Late Middle Ages

The cult of the Virgin Mary in the Late Middle Ages

The cult of the Virgin Mary was the most distinctive single feature of late medieval popular religion. By 1300 the Virgin had become, in the popular imagination, the Regina Coeli, the Queen of Heaven, the Advocata, the advocate of the human race, the Mater Misericordiae, the mother of mercy, the Sedes Sapientiae, the seat of wisdom, and the Immaculata, the immaculate, of the doctrine of the immaculate conception. The great cathedrals of Europe were dedicated to her under various titles — Notre-Dame in Paris, Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Unsere Liebe Frau in the German-speaking lands, Onze Lieve Vrouwe in the Low Countries. The new religious orders placed her at the centre of their devotion: the Carmelites (whose tradition dates the Festum Sanctae Mariae de Monte Carmelo to the eve of the feast of the Assumption in 1185, in the Latin Kingdom), the Servites (founded 1233 by the seven boni homines of Florence), the Hieronymites (founded 1373 by the Iberian house of Lupiana), the Bridgettines of Vadstena (founded c. 1346 by St. Bridget of Sweden), and the Sisters of the Common Life. The great theologians of the mendicant schools developed her theology: the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, the Quaestiones disputatae of Bonaventure, the Ordinatio of John Duns Scotus. The great poets sang her: Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia ends with a vision of the Virgin in the highest heaven of the Empireo; Francesco Petrarca’s Canzoniere opens with a salutation to the Virgin; Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales opens with the invocation to Mary in the Man of Law’s Tale and the Prioress’s Tale. The history of the late medieval church is unintelligible without the cult of the Virgin.

The theology of the divine maternity

The theological foundation of the cult of the Virgin is the doctrine of the divine maternity, the Theotokos, the Mother of God. The doctrine was defined at the Council of Ephesus in 431, in the condemnation of Nestorius, and was reaffirmed at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, in the condemnation of Eutyches, and at the Third Council of Constantinople in 681, in the condemnation of Monothelitism. The doctrine was the foundation of the devotion to the Virgin in the Latin West: the Liber de laudibus beatae Mariae Virginis of St. Ildephonsus of Toledo (607–667), the De Assumptione of Paschasius Radbertus (c. 785–865), the Sermones super “Missus est” of St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) — the Missus est sermons on the Annunciation are the most influential single cycle of Marian preaching in the Middle Ages — and the Quaestiones disputatae de veritate and the Summa theologiae III, qq. 27–35, of Thomas Aquinas are the principal theological texts.

The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, the Conceptio Immaculata, the doctrine that the Virgin was, by a special grace, preserved from the stain of original sin from the moment of her own conception, was the principal Marian quaestio of the late medieval schools. The doctrine was held by the Franciscans (Duns Scotus being the principal theological defender; the bull Cum praeexcelsa of Sixtus IV of 1476 is the first papal recognition of the feast of the Conceptio), by the Cistercians (the chapter of Cîteaux of 1137 had prescribed the feast in the Cistercian houses), by the Premonstratensians, and by the English church (the Venerable Bede had been a precursor in the De temporibus of 703 and the De temporum ratione of 725, and the feast was celebrated in the chapter of the English cathedrals from the early fourteenth century). The doctrine was contested by the Dominicans (the Tertia pars of the Summa theologiae of Aquinas is ambiguous, and the correctorium of the fratres of the order was hostile to Scotus’s argument). The quaestio was the occasion of a long university dispute, with the universities of Paris, Cologne, and Louvain aligned on either side, and the Conimbricenses of the Portuguese Jesuit college producing a long Commentarii in the late sixteenth century. The dispute was not finally settled until the bull Ineffabilis Deus of 8 December 1854, defining the Conceptio Immaculata as a dogma of faith. The standard treatment is R. Laurentin, La Vierge au Concile (1965), and the older E. Druwé, De Immaculata Conceptione in Universitate Catholica (1930); for the late medieval English dimension, Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (1992).

The great Marian feasts

The cult of the Virgin was celebrated in a series of great feasts, of which the most important were the Annunciation (25 March), the Visitation (2 July), the Nativity of the Virgin (8 September), the Purification of the Virgin (2 February, also called Candlemas), and the Assumption of the Virgin (15 August). The feasts of the Virgin were celebrated with great solemnity in the late medieval church: the processio of the feast, the psalmi of the officium, the praedicatio of the chapter, the elemosina of the almonry. The Litany of Loreto (the Litaniae Lauretanae), which was approved by Clement VII in 1527 and which assembles the principal Marian tituli of the late medieval church (the Regina Angelorum, the Regina Patriarcharum, the Mater Divinae Gratiae, the Speculum Iustitiae, the Salus Infirmorum, the Refugium Peccatorum, the Consolatrix Afflictorum, the Auxilium Christianorum), is one of the principal devotional monuments of the cult. The Office of the Virgin, the Officium Parvum Beatae Mariae Virginis, the Little Office of the Virgin, was the principal daily prayer of the late medieval convents of nuns and of the laity of the Devotio Moderna. The Compassio Mariae, the doctrine of the Virgin’s co-suffering at the foot of the cross, the Stabat Mater Dolorosa, was given a special emphasis in the late medieval period: the Meditationes Vitae Christi of the Pseudo-Bonaventure (c. 1300) and the Stimulus Amoris of James of Milan (the Iacobus de Mediolano of c. 1300) are the principal texts, and the Compassio was the principal object of the feast of the Septem Dolorum Beatae Mariae Virginis, the feast of the Seven Sorrows, instituted by the Servites in 1423 and given a wider liturgical use by the bull Super speciositatem of Pius IX in 1857.

The Hail Mary, the Angelus, and the Rosary

The principal devotional practices of the late medieval Marian cult were the Hail Mary (Ave Maria), the Angelus, and the Rosary. The Ave Maria of the late medieval church is a composite of the Ave of the gospel of Luke (i. 28, the salutation of the angel Gabriel), the Ave of the gospel of Elizabeth (Luke i. 42, the salutation of Elizabeth at the Visitation), and the prayer Sancta Maria, mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. The composite was stabilised in the Dominican and Franciscan Officium and Officium Parvum of the Virgin in the thirteenth century, and the Sancta Maria clause was added to the Ave in the course of the fifteenth.

The Angelus, the Angelus Domini, the morning, midday, and evening commemoration of the Annunciation, was a product of the Franciscan order in the early fourteenth century, popularised by the Confraternitates of the Angelus; the form of the prayer stabilised in the Breviarium of the order. The Rosary is a vocal and meditative devotion in which the Ave Maria is recited 150 times, with the Pater Noster and the Gloria Patri, while the reciter meditates on the fifteen mysteria — the five mysteria gaudii (the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Presentation, the Finding in the Temple), the five mysteria dolorum (the Agony in the Garden, the Scourging, the Crowning with Thorns, the Carrying of the Cross, the Crucifixion), and the five mysteria gloriae (the Resurrection, the Ascension, the Descent of the Holy Spirit, the Assumption, the Coronation of the Virgin). The Rosary was traditionally attributed to St. Dominic, who is said to have received it from the Virgin in 1208, and the attribution is recorded in the Legenda of the Confraternitas of the Sanctum Rosarium of the order. The bull Consueverunt of Pius V of 1569 standardised the present form of the devotion, and the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary was fixed for 7 October by Clement XI in 1716. The Rosary became the principal vocal devotion of the laity of the late medieval church, and was especially promoted by the Dominican order in the Confraternitates of the Rosary that were founded in the principal cities of western Europe in the fifteenth century.

Mary in late medieval art and literature

The Virgin was the central figure of late medieval Marian devotion, and the most prolific single subject of late medieval art. The great altarpieces of the Italian fifteenth century — Duccio’s Maestà of 1308–11 for Siena Cathedral, the Ghent Altarpiece of the Van Eyck brothers (completed 1432), the Annunciation of Jan van Eyck of c. 1434–36 in Washington, the Misericordia of Piero della Francesca of c. 1445–62, the Madonna and Child with Saints of the Vivarinis of Murano, the Virgin of the Rocks of Leonardo da Vinci of c. 1483–86, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna of c. 1512 — are the principal Italian monuments. The German monuments of the period — the Beautiful Madonna of the Schöner Madonnen of c. 1380–1430, the Münster of the Liebfrauenkirche of Cologne, the Tönnes-Muttergottes of the Lower Rhine, the Pacher Altar of St. Wolfgang, the Kefermarkt Madonna of c. 1470–90, the Buxheim Madonna of the early sixteenth century — are the principal German monuments. The principal English monument is the Wilton Diptych of c. 1395–99, the small panel painting of the Virgin and Child with Richard II and the English saints that is the key image of the English late medieval monarchy.

The Virgin was also the principal female figure of late medieval vernacular literature. Dante’s Divina Commedia (c. 1308–14) places the Virgin at the summit of the Empireo and ends the Paradiso with a prayer to her (Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio); Petrarch’s Canzoniere (the final redaction of c. 1374) opens and closes with a salutation to the Virgin; Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400) and the Prioress’s Tale; the Pearl of the alliterative Pearl-poet of c. 1380; the Mariale of the Pseudo-Bonaventure (the Mariale of c. 1330, which was the principal Marian florilegium of the late medieval church); the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ of the Nostrè Segnor of c. 1410; the Mystère de la Passion of Arnoul Gréban of c. 1450; the Planctus Mariae of the German and Italian tradition. The standard treatment is Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (Yale, 2009), and the older E. Goodall, The Virgin in Art (1922).

The legacy of the cult

The cult of the Virgin was, in the historiographical revision of the last forty years, the principal religious fact of the late medieval church. The late medieval church was, in a sense, a Marian church — the principal church of the laity was a Marian church, the principal prayer of the laity was a Marian prayer, the principal feast of the laity was a Marian feast, the principal saint of the laity was the Virgin. The cult was challenged by the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century: Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli rejected the cult of the Virgin, the cult of the relics of the Virgin, the cult of the Conceptio Immaculata, and the Compassio of the Virgin. The Catholic response was the Roman Catechism of 1566, the Catechismus Romanus of 1566, and the twenty-second session of the Council of Trent, the decreta of the de sanctissima Virgine Matre of 17 December 1563. The cult was reaffirmed by the bull Ineffabilis Deus of 1854 and the bull Munificentissimus Deus of 1950, which defined the Conceptio Immaculata and the Assumptio Beatae Mariae Virginis as dogmas of faith. The cult survives in the Catholic church of the twenty-first century as one of the principal objects of devotion, and is the subject of the encyclicals Mystici Corporis Christi of 1943, Mediator Dei of 1947, and Redemptoris Mater of 1987. The treatment is in Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints (Chicago, 1981), and the older R. Laurentin, La Vierge au Concile (1965). The wider context is in the overview of pilgrimage, saints, and popular religion, and the related cults are in Medieval relics and the cult of saints and Thomas Becket and medieval pilgrimage to Canterbury.

References and further reading

  • Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (Yale University Press, 2009).
  • Émile Mâle, L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France (Armand Colin, 1898; 3rd ed. 1925; trans. The Gothic Image, Collins, 1958).
  • Émile Mâle, L’Art religieux de la fin du Moyen Âge en France (Armand Colin, 1908; trans. Religious Art in France, XIII Century, Princeton, 1984).
  • Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion (2 vols, Sheed & Ward, 1963–65).
  • René Laurentin, La Vierge au Concile (Fayard, 1965).
  • Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (Yale, 1996).