This chapter examines Monday, the first day of meditation, which presents the text’s precepts and goals. Centered on Mary’s childhood and the events of the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Circumcision, and the Presentation at the Temple, the text and image program invites the reader-viewer to reflect on the notion of conceiving Christ both physically, in the Virgin’s body as part of the divine plan, and mentally, as a truth to be recognized and internalized by the fourteenth-century nun. The Meditations on the Life of Christ stages Mary as a particularly apt exemplum for the female reader: a model contemplative who strives to keep Christ always with her by conceiving him in her soul, seeing glory in his abasement, and striving to transcend the temporal in pursuit of spiritual understanding.

The Virgin Mary was a multifaceted figure in Byzantine theology. She played a central role in the incarnation of Christ since she provided him with his human nature. Her virginity, before, during, and after the birth bore witness to his ongoing divinity. Although Mariological doctrine did not receive systematic treatment in the Byzantine theological tradition, it was elaborated in liturgical texts. The Theotokos was described with the help of metaphorical and typological language, which associated her symbolically with creation, humanity, and a transfigured paradise, that is, spaces that were potentially receptive to God’s presence. As recent scholarship has shown, however, Byzantine Christians also encountered Mary as a female human person. Her maternal qualities, which came to be celebrated especially during and after the period of Iconoclasm (ca. 730–843), included tenderness, mercy, and sorrow – as displayed at the foot of the cross during Christ’s crucifixion. Historical accounts and miracle stories provide evidence of individual Christians’ visions of the Virgin Mary at shrines and churches in Constantinople. At both symbolic and personal levels, Mary, the Theotokos, remained accessible to Christians while representing the ideal model of the deified human person.

This article discusses the formational qualities of Byzantine church decoration, especially icons. It proposes that the iconographic programs of Byzantine churches had a profound effect on the viewers by offering them models for faithfulness and virtue and facilitating their transformation into ideal Christian subjects. My intention is to show that icons in the church do not simply interact with the viewers, but also form and transform them. I explore how iconic subjects worked in Byzantine churches in light of Ivan Drpić’s important insight about the Byzantine self as fundamentally relational and as ‘a replicable likeness’. I wish to show how mosaics and frescoes in Byzantine churches could provoke transformational experiences for their viewers by inviting identification with models of faithfulness and virtue.

This chapter explores the degree to which Vasari designed his Pieve altars to integrate, alter, or reproduce the liturgical and artistic precedents in the Romanesque church. It evinces a surprising level of stylistic, iconographical, and functional harmony between them and other works in the Pieve—an early sixteenth-century Madonna of Mercy altarpiece in particular. The conception and creation of Vasari’s altars for the Pieve was nowhere near as carefully orchestrated as it was for his better known Medici-sponsored church renovations in Florence, but this chapter shows that his gradual transformation of the Pieve’s interior constituted an important precedent and counterpart to those better-known Florentine projects.

The Introduction presents the topic of feminine imagery for the Church and the book’s method for examining this imagery in both expository and literary sources and across the traditional medieval and early modern periodization divide. It presents Lady Church both as a theological person with a transcendent ontological status not identical to the ecclesiastical institution and as a literary figure developed through drama, poetry, and literary techniques used in other genres.

The cult of the Virgin Mary went global during the early modern period, as Catholics embraced her with renewed fervor in the wake of Protestant attacks. Using one of Mary’s most famous advocations as a case study, this chapter investigates the origins, spread, and reinvention of the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Extremadura, Mexico, and in the Philippines, demonstrating both the causes and limitations of her success across different parts of the Spanish empire.

O’Casey was born into a Protestant family and his father worked as a clerk for the Irish Church Missions, an evangelical society that aimed to convert Catholics. This chapter argues that O’Casey radically reimagined Christianity, depicting characters that inadvertently travesty or re-enact Christianity’s meanings. More broadly, however, he treats the love of the divine as parallel to the love of freedom and country; rather than a strict code, such love is a life-affirming source of inspiration akin to art and poetry. O’Casey’s sophisticated understanding of the value of Christianity has little to do with sectarian differences or superstition, but inheres in caring actions, love of life, and a determination to feed the spirit along with the body.

The Introduction begins with a fax which Seamus Heaney sent to Professor Eamon Duffy (Cambridge University) in 2001. The fax was a response to Duffy’s book The Voices of Morebath, in which he tells the story of the desacralising of a small Catholic community during the English Reformation. Heaney’s response to the book draws parallels between the medieval world of Morebath and the world of Mossbawn, where he grew up and which was foundational to his experience of Catholicism and his growth as a poet. I draw attention, in particular, to the centrality of Marian devotion for the parishioners of Morebath and for Heaney as a child. What Heaney’s fax shows is the emotional purchase which Catholicism continued to exert upon him long after he had moved away from adherence to religious orthodoxy or practice. By placing Heaney’s engagement with Catholicism in a broader historical context than has been the case up until now, I show how it operates in ways other than social and political, concluding that Catholicism remains foundational to Heaney’s work at the level of what I call a felt sense.

Before his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Hopkins acquired a copy of the Vulgate Latin Bible for future use and returned his copy of the King James Bible to his unhappy father. From a Bible-centred Protestant perspective, much of the doctrine on which he was to meditate as a Jesuit poet is non-scriptural, and could be described as Catholic accretions. This chapter reveals that Catholic versions of the Bible underwent revision down the centuries, as Protestant versions did, and that Victorian Catholics were not forbidden to read the Bible. A new Holy Catholic Bible is adorned with an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary in glory. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary was promulated in 1854, further widening the gap between Protestant and Catholic teaching. But for Hopkins, the unpublished laureate of the Blessed Virgin, the (unscriptural) Immaculate Conception lay at the heart of his faith.

This chapter locates a shift in beginning in the seventh century in which the power to halt quakes began to move away from collective repentance and toward saintly intercession. First, it examines the seventh-century Life of St. Symeon Stylites the Younger, a Syrian pillar saint with ties to Constantinople. It focuses in particular on hymns recorded in the Life for earthquakes that purportedly caused them to cease when sung by the holy man. The chapter shows how seventh-century Byzantines could have constructed the role of the saintly intercessor when faced with natural disasters. Next, it analyzes changes in Constantinople’s earthquake commemoration rite in the eighth century, specifically the introduction of the Theotokos as the city’s chief protection against earthquakes. Eighth-century liturgical editors borrowed from the rites commemorating the enemy invasions of Constantinople in 623, 626, and 717–18, in which the Theotokos was remembered to play a prominent role in protecting the city. It shows how the earthquake commemoration liturgy no longer saw earthquakes as divine judgment against the sin of the city, but as outside threats to the city for which powerful heavenly intercessions were needed.

Chapter 3, “Invoking the Name of Mary,” reconstructs the resonance of Marian invocation for charm participants of the late-Saxon period. While the elaborate monastic cult of the Virgin had not yet spread into popular devotion at this time, the Church urged Christians to trust Mary with their needs. It taught the people that she would advocate for them in response to their prayers. Church festivals, liturgy, homily, and poetry expose laity to narratives about Mary’s intervention on behalf of the faithful. The Mother of Christ could intercede with her son; the Queen of Heaven and Hell could command saints and overcome the devil. Charms that invoke Mary call on her by name, relate stories about the Virgin’s miraculous bearing of Christ, and prescribe her Magnificat or Masses said in her honor. Through the operation of charms’ semiotic systems, the Virgin known from vernacular and ecclesiastical traditions becomes immanent for the charm audience. By identifying the ways in which Mary is invoked, this chapter demonstrates Mary’s contributions to remedies for acute physical and spiritual conditions.

Alchfrith may have been associated with Lindisfarne. This prayer, probably dating from the end of the eighth century and addressed to the Virgin Mary, is found among a set of Gospel extracts and other prayers in the so-called Book of Cerne.

The presence of the Catholic Church and the imposition of religious beliefs and practices onto the newly found inhabitants of the Americas was perhaps one of the biggest catalysts of transition during the early modern period. This chapter focuses on the literature that was produced for, and by indigenous peoples within the religious realm. It considers different discursive genres that are emblematic of the transitions that natives experienced when they were into close and sustained contact with religious institutions, such as plays for conversion and evangelization, sermons, catechisms, spiritual biographies, and other prescriptive literature.