Call for Papers

The Sorrowful Virgin: Medieval and Early Modern Devotion

Monday 24th March, St Hugh’s College Oxford

Images of the Sorrowful Virgin, whether in the form of Michelangelo’s Pietà, or Mary at the foot of the Cross on the Isenheim altarpiece are ubiquitous in medieval and early modern culture. Liturgically this was explored through the Stabat Mater, while vernacular writers found in the Marian lament a vehicle through which the Virgin could speak, offering a route for affective engagement with Mary’s suffering. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation inflected the ways in which the Sorrowful Virgin was presented, as devotions such as the Seven Sorrows served as spiritual models for more standardized monastic environments in the post-Tridentine period. Moreover, with colonisation of the New World, Marian devotion took on new emphases.  

Eliška Kubartová Poláčková’s 2023 monograph Medieval Laments of the Virgin Mary offers new insights into a medieval aspect of this devotion, emphasising the performativity of Marian laments, giving a firm foundation for further research into medieval laments, and offering potential models for early modern engagement with this devotion.  Her work opens up the wider questions about medieval affective piety and performativity in the Marian context, and whether this continued to manifest into the early modern period, or whether the Counter-Reformation precipitated new developments or emphases. 

This interdisciplinary workshop will investigate the Sorrowful Virgin in medieval and early modern culture, in which we aim to engage with some of these questions. The workshop will include a hands-on session with material objects and a performance of an early modern lament. We have entitled this workshop ‘The Sorrowful Virgin’ to encompass the many manifestations of this devotion, from the Seven Sorrows to the Mater Dolorosa and welcome broad interpretations of the theme.

We are looking for proposals for 20-minute papers on all aspects of this devotion in medieval and early modern culture, and encourage submissions from those in the fields of History, Music, Medieval Languages and Literature, Theology, and Art History including but not limited to:

• Vernacular poetry

• Musical Settings

• Performativity

• Liturgy

• Iconography

• Material Culture

• Theological development

• Affective piety

• Reformation

• Counter-Reformation

• Monastic devotion

For more information, please send an email to: anna.wilmore@st-hughs.ox.ac.uk 

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