses in English and Latin: Ave Maria. The Osservatore Romano heralded her performance as a unique occasion, a Jewish woman singing to a pope. Interviews with the gracious Nini reported her feeling on the occasion: the invitation was an honour, a gesture of peace, from a pope who had begged forgiveness for Catholic excesses against Jews throughout the centuries. Nini attracted hostile reaction from some orthodox Jews, but these were countered by a shower of approval from more liberal folk. The world delighted—even the most world-weary music journalists—in hearing a young Jewish woman sing some of the words, which millions still believe to be the words of an angel uttered long ago to another young Jewish woman endowed with song, Mary—Mother of Jesus.
Mary and song, Mary and forgiveness, Mary and peace. Mary is a truly global figure. Her image has the power to disarm, and to merge. She was the secret weapon of missionaries, but also became the favourite of those whom they aimed to Christianize: in Mexico indigenous imagination responded by creating the Virgen de Guadalupe, in what had once been the chapel of the mother goddess Toci. The mission to Huron women led with the cult of Mary, female saints and nuns. In Japan the goddess of mercy Kannon Bosatsu merged with Mary, so that when Christians were persecuted in the early seventeenth century they worshipped Mary Kannon with a cross under her dress. Mary's images accompanied merchants and friars to the Canaries and Mexico, to Peru and the Congo. And so she became a global image, made and remade out of the dreams of her beholders and the suggestions of her purveyors. She was often the first image put forward as conquest ceded a space to mission, an image of love and inclusion after the trauma of conquest.
This power to console continues to animate sensibility and creativity even away from Christian orthodoxy or Creed. A communist artist like the German Käthe Kollwitz chose Mary to represent suffering motherhood and the memory of the son she had lost in the First World War. Mary travels [End Page 1] swiftly across boundaries: she is favoured by feminists as a welcome female presence within religions which privilege men, is appreciated by those who harbour ecumenical aspirations, is used as a universal symbol of maternal nurture and human sympathy. When Raphael's painting The Madonna of the Pinks was recently offered to young mothers at workshops in the National Gallery, their responses showed just how easily her image elicits interest and joy, even from those who know little about Christianity or European art.
Mary's power to console has also been historically linked to violence, which creates the very need for consolation and exculpation. Mary's grace is felt most strongly in the aftermath of struggles, by thinkers and writers, preachers and teachers and leaders, who seek to make abundantly clear the triumph of Christianity through a God made Flesh. Her global eruption is the product of concerted and knowing work, which turned a figure so nebulous and mysterious—to whom few biblical phrases refer—into one around whom whole life-worlds have been woven, and in whose name peoples and cultures have been displaced and re-made.
How might a historian meet the challenge of understanding Mary? This historian does so supported by the scholarship and the friendship of many who still live in the land imagined as Mary's home. Thinking about Mary takes me back to the troubled terrain where I gained my own knowledge of the world and of the historian's craft. In Jerusalem I encountered the vying desires of Christianity, Judaism and Islam; I learned to work historically with the...
