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This introductory chapter begins with an explanation of why sermons were selected as source material for this study. It presents evaluations of Martin Luther’s ideas and writings, and discusses the situation of Marian devotion and theology on the “eve” of the Reformation to develop a context for the presentation of Virgin Mary by Luther and his followers. An overview of the chapters included in the volume is then presented.

This book examines the rise of Marian piety in the early Christian period. Focusing primarily on the period from the latter half of the second century to the first half of the fifth, it shows how Mary evolved as a focus of Christian devotion and situates the origins of Marian devotion within the broader context of emergent Christian devotion to the saints. The book draws on scattered and often overlooked evidence for early Marian piety, from the beginnings of Christianity up to and including the events of the Council of Ephesus. It considers one important text, the Protevangelium of James, and bridges it with the Marian veneration of the fifth and later centuries through other sources from the second, third, and fourth centuries. This introduction clarifies some of the relevant terms used in the book to refer to the various kinds of reverence that the early Christians had for the Virgin, such as ‘piety’, ‘devotion’, ‘veneration’, and ‘cult’.

The practice of touring with the relics of their saintly patrons was a new trend among religious communities of northern France in the late 11th century. A particular kind of hagiographical travelogue accompanied the phenomenon, examples of which endure sporadically up to the 16th century. Two accounts of the tours conducted by the canons of Laon were written: by Guibert, abbot of Nogent, soon after the uprising; and by Hermann, sometime abbot of Tournai, writing in the 1140s. This chapter examines how the authors chose to deal with their common material in writing, and what this reveals about the social and religious functions of Marian devotion in an increasingly complex and commercially sophisticated medieval world.

This chapter examines six areas of musical performance that were governed or influenced by ecclesiastical decrees or governmental legislation: Asian musics, vernacular‐language vocal music in sacred contexts (such as villancicos), musical practices for Marian devotions, liturgical music and the use of instruments in churches, theatrical performances, and music in processions, celebrations, and feasts. It draws on sources including manuals published by religious orders for the regulation of parochial life, religious statutes and ordinances, Papal Bulls, royal decrees, and archiepiscopal decrees. It also examines musical references found in the proceedings of the Provincial Council of Manila (1771) and the Synod of Calasiao (1773).

The cathedral church of Paris, with its overwhelming focus upon the Mother of God, let virtually no day pass without explicit liturgical acknowledgement of her role in salvation. In the voice, ear, and mind of every cleric in this cathedral, the most familiar and frequently performed Office was the Little Office of the Virgin. It was essentially an Office by the clerics for the clerics, without spectators, done in their private liturgical space, the choir, before the altar of the Virgin. This chapter discusses the sources for this Office, which was known in Paris before the year 1200, its use both in Paris and elsewhere, and its texts. It describes the complex state of the sources from before the 13th century and points to the significant amount of local variation in the tradition.

This chapter examines other evidence for Marian devotion in the fourth and early fifth centuries, including the writings of the church fathers and nonliterary evidence for the cult of the Virgin. It begins with a discussion of Marian cult and devotion in the works of fourth-century church fathers such as Peter of Alexandria, Alexander of Alexandria, Ephrem the Syrian, and John Chrysostom. In particular, it considers the subject of Mary’s virginity and her role as an ascetic model in these writings as well as patristic evidence for Marian intercession and apparitions. It then explores liturgical evidence for the cult of the Virgin, including feast days and shrines in her honor, miracles, and prayer to her in the Sunday liturgies. It also assesses early hymnography and evidence from material culture for early devotion to the Virgin. Based on this evidence, the chapter shows that the cult of the Virgin had already begun by the second half of the fourth century.

This conclusion summarizes the evidence for Marian devotion and veneration in early Christianity. It first considers the Protevangelium of James, whose interest in Mary as a figure in her own right and its reverence for her sacred purity mark the beginnings of Marian piety in the early Christian period. It then examines a number of apocryphal texts that attest to belief in the power of Mary’s intercessions, including the Sub tuum praesidium papyrus, along with the Book of Mary’s Repose and the Six Books Dormition Apocryphon. It also discusses writings by the fourth-century church fathers, traces of Marian cult and devotion in material culture, and the events of the Council of Ephesus that reveal a vibrant cult of the Virgin standing behind the controversies over Nestorius.

This chapter examines the role of the cult of the Virgin in the controversies leading up to the Council of Ephesus as well as its outcome. Toward the end of the twentieth century, a number of studies addressed the impact that an already vibrant Marian piety seems to have had in galvanizing the resistance to Nestorius in Constantinople and elsewhere. These studies also often identify the Empress Pulcheria as an instrumental figure who was particularly responsible for deploying Marian devotion to orchestrate Nestorius’s downfall. More recent scholarship, however, has cast some doubt on the extent of Pulcheria’s involvement in both the promotion of the early Marian cult and Nestorius’s demise. This chapter first considers the controversy involving Nestorius stemming from the issue of Marian veneration before discussing his rift with Pulcheria. It then looks at Pulcheria’s relationship with Proclus, along with her participation in the cult of the Virgin and personal devotion to Mary. It also considers how much popular devotion to Mary in Constantinople and elsewhere may have actually contributed to Nestorius’s ultimate demise.

The Carmelite Order accepted the Office of the Presentation of the Virgin Mary into its liturgy in 1393. The Carmelites of Mainz composed new texts for the feast and adapted music from three other Offices — St. Thomas of Canterbury, the Three Marys, and the Nativity of Mary — to the new texts. Differences in textual length and metrical patterns between these Presentation chants and their models forced changes in phrase divisions and melodic contours as part of this process of adaptation, yielding a product that is both musically distinctive and uniquely Carmelite.

This chapter examines the evidence of Marian piety from the first two Christian centuries. It begins with the New Testament, highlighting some perspectives on Mary’s role in the process of salvation from a number of writings of the second-century fathers. In particular, it discusses the Gospel of Luke, which offers the most developed reflection on Mary and her role in the beginnings of Christianity in the New Testament. It then considers early Christian apocrypha, and especially the Protevangelium of James, an early Christian biography of the young Virgin that attests to a surprisingly advanced piety centered on Mary’s ‘sacred purity’ and exceptional holiness already by the later second century. It shows that the Protevangelium’s Marian piety poses a puzzling anomaly that is difficult to relate not only to other elements of second-century Christianity but also to later developments in Marian devotion. The chapter also looks at other texts such as the Ascension of Isaiah and the Odes of Solomon.

This chapter focuses on transition that began to unfold after the Council of Trent (1545–63), during an epoch commonly called the “Counter-Reformation” or “Catholic Reformation.” It shows how the rosary and Marian piety became emblematic of an innovative, renascent Catholicism, especially in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; how the image of Mary and the rosary began to be reinterpreted in the early baroque era; how the rosary's post-Tridentine evolution was directly connected to both liturgical and devotional customs; how Marian devotion survived and flourished even (or especially) in circumstances where the public practice of Catholicism was prohibited; and how and why the rosary has continued to play a vital role in the lives of modern and postmodern Catholics.

This chapter examines how the rosary became a principal medium through which Catholics renegotiated their relationship to sacred places, persons, objects, and events. It focuses on the British Isles between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, in part because laypeople and their piety played a key role in the “continuing persistence and survival of Catholicism in England after 1559,” and in part because praying the rosary became a way to participate in the Roman liturgy itself. The chapter shows that the rosary not only became a way for lay Catholics to pray and participate during Mass; it also, in a sense, became the Mass when public liturgical spaces (churches, chapels, shrines) were no longer readily accessible.

This chapter examines the reframing of religious identity in early modern Catholicism. It discusses the kinds of religious subjectivity that emerged in early modernity, especially in Europe, and considers the role played by Marian symbols of devotions such as the rosary in the reshaping of Catholic identity. It argues that the reframing of Catholic identity was a complex process with multiple features. It included the expanded interior space, self-awareness, and personal autonomy that are hallmarks of early modern subjectivity, yet it also involved a retrieval of those “affective perceptions of faith” found not only in medieval theologians such as Bonaventure but in humanist reformers such as Erasmus, in early baroque artists such as Caravaggio, and in early modern mystics and devotional writers such as Mary of Ágreda.

This chapter examines ritual reinterpretations of Mary and the rosary in early modern Catholicism. The Council of Trent reasserted the primacy of sacraments in Christian life and mandated a reform of all the liturgical books of the Roman Rite. These reformed rituals reframed the image of Mary and tried to reshape devotion to the Mother whose “fruitful virginity brought forth the rewards of unending salvation to the human race.” The chapter discusses how the rosary offered Catholics a new way to express unity without recourse to either official liturgy or sacramental participation (e.g. through eucharistic communion). It was a devotion that could be prayed individually or in groups, in the vernacular or in Latin, by laypersons or clerics, by women as well as men, by young and old alike.

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the influence of Catholic nostalgia on the works of James Joyce. It highlights the differences between Joyce's depiction of Catholic rituals and iconography in his works and those of several other writers including Thomas Merton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Flannery O'Connor. It also describes the influence of Marian devotion on these writers, all having experienced a so-called Marian era which lasted from the 1850s to the 1960s.

This chapter examines how the rosary and Marian devotion were reinterpreted within early modern Catholicism. It focuses on Caravaggio's images of Mary to highlight the role of visual perception in shaping religious practice. His work displayed a visual solution to what late sixteenth-century naturalists called “the defect of distance” by altering the relation between subjects and spectators. Caravaggio's Marian images rewrote traditional biblical narratives with often surprising, even scandalous, results. He allowed Mary to be a woman, real and accessible, a holy woman whose unique role in the history of salvation requires us to see her as fully “carnal, human, … heavy with a sense of sleep, sex, birth and death”.

Before he died, the well-known anthropologist of African religion Victor Turner (1920–83) turned his attention to Catholic forms of pilgrimage and, with Edith Turner, traveled across the world visiting Marian shrines. Victor and Edith Turner were themselves Catholic. The book that resulted is a classic of early anthropological writing about Catholicism and has done much to lay down an analytical “grammar” for thinking about it. In this chapter the Turners draw attention to the long-standing tension in Christianity between iconoclasm and iconophily—a topic that resonates deeply with contemporary debates about semiotics.¹ In this chapter the Turners explore the potent affordances of material form through an analysis of shrines, images, and statues. Of interest here are the multiple and sometimes contradictory layers of personification and signification that accrue to devotional objects and places over time, through repeated human interaction. The shrine’s semantic field has a diachronic axis as a well as a synchronic one—both axes further layered with political and historic events that inscribe themselves upon the place. Both in and out of structure and time, shrines condense symbols, practices, histories, and culturally specific influences and affordances. An analytical question running through this chapter is thus whether the power of the divine is compressed within and hence generated by the image or whether the image simply represents the power of the divine. This, of course, is something of an age-old theological problem in Christianity, which the Turners as Catholics themselves are eminently aware of. In their treatment of this issue, however, they remain steadfastly anthropological, taking seriously the sensorial plasticity of devotional objects and their inherent capacity to exceed the roles intended of them by official theology. Rather than “materiality” or “aesthetic formations,” the Turners describe devotional objects as “outward vehicles” for symbols. “Outward vehicles,” they argue, have a tendency to become more bound up with the orectic pole of signification than the normative pole. Here the “orectic” encompasses the emotional, sensorial, and affective field of semantics, whereas the “normative” encompasses the abstract, ideational field. The Turners see this as a basic religious structure common to all religious traditions, although the respective stability of each pole is reversed in different cultures. Thus in non-Christian “tribal” societies the orectic pole is more stable than the normative one, whereas in hierarchically organized, scripturally complex religions such as Christianity the normative is more stable than the orectic. Although the language the Turners employ is reflective of the structuralist and symbolic-humanist fields they were very much embedded within, their work is relevant to a renewed anthropology of Catholicism for the way it helps to make sense of the relationship of parts to wholes, and for the creative attention it draws to the circulation of ideas and affects within Catholic institutional territories.

Two of the key ways the Chinese Catholic Church sought to develop its identity further were through education and the creation of unique visual images. In the early twentieth century, efforts of Chinese Catholics like Ma Xiangbo and Ying Lianzhi to start a Catholic University were supported by the influential Celso Costantini and the Catholic University of Peking (Furen Daxue). Costantini was also instrumental in ensuring that this university had an art department that produced Chinese Catholic images, many of which had Marian devotions as their themes. Chinese Catholic artists like Luke Chen Yuandu emerged from this department.

The introduction sets the scene for the main points of this work. It establishes the main theme of the book, the literature base, and the scope of the research. It then describes apparitions and visionaries phenomenologically, including their relationship to local communities. The sites as well as the visionaries are introduced, as the shrines are centres of the pilgrimage movement that result from apparition events. The next section introduces Mary as the central figure in the visions and discusses shifts in Mariology. Then it is asked whether apparitions can be described as ‘modern’, using Robert Orsi’s concept of ‘alternative modernity’ to suggest that apparitions express ‘alternative history’.