IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-137-12140-0_6.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Mary Today

In: See the Virgin Blest

Author

Listed:
  • Barry Spurr

Abstract

Writing of the “ancient feminine religion of Northern Europe,” Seamus Heaney identifies a difference between “masculine, active, hard, phallic” ways of working, thinking, and praying, and the “yielding, maternal” influence of the complex forms of Marian Christianity that have influenced his own poetry.1 “For Heaney,” Eamon Duffy has written, “Christianity without its Marian dimension is an arid, abstract thing.”2 Yet, our study has shown that even Mary’s maternal qualities are not exclusively yielding, although her unique suspectibility to poetic representation—more often than not, by male poets—reveals a creative submission to the forms and purposes of poetry that, paradoxically, give her a presence and a voice that affirm a host of roles and qualities, by no means restricted to gender stereotyping or other constraints, through the centuries: Mary transcends the media, the temporal and regional restrictions, and human limitations that govern her image in any one era. The meaning of the icon outweighs the individual artist or epoch.3

Suggested Citation

  • Barry Spurr, 2007. "Mary Today," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: See the Virgin Blest, chapter 0, pages 197-218, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-12140-0_6
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-137-12140-0_6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-12140-0_6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.