Pierpont
Morgan, 1916, Accession number 16.
Mary and the Art of Prayer_Ave Maria
Rachel
Fulton
Brown
Mary & theArtof
Prayer
e Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and ought
2
Ave Maria
Imagine the scene, if you will. 1 It is dark, except for the light of a few candles, and silent, except for the breathing of those around you. Someone coughs. You are, perhaps, tired, because you have already
been singing and listening for some time, praising God through the watches of the night. Still in your stall, you turn with your brothers (or sisters) toward the altar and repeat, once again, the opening dialogue of Matins, led by your priest:
Domine, labia mea aperies. Lord, open my lips.
Towhichyouaspartofthechoirreply: Et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam.
And my mouth shall show forth your praise. Again, the priest li s up his voice:
Deus, in adjutorium meum intende. God, come to my assistance.
To which the choir responds:
Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina. Lord, make haste to help me.
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e latter is spoken rather than sung, followed by a Gloria Patri. 2 And then, as if
with the voice of an angel, the versicularius intones the familiar chant: Ave Maria, gratia plena.
Hail Mary, full of grace.
You with the rest of the choir respond in full (CAO #1041, 1539):
Ave Maria, gratia plena, dominus tecum. Ave Maria, gratia plena, dominus tecum.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.
At once, the versicularius continues, intoning the psalm (Psalm 94):
Venite exultemus Domino, iubilemus Deo salutari nostro: preoccupemus faciem
eius in confessione: et in psalmis iubilemus ei. You respond, yet again:
Ave Maria, gratia plena, dominus tecum.
e one text is as habitual as the other; you have sung both every morning for the better part of your life. You have no need to look at the words or to think about the reciting tone; this exchange comes to you as easily as breathing. "Venite," the psalm invites you.
Come, let us sing unto the Lord. Let us rejoice before God, our Savior. Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving, and rejoice before him with psalms (vv. 1-2).
"Hail Mary," you respond, "full of grace, the Lord is with you," weaving the words that the angel Gabriel spoke to the Mother of God at the Annunciation (Luke 1:28) in among the verses of the psalm.
Perhaps, as you sing, a glint of light catches your eye, and you turn to see a pair of amber beads swaying gently in front of the image of the Blessed Virgin. Almost idly, you recall how Isabella, the wife of William Belgrafe, had bequeathed them to Our Lady along with her gold and silver ring only last year. 3 You begin to think on the joy with which Mary herself must have exulted when she understood that
she was to become Bride of God and Mother of Our Lord. Suddenly, it is as if you were present yourself at the very moment when Gabriel came to her in that "pryue chaumbure" where she was accustomed to say her prayers and meditate, with Isaiah, on the manner of the Incarnation. 4 You hear her speak:
Quoniam Deus magnus Dominus et rex magnus super omnes deos: quoniam non repellet Dominus plebem suam: quia in manu eius sunt omnes nes terre: et altitudines montium ipse conspicit.
For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods. For the Lord will not cast o his people. For in his hand are all the ends of the earth: and the heights of the mountains he beholds (vv. 3-4).
And you realize that she is waiting for you to speak in return: " e Lord is with you. " To which she responds with even greater joy:
Quoniam ipsius est mare et ipse fecit illud; et aridam fundauerunt manus eius: venite adoremus et procidamus ante Deum, ploremus coram Domino qui fecit nos: quia ipse est Dominus Deus noster: nos autem populus eius et oues pascue eius.
For the sea is his, and he made it: and his hands formed the dry land. Come, let us worship and fall down before God, let us weep before the Lord who made us: for he is the Lord our God, and we are his people and the sheep of his pasture (vv. 5-7).
You are amazed to nd your mouth lled with an extraordinary sweetness, like honey, as once again you repeat the angel's greeting: "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. "5 And in little more than a whisper, so that you are not sure whether you are hearing it or not, a voice admonishes you: "Slow down! I want to savor the joy that I have when you say those words, most especially Dominus tecum, for then it seems to me that my Son is in me, just as he was when, God and man, he deigned to be born from me for the sake of sinners. "6
Abashed, you nd yourself wanting to fall to your knees and bow down with every repetition of the angel's words and wonder what it would be like to say the salutation y, a hundred, or even a hundred and y times, when once again the Virgin's voice breaks in:
Hodie si vocem eius audieritis nolite obdurare corda vestra: sicut in exacerba- tione secundum diem tentationis in deserto vbi tentauerunt me patres vestri: probauerunt et viderunt opera mea.
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P l at e 5 Altar statue, the Virgin and Child in majesty, Auvergne, France, ca. 1175-1200. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gi of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1916, Accession number 16. 32. 194.
Image (C) e Metropolitan Museum of Art. www. metmuseum. org
If you hear his voice today, harden not your hearts: as in the provocation accord- ing to the day of temptation in the wilderness where your fathers tempted me: they proved me and saw my works (vv. 8-9).
As you answer: " e Lord is with you," you think miserably on your sins and your hardness of heart, especially your failure to honor God and his Mother as you should, for did she not su er even as her Son as he died on the cross for our sins? 7 Almost as if he could read your thoughts, her Son replies:
Quadraginta annis proximus fui generationi huic et dixi semper hi errant corde ipsi vero non cognouerunt vias meas quibus iuraui in ira mea si introibunt in requiem meam.
For forty years I was nigh to this generation, and I said: always they err in heart, for truly they have not known my ways: I swore to them in my wrath they shall never enter into my rest (vv. 10-11).
Trembling, indeed, pleading, you turn to the Virgin Mother once again: "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you," hoping against hope that she might be able to assuage the wrath of the Judge, her Son. "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit," you sing. "As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be: world without end. Amen. " ankfully, you hear the versicularius intone once again: "Hail Mary, full of grace," and you answer: " e Lord is with you," knowing that he "whom earth and sea and sky adore" vouchsafed in truth to be enclosed within her womb. 8
"Today," the great Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) advised his brothers as he turned their attention to the opening verse of the Song of Songs, "we read in the book of experience (Hodie legimus in libro experientiae): 'Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth. ' But," he cautioned them,
it is not given to just anyone to say these words from within (ex a ectu). . . . I think that no one is able to understand what [this kiss] is except the one who receives it; for it is a "hidden manna" [Revelation 2:17], and only he who eats it still hungers for more. It is a "sealed fountain" [Song of Songs 4:12], to which no stranger has access; only he who drinks still thirsts for more. 9
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What was it like for medieval Christians to pray, hour a er hour, day a er day, to the Virgin Mother of God? Much like Bernard when confronted with the mys- tical kiss of the Song, this is not a question that most recent scholars, including historians, have found themselves readily equipped to answer. e odd (if o en repeated) miracle story, the chipped and faded (if still much-loved) image before which her devotees were accustomed to kneel, the evocative (if historically and scripturally problematic) advice on how to imagine oneself in her earthly pres- ence, the repetitive (if poetic) chants and psalms of her liturgy: these are the frag- mentary objects and texts upon which we depend to imagine their devotional world. As the n de sie`cle American tourist Henry Adams--marveling at the forces brought to bear on the medieval construction of the Virgin's cult--once put it: "All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres. "10 And yet, like Adams, historians have been hard pressed to explain her appeal in other than the most psychologically reductive (or etic) terms, for example, because medieval monks and other clerics were simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the female body or because, as oblates, they had never known their mothers. 11 Did medieval Christians pray to her as if to a goddess, as the sixteenth- century reformers who rejected her cult feared they had and many twentieth- century feminist scholars have hoped modern Christians might? 12 Or was she rather for them a model or type of the Church, as Catholic theologians following Vatican II have tended to argue? 13
To be clear, no, not at least as we see her in the sources associated with her medieval cult. 14 Even at the height of her popularity in the Middle Ages, Mary was not revered as a goddess in the pagan sense of the term, that is, as if she were not a creature but herself somehow divine--although, as well shall see, this did not mean that she was not revered as other than a humble woman, as the six- teenth-century reformers seem to have preferred. Nor was she subsumed into the Church such that every image of her was always already understood as a type of the communal Body of Christ, as certain twentieth-century Catholic studies have tended to imply. 15 As the one who remained steadfast in faith during the days of her Son's entombment, she was the rst member of the Church that had been born in the water and blood that owed from Christ's side, but for all their love of personi cation allegories, her medieval devotees would never have insisted that she or Christ was thereby identical with, never mind subordinate to Eccle- sia. Nor would Mary's medieval devotees have accepted the preeminently Protes- tant claim that the scriptures say "so little" about her, any more than they would have accepted the more recent historical-critical insistence that, of the scriptures, only the texts of the New Testament contain any reliable information about the
life, death, and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. If, as they believed, Christ spoke to them through the Psalms, so Mary spoke to them through Proverbs, the Song of Songs, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), and the Wisdom of Solomon. Indeed, as we shall see, some like Richard of Saint-Laurent, a canon of the metropolitan chapter of Rouen, would insist that nearly all of the scriptures showed forth her praise insofar as they contain images of her spiritual and physical beauty and of the mystery of her relationship with God. Mary as her medieval devotees described her may not have been a goddess in her own right (that is, uncreated, herself the Creator)--much of the wonder of the Incarnation depended on the fact that she was not--but she had borne God in her womb, and for this reason she was not only blessed among women as her cousin Elizabeth exclaimed (Luke 1:42), but indeed exalted above all the choirs of the angels, as the rst antiphon for the rst nocturn for the feast of her Assumption proclaimed. 16
Nor was devoting oneself to the Virgin Mary somehow necessarily easier or less terrifying than praying directly to God. Mary, like the elephant, might be "lacking in bile" as the great Dominican preacher Jacobus de Voragine (d. 1298) put it and, therefore, only accidentally "severe," but even her sweetness had its limits. Like the elephant in battle, when provoked, she too could be "terrible as the ordered ranks of the army" (Song of Songs 6:3, 9), battling on humanity's behalf against the demons but also against sinners at the judgment, for whom "at the end she would no longer pray. "17 Indeed, as our imaginative exercise has already shown, prayer to Mary might be just as much an occasion for abjection over one's sins as prayer to Christ. Certainly, this is what Anselm of Canterbury found when he attempted to write a prayer worthy of her attention. "Good Lady," he prayed, "a huge dullness is between you and me, so that I am scarcely aware of the extent of my sickness. I am so lthy and stinking that I am afraid you will turn your merciful face from me. "18 e point for medieval Christians like Anselm was not that praying to Mary made prayer easy, but rather, as we shall see, that Mary, by giving her consent to bear the Creator of all things in her body and so make the God-man visible to the world, made prayer possible in a way that it had not hitherto been before. It was for this reason that Mary's medieval devotees delighted to recite the words with which the angel Gabriel had greeted her at the moment of the Incarnation: every repetition recalled for her--and them--the joy that she had felt when divinity joined itself with humanity in her womb. It was, they insisted, not possible to praise her enough, whom God had loved so much as to take his very esh from her.
"Prayer," as Dionysius the Carthusian (d. 1471) put it, following a tradition going back through omas Aquinas (d. 1274) to John of Damascus (d. 749),
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"is de ned as 'a li ing up (ascensus) of the mind and soul to God. ' "19 One of the most e ective ways to assist this mental and spiritual ascensus, or so medie- val Christians believed, was to address themselves to the woman through whom God had descended to the world in esh. Indeed, in their experience, the more o en they repeated the angel's salutation to her ("Ave Maria, gratia plena"), the deeper their appreciation of the mystery of God's Incarnation became ("Domi- nus tecum"). While later critics following the sixteenth-century reformers have tended to see in this practice either a superstitious dependence on the e cacy of sheer repetition or, more sympathetically, a powerful if nevertheless some- what mindless or mechanical form of self-hypnosis, medieval commentaries on the text--not to mention the Virgin's own plea that her devotees not say her salutation too fast--make it clear that, like the Virgin herself, Gabriel's greet- ing was pregnant with God. It was for this reason--not the Virgin's purported capriciousness in honoring her devotees--that repeating it mindfully, with devo- tion, could have such profound spiritual bene ts. Certainly, it might seem a little thing to say "Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum" y or a hundred or even a hundred and y times a day, but only if one had no sense of the mystery con- tained therein.
To judge from the sermons that they preached both within their own monastic or collegiate communities and, in the vernacular, to the laity at large, as well as the hymns, litanies, and psalters they composed in her praise, like- wise the popularity of such works as Conrad of Saxony's (d. 1279) Speculum beatae Mariae virginis, itself an extended commentary on the angelic saluta- tion, medieval monks, nuns, canons, and friars relished the opportunity to savor this mystery and encouraged their audiences to do likewise. As we shall see, one of the things that they enjoyed most was meditation on Mary's name, including all of the titles and typologies discovered of her in creation and in the scriptures. Mary, as they saw her, was God's handmaid, to be sure (Luke 1:38), but she was also Ark of the Covenant, Seat of Wisdom, Tower of Ivory, Litter of Solomon, Cedar of Lebanon, Garden of Delights, and Star of the Sea, not to mention Virgin of Virgins, Mother of Mercy, Queen of Heaven, and Bride of God. More to the point, Mary, as the Mother of God, the Creator of all things, was in Anselm's words the "mother of all re-created things. "20 e most perfect of all God's creatures, Mary herself was the most perfect mirror of God, the one--as the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri (d. 1321) put it in his Paradiso-- whose "face is most like / the face of Christ" and by whose radiance humanity is prepared for the vision of God. 21 is is the way that the Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen hailed her:
O how great
in its strength is the side of man,
from which God produced the form of woman. He made her the mirror
of all his beauty
and the embrace
of his whole creation. 22
Earth, sea, and sky; sun, moon, and stars; owers, trees, spices, fruits; birds and beasts; precious metals and gemstones; the products of the mechanical, archi- tectural, and liberal arts: all were invoked as symbols for or attributes of her vir- tues and beauty. 23 A creature herself, Mary re ected the virtues and beauty of all God's creatures; and yet, she had carried within her womb "he whom the whole world could not contain. "24 is was the mystery evoked at every recitation of the angel's words: "Dominus tecum. " Little wonder if, as the Benedictine poet Gautier de Coincy (d. 1236) put it, Mary "is the sea that no one exhausts" (mers que nus n'espuise). 25 She it was whom God lled with himself.
Plate 6 Calendar, Annunciation. Book of Hours, France, ca. 1400-1414. Use of Cha^lons- sur-Marne. Chicago, e University of Chicago Library, Special Collections 26, fols. 12v-13r.
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Photo courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, e University of Chicago Library.
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SALUTING MARY: AVE
Of all of the practices associated by the later Middle Ages with devotion to the Virgin--veneration of her milk, clothing, and house(s); pilgrimage to the shrines of her wonder-working statues; imaginative meditation on the events of her life leading to the conviction that she might appear to the meditants in visions--none so exercised the concern, if not the ridicule, of the sixteenth-century reformers as the recitation of the greeting of the angel Gabriel as, in e ect, a prayer. In part one might argue that their concern was justi ed. By the later eenth cen- tury, the angel's salutation as recorded by Luke had been supplemented not only with Mary's proper name (Gabriel had said only, "Chaire, kecharitomene [? ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ]," in Jerome's translation, "Ave, gratia plena"), as well as with Eliza- beth's greeting ("et benedictus fructus ventris tui," itself supplemented with Jesus' name), but also with a concluding nonscriptural plea: "Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in ora mortis. Amen. "26 Regardless of the fact that this second part of the Ave Maria was not to become standardized until the latter part of the sixteenth century (a standardization owing, not incidentally, to Protestant attacks on the recitation of the Ave Maria as such), the reformers, beginning with Martin Luther (d. 1546), were adamant that what the angel and Elizabeth had said to Mary was not a prayer but simply a greeting intended to honor and praise her. 27 As the English martyr Hugh Latimer (d. 1555) defended his rejection of the hitherto customary devotional use of the Ave:
As for the Ave Maria, who can think that I would deny it? I said it was a heavenly greeting or saluting of our blessed lady, wherein the angel Gabriel, sent from the Father of heaven, did annunciate and shew unto her the good-will of God towards her, what he would with her, and to what he had chosen her. But I said, it was not properly a prayer, as the Pater noster, which our Saviour Christ himself made for a proper prayer. 28
Arguably even more problematic than the form of the words was the way in which Christians had been accustomed to salute the Virgin. Again, in Latim- er's words: "I did not speak against well saying of [the Ave Maria], but against superstitious saying of it, and of the Pater noster too. "29 Paramount among such superstitions according to the reformers was the repeated recitation of the Ave Maria--as, for example, in the devotions of the rosary--in the hope of acquiring spiritual merit and, thereby, indulgences. Such practices were not only vain, but impious, their observance the very de nition of "popery. " Accordingly, Arch- bishop of Canterbury Edmund Grindal's Visitation Articles of 1576 speci cally
inquired whether any of the clergy encouraged their parishioners "to pray in an unknown tongue, [rather] than in English, or to put their trust in a certain num- ber of prayers, as in saying over a certain number of beads, Lady-Psalters, or other like. "30 is distrust of the mere numbering of prayers would later translate itself among the reformers' modernist descendants into a distrust of the very use of such scripted, "arti cial" prayers, for how, they argued, could any "vain exercise of words" or "mere repetition of sacred formulae" have anything to do with "the very movement itself of the soul" that is the essence of "religion in act," that is, prayer? 31 More recent phenomenological investigations have tended to be some- what more sympathetic to such regular practices as chanting the psalms or, as with the rosary, keying meditations to the repeated recitation of short phrases or mantras. 32 Contrary to the sixteenth-century reformers' conviction that such practices were at best vain, at worst the work of the devil, the tendency now is to assume that chanting Mary's name over and over again could indeed induce visions and sensations of sweetness. From this perspective, chanting almost any sacred or even not so sacred text with the proper breath control and attention would have much the same spiritual e ect. 33
Medieval Christians who devoted themselves to the recitation of the Ave Maria would have been as befuddled by the sixteenth-century reformers' insis- tence that it was "only" a salutation (that, a er all, was its point) as they would by the more recent conviction that the speci c words one uses in such exercises do not really matter. To their understanding, saluting the Virgin in Gabriel's and Elizabeth's words was not so much a prayer in the sense of a petition for something, as a service, much as chanting the Psalter as a whole in the course of the Divine O ce was a service to God. e point was not, by way of such exercises, to change one's own intellectual, spiritual, or emotional state, but to please God and his Mother. To be sure, singing the Divine O ce or saying the Ave Maria might have powerful--and, indeed, manifold--spiritual, emotional, and even corporeal e ects: stirring the soul to contrition for sins, melting the heart to greater devotion, ravishing devout souls and causing them to receive spiritual gi s, making the heart joyous and sweet, driving away evil spirits, and overcoming the bodily and spiritual enemies of the church. But, above all, as the Birgittine Myroure of oure Ladye put it, "holy chyrche songe . . . pleasyth so moche god, that he desyreth and ioyeth to here yt. "34 It was for this reason that the monks and nuns of the medieval church spent their lives singing the psalms: not because they thought thereby to achieve ecstasy (although some most certainly did), but because the Psalms were the words with which God had praised himself and therefore the words he most desired to hear. 35 As Augus- tine of Hippo explained in his commentary on Psalm 144 (Exaltabo te Deus):
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"So that God might be well praised by man, God praised himself [in the scrip- tures]; and because he has deigned to praise himself, therefore man knows how to praise him. "36
Likewise the words with which the angel Gabriel greeted the Mother of God. As Jacobus de Voragine put it, citing "Bernard," " is salutation was composed in the council chamber (in secretario) of the Trinity and written by the nger of God" (cf. Exodus 31:18). 37 To recite Gabriel's salutation was neither to ask something of Mary nor to attribute it to her divinity. Rather, it was to rejoice with her and to congratulate her, as if to say, or so Richard of Saint-Laurent put it: "O blessed Virgin, I rejoice with you and give you joy in your salvation and glory. "38 If God saw t to address her in this way through his angel, how much more ought human beings to congratulate her, being as they are in her debt for so many blessings? John the Baptist leapt in his mother's womb as Mary approached (Luke 1:41), while her Son himself rose to meet and adore her--"that is, salute her"--in heaven (3 Kings 2:19). "We ought, therefore," Jacobus chided his audi- ence, "to blush not to salute her a er such as these have saluted her. "39 Richard of Saint-Laurent was, if anything, even more forceful in his recommendations for saluting the Virgin. "When, therefore, we say Ave, Maria," he insisted, "we ought to humble ourselves before her like servants (servi) before their Lady. "40 Nor was this humiliation to be strictly spiritual:
For [Richard argued] if we salute so a ectionately and diligently, if we bare our heads, if we bow and rise to our feet and bend our knees and repeat our saluta- tion again and again to the intimate friends and relatives and companions of the great whose counsel or support we need at court, and we seek to obtain their benevolence with gi s and services, and we prevail in this way, what should we do for the mother at the court of her only Son, whom not only can she supplicate e ectively, but also command with her maternal authority? 41
Just as Mary herself served humanity in her body by giving esh to her Son, so (Richard averred) Christians ought to serve her not only in their hearts, but also with all of their bodily members and all of their senses: bowing their heads before her images whenever they passed them; averting their eyes from all vanities and praying with groans and tears; closing their ears to all obnoxious sounds and their noses to all meretricious scents; restraining their appetites so as not to give in to drunkenness or gluttony; doing good works with their hands; embracing their enemies with their arms; bending their knees before her altars and images and whenever they recited her name, "because she says with the Son: 'To me every knee shall bow' (Isaiah 45:24). "42
Saying the Ave
Stories told of the lives of the holy--and the not-so-holy--bear ample witness to these practices, particularly the reverence given to Mary's images and the genu ections with which she was regularly greeted. Moreover, as Herbert urston argued more than a century ago following the great Benedictine historians Luc d'Achery (d. 1685) and Jean Mabillon (d. 1707), such stories likewise prove that the recitation of the Ave Maria as such had its origins not as a freestanding devotion, but rather in the genu ections or bows o ered with the invitatory antiphon at the outset of the O ce of the Virgin, as, for example, in both London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii and Royal 2 B. V. 43 Once again, as with the Hours of the Virgin, Peter Damian is one of our earliest witnesses to this development. As Peter or, rather his friend Stephen, cardinal priest of the Apostolic see, told it:
I remember hearing of a certain cleric, who was simple, good for nothing, ighty and tactless. In addition, he seemed to have no talent for the religious life, no quality that re ected the gravity and decorum pertaining to canonical discipline.
Pierpont Morgan, 1916, Accession number 16. 32. 194.
Image (C) e Metropolitan Museum of Art. www. metmuseum. org
If you hear his voice today, harden not your hearts: as in the provocation accord- ing to the day of temptation in the wilderness where your fathers tempted me: they proved me and saw my works (vv. 8-9).
As you answer: " e Lord is with you," you think miserably on your sins and your hardness of heart, especially your failure to honor God and his Mother as you should, for did she not su er even as her Son as he died on the cross for our sins? 7 Almost as if he could read your thoughts, her Son replies:
Quadraginta annis proximus fui generationi huic et dixi semper hi errant corde ipsi vero non cognouerunt vias meas quibus iuraui in ira mea si introibunt in requiem meam.
For forty years I was nigh to this generation, and I said: always they err in heart, for truly they have not known my ways: I swore to them in my wrath they shall never enter into my rest (vv. 10-11).
Trembling, indeed, pleading, you turn to the Virgin Mother once again: "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you," hoping against hope that she might be able to assuage the wrath of the Judge, her Son. "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit," you sing. "As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be: world without end. Amen. " ankfully, you hear the versicularius intone once again: "Hail Mary, full of grace," and you answer: " e Lord is with you," knowing that he "whom earth and sea and sky adore" vouchsafed in truth to be enclosed within her womb. 8
"Today," the great Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) advised his brothers as he turned their attention to the opening verse of the Song of Songs, "we read in the book of experience (Hodie legimus in libro experientiae): 'Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth. ' But," he cautioned them,
it is not given to just anyone to say these words from within (ex a ectu). . . . I think that no one is able to understand what [this kiss] is except the one who receives it; for it is a "hidden manna" [Revelation 2:17], and only he who eats it still hungers for more. It is a "sealed fountain" [Song of Songs 4:12], to which no stranger has access; only he who drinks still thirsts for more. 9
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What was it like for medieval Christians to pray, hour a er hour, day a er day, to the Virgin Mother of God? Much like Bernard when confronted with the mys- tical kiss of the Song, this is not a question that most recent scholars, including historians, have found themselves readily equipped to answer. e odd (if o en repeated) miracle story, the chipped and faded (if still much-loved) image before which her devotees were accustomed to kneel, the evocative (if historically and scripturally problematic) advice on how to imagine oneself in her earthly pres- ence, the repetitive (if poetic) chants and psalms of her liturgy: these are the frag- mentary objects and texts upon which we depend to imagine their devotional world. As the n de sie`cle American tourist Henry Adams--marveling at the forces brought to bear on the medieval construction of the Virgin's cult--once put it: "All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres. "10 And yet, like Adams, historians have been hard pressed to explain her appeal in other than the most psychologically reductive (or etic) terms, for example, because medieval monks and other clerics were simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the female body or because, as oblates, they had never known their mothers. 11 Did medieval Christians pray to her as if to a goddess, as the sixteenth- century reformers who rejected her cult feared they had and many twentieth- century feminist scholars have hoped modern Christians might? 12 Or was she rather for them a model or type of the Church, as Catholic theologians following Vatican II have tended to argue? 13
To be clear, no, not at least as we see her in the sources associated with her medieval cult. 14 Even at the height of her popularity in the Middle Ages, Mary was not revered as a goddess in the pagan sense of the term, that is, as if she were not a creature but herself somehow divine--although, as well shall see, this did not mean that she was not revered as other than a humble woman, as the six- teenth-century reformers seem to have preferred. Nor was she subsumed into the Church such that every image of her was always already understood as a type of the communal Body of Christ, as certain twentieth-century Catholic studies have tended to imply. 15 As the one who remained steadfast in faith during the days of her Son's entombment, she was the rst member of the Church that had been born in the water and blood that owed from Christ's side, but for all their love of personi cation allegories, her medieval devotees would never have insisted that she or Christ was thereby identical with, never mind subordinate to Eccle- sia. Nor would Mary's medieval devotees have accepted the preeminently Protes- tant claim that the scriptures say "so little" about her, any more than they would have accepted the more recent historical-critical insistence that, of the scriptures, only the texts of the New Testament contain any reliable information about the
life, death, and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. If, as they believed, Christ spoke to them through the Psalms, so Mary spoke to them through Proverbs, the Song of Songs, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), and the Wisdom of Solomon. Indeed, as we shall see, some like Richard of Saint-Laurent, a canon of the metropolitan chapter of Rouen, would insist that nearly all of the scriptures showed forth her praise insofar as they contain images of her spiritual and physical beauty and of the mystery of her relationship with God. Mary as her medieval devotees described her may not have been a goddess in her own right (that is, uncreated, herself the Creator)--much of the wonder of the Incarnation depended on the fact that she was not--but she had borne God in her womb, and for this reason she was not only blessed among women as her cousin Elizabeth exclaimed (Luke 1:42), but indeed exalted above all the choirs of the angels, as the rst antiphon for the rst nocturn for the feast of her Assumption proclaimed. 16
Nor was devoting oneself to the Virgin Mary somehow necessarily easier or less terrifying than praying directly to God. Mary, like the elephant, might be "lacking in bile" as the great Dominican preacher Jacobus de Voragine (d. 1298) put it and, therefore, only accidentally "severe," but even her sweetness had its limits. Like the elephant in battle, when provoked, she too could be "terrible as the ordered ranks of the army" (Song of Songs 6:3, 9), battling on humanity's behalf against the demons but also against sinners at the judgment, for whom "at the end she would no longer pray. "17 Indeed, as our imaginative exercise has already shown, prayer to Mary might be just as much an occasion for abjection over one's sins as prayer to Christ. Certainly, this is what Anselm of Canterbury found when he attempted to write a prayer worthy of her attention. "Good Lady," he prayed, "a huge dullness is between you and me, so that I am scarcely aware of the extent of my sickness. I am so lthy and stinking that I am afraid you will turn your merciful face from me. "18 e point for medieval Christians like Anselm was not that praying to Mary made prayer easy, but rather, as we shall see, that Mary, by giving her consent to bear the Creator of all things in her body and so make the God-man visible to the world, made prayer possible in a way that it had not hitherto been before. It was for this reason that Mary's medieval devotees delighted to recite the words with which the angel Gabriel had greeted her at the moment of the Incarnation: every repetition recalled for her--and them--the joy that she had felt when divinity joined itself with humanity in her womb. It was, they insisted, not possible to praise her enough, whom God had loved so much as to take his very esh from her.
"Prayer," as Dionysius the Carthusian (d. 1471) put it, following a tradition going back through omas Aquinas (d. 1274) to John of Damascus (d. 749),
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"is de ned as 'a li ing up (ascensus) of the mind and soul to God. ' "19 One of the most e ective ways to assist this mental and spiritual ascensus, or so medie- val Christians believed, was to address themselves to the woman through whom God had descended to the world in esh. Indeed, in their experience, the more o en they repeated the angel's salutation to her ("Ave Maria, gratia plena"), the deeper their appreciation of the mystery of God's Incarnation became ("Domi- nus tecum"). While later critics following the sixteenth-century reformers have tended to see in this practice either a superstitious dependence on the e cacy of sheer repetition or, more sympathetically, a powerful if nevertheless some- what mindless or mechanical form of self-hypnosis, medieval commentaries on the text--not to mention the Virgin's own plea that her devotees not say her salutation too fast--make it clear that, like the Virgin herself, Gabriel's greet- ing was pregnant with God. It was for this reason--not the Virgin's purported capriciousness in honoring her devotees--that repeating it mindfully, with devo- tion, could have such profound spiritual bene ts. Certainly, it might seem a little thing to say "Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum" y or a hundred or even a hundred and y times a day, but only if one had no sense of the mystery con- tained therein.
To judge from the sermons that they preached both within their own monastic or collegiate communities and, in the vernacular, to the laity at large, as well as the hymns, litanies, and psalters they composed in her praise, like- wise the popularity of such works as Conrad of Saxony's (d. 1279) Speculum beatae Mariae virginis, itself an extended commentary on the angelic saluta- tion, medieval monks, nuns, canons, and friars relished the opportunity to savor this mystery and encouraged their audiences to do likewise. As we shall see, one of the things that they enjoyed most was meditation on Mary's name, including all of the titles and typologies discovered of her in creation and in the scriptures. Mary, as they saw her, was God's handmaid, to be sure (Luke 1:38), but she was also Ark of the Covenant, Seat of Wisdom, Tower of Ivory, Litter of Solomon, Cedar of Lebanon, Garden of Delights, and Star of the Sea, not to mention Virgin of Virgins, Mother of Mercy, Queen of Heaven, and Bride of God. More to the point, Mary, as the Mother of God, the Creator of all things, was in Anselm's words the "mother of all re-created things. "20 e most perfect of all God's creatures, Mary herself was the most perfect mirror of God, the one--as the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri (d. 1321) put it in his Paradiso-- whose "face is most like / the face of Christ" and by whose radiance humanity is prepared for the vision of God. 21 is is the way that the Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen hailed her:
O how great
in its strength is the side of man,
from which God produced the form of woman. He made her the mirror
of all his beauty
and the embrace
of his whole creation. 22
Earth, sea, and sky; sun, moon, and stars; owers, trees, spices, fruits; birds and beasts; precious metals and gemstones; the products of the mechanical, archi- tectural, and liberal arts: all were invoked as symbols for or attributes of her vir- tues and beauty. 23 A creature herself, Mary re ected the virtues and beauty of all God's creatures; and yet, she had carried within her womb "he whom the whole world could not contain. "24 is was the mystery evoked at every recitation of the angel's words: "Dominus tecum. " Little wonder if, as the Benedictine poet Gautier de Coincy (d. 1236) put it, Mary "is the sea that no one exhausts" (mers que nus n'espuise). 25 She it was whom God lled with himself.
Plate 6 Calendar, Annunciation. Book of Hours, France, ca. 1400-1414. Use of Cha^lons- sur-Marne. Chicago, e University of Chicago Library, Special Collections 26, fols. 12v-13r.
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Photo courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, e University of Chicago Library.
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SALUTING MARY: AVE
Of all of the practices associated by the later Middle Ages with devotion to the Virgin--veneration of her milk, clothing, and house(s); pilgrimage to the shrines of her wonder-working statues; imaginative meditation on the events of her life leading to the conviction that she might appear to the meditants in visions--none so exercised the concern, if not the ridicule, of the sixteenth-century reformers as the recitation of the greeting of the angel Gabriel as, in e ect, a prayer. In part one might argue that their concern was justi ed. By the later eenth cen- tury, the angel's salutation as recorded by Luke had been supplemented not only with Mary's proper name (Gabriel had said only, "Chaire, kecharitomene [? ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ]," in Jerome's translation, "Ave, gratia plena"), as well as with Eliza- beth's greeting ("et benedictus fructus ventris tui," itself supplemented with Jesus' name), but also with a concluding nonscriptural plea: "Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in ora mortis. Amen. "26 Regardless of the fact that this second part of the Ave Maria was not to become standardized until the latter part of the sixteenth century (a standardization owing, not incidentally, to Protestant attacks on the recitation of the Ave Maria as such), the reformers, beginning with Martin Luther (d. 1546), were adamant that what the angel and Elizabeth had said to Mary was not a prayer but simply a greeting intended to honor and praise her. 27 As the English martyr Hugh Latimer (d. 1555) defended his rejection of the hitherto customary devotional use of the Ave:
As for the Ave Maria, who can think that I would deny it? I said it was a heavenly greeting or saluting of our blessed lady, wherein the angel Gabriel, sent from the Father of heaven, did annunciate and shew unto her the good-will of God towards her, what he would with her, and to what he had chosen her. But I said, it was not properly a prayer, as the Pater noster, which our Saviour Christ himself made for a proper prayer. 28
Arguably even more problematic than the form of the words was the way in which Christians had been accustomed to salute the Virgin. Again, in Latim- er's words: "I did not speak against well saying of [the Ave Maria], but against superstitious saying of it, and of the Pater noster too. "29 Paramount among such superstitions according to the reformers was the repeated recitation of the Ave Maria--as, for example, in the devotions of the rosary--in the hope of acquiring spiritual merit and, thereby, indulgences. Such practices were not only vain, but impious, their observance the very de nition of "popery. " Accordingly, Arch- bishop of Canterbury Edmund Grindal's Visitation Articles of 1576 speci cally
inquired whether any of the clergy encouraged their parishioners "to pray in an unknown tongue, [rather] than in English, or to put their trust in a certain num- ber of prayers, as in saying over a certain number of beads, Lady-Psalters, or other like. "30 is distrust of the mere numbering of prayers would later translate itself among the reformers' modernist descendants into a distrust of the very use of such scripted, "arti cial" prayers, for how, they argued, could any "vain exercise of words" or "mere repetition of sacred formulae" have anything to do with "the very movement itself of the soul" that is the essence of "religion in act," that is, prayer? 31 More recent phenomenological investigations have tended to be some- what more sympathetic to such regular practices as chanting the psalms or, as with the rosary, keying meditations to the repeated recitation of short phrases or mantras. 32 Contrary to the sixteenth-century reformers' conviction that such practices were at best vain, at worst the work of the devil, the tendency now is to assume that chanting Mary's name over and over again could indeed induce visions and sensations of sweetness. From this perspective, chanting almost any sacred or even not so sacred text with the proper breath control and attention would have much the same spiritual e ect. 33
Medieval Christians who devoted themselves to the recitation of the Ave Maria would have been as befuddled by the sixteenth-century reformers' insis- tence that it was "only" a salutation (that, a er all, was its point) as they would by the more recent conviction that the speci c words one uses in such exercises do not really matter. To their understanding, saluting the Virgin in Gabriel's and Elizabeth's words was not so much a prayer in the sense of a petition for something, as a service, much as chanting the Psalter as a whole in the course of the Divine O ce was a service to God. e point was not, by way of such exercises, to change one's own intellectual, spiritual, or emotional state, but to please God and his Mother. To be sure, singing the Divine O ce or saying the Ave Maria might have powerful--and, indeed, manifold--spiritual, emotional, and even corporeal e ects: stirring the soul to contrition for sins, melting the heart to greater devotion, ravishing devout souls and causing them to receive spiritual gi s, making the heart joyous and sweet, driving away evil spirits, and overcoming the bodily and spiritual enemies of the church. But, above all, as the Birgittine Myroure of oure Ladye put it, "holy chyrche songe . . . pleasyth so moche god, that he desyreth and ioyeth to here yt. "34 It was for this reason that the monks and nuns of the medieval church spent their lives singing the psalms: not because they thought thereby to achieve ecstasy (although some most certainly did), but because the Psalms were the words with which God had praised himself and therefore the words he most desired to hear. 35 As Augus- tine of Hippo explained in his commentary on Psalm 144 (Exaltabo te Deus):
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"So that God might be well praised by man, God praised himself [in the scrip- tures]; and because he has deigned to praise himself, therefore man knows how to praise him. "36
Likewise the words with which the angel Gabriel greeted the Mother of God. As Jacobus de Voragine put it, citing "Bernard," " is salutation was composed in the council chamber (in secretario) of the Trinity and written by the nger of God" (cf. Exodus 31:18). 37 To recite Gabriel's salutation was neither to ask something of Mary nor to attribute it to her divinity. Rather, it was to rejoice with her and to congratulate her, as if to say, or so Richard of Saint-Laurent put it: "O blessed Virgin, I rejoice with you and give you joy in your salvation and glory. "38 If God saw t to address her in this way through his angel, how much more ought human beings to congratulate her, being as they are in her debt for so many blessings? John the Baptist leapt in his mother's womb as Mary approached (Luke 1:41), while her Son himself rose to meet and adore her--"that is, salute her"--in heaven (3 Kings 2:19). "We ought, therefore," Jacobus chided his audi- ence, "to blush not to salute her a er such as these have saluted her. "39 Richard of Saint-Laurent was, if anything, even more forceful in his recommendations for saluting the Virgin. "When, therefore, we say Ave, Maria," he insisted, "we ought to humble ourselves before her like servants (servi) before their Lady. "40 Nor was this humiliation to be strictly spiritual:
For [Richard argued] if we salute so a ectionately and diligently, if we bare our heads, if we bow and rise to our feet and bend our knees and repeat our saluta- tion again and again to the intimate friends and relatives and companions of the great whose counsel or support we need at court, and we seek to obtain their benevolence with gi s and services, and we prevail in this way, what should we do for the mother at the court of her only Son, whom not only can she supplicate e ectively, but also command with her maternal authority? 41
Just as Mary herself served humanity in her body by giving esh to her Son, so (Richard averred) Christians ought to serve her not only in their hearts, but also with all of their bodily members and all of their senses: bowing their heads before her images whenever they passed them; averting their eyes from all vanities and praying with groans and tears; closing their ears to all obnoxious sounds and their noses to all meretricious scents; restraining their appetites so as not to give in to drunkenness or gluttony; doing good works with their hands; embracing their enemies with their arms; bending their knees before her altars and images and whenever they recited her name, "because she says with the Son: 'To me every knee shall bow' (Isaiah 45:24). "42
Saying the Ave
Stories told of the lives of the holy--and the not-so-holy--bear ample witness to these practices, particularly the reverence given to Mary's images and the genu ections with which she was regularly greeted. Moreover, as Herbert urston argued more than a century ago following the great Benedictine historians Luc d'Achery (d. 1685) and Jean Mabillon (d. 1707), such stories likewise prove that the recitation of the Ave Maria as such had its origins not as a freestanding devotion, but rather in the genu ections or bows o ered with the invitatory antiphon at the outset of the O ce of the Virgin, as, for example, in both London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii and Royal 2 B. V. 43 Once again, as with the Hours of the Virgin, Peter Damian is one of our earliest witnesses to this development. As Peter or, rather his friend Stephen, cardinal priest of the Apostolic see, told it:
I remember hearing of a certain cleric, who was simple, good for nothing, ighty and tactless. In addition, he seemed to have no talent for the religious life, no quality that re ected the gravity and decorum pertaining to canonical discipline. But among these dead ashes of a useless life, one tiny ame continued to burn. Daily he would go to the holy altar of the blessed Mother of God, and there reverently bowing his head would recite this angelic and Gospel verse (angelicum atque evangelicum versiculum): "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you: blessed are you among women. "
Eventually, the cleric's bishop caught wind of his uselessness and deprived of him the bene ce upon which he depended to live, at which the Virgin was not pleased. Appearing to the bishop in his sleep along with a man carrying a torch in one hand and a rod in the other, she ordered him to be whipped and chastised him for depriving "my chaplain who daily prayed to me" of his stipend. " ere- fore," Peter concluded, "if this cleric was rewarded with food for his body just for having sung one prayerful verse, with what con dence can those who daily recite all the hours of the o ce to the blessed queen of the world look forward to eternal refreshment? "44
As with the full O ce of the Virgin, this "abbreviated O ce" was to become popular among monastics, clergy, and laity alike over the course of the next century or so, such that even those who could say only the invitatory antiphon were able to participate in Mary's service. 45 As early as 1125, Franco, abbot of the Brabantine house of A ighem, insisted: "Of good right does every condition, every age, every degree honour Mary with the angelical salutation; of good right does every voice, every tongue, every conscious being cry aloud to Mary with
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the angel: 'Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum; benedicta tu in mulieri- bus. ' "46 As Baldwin of Ford (d. 1190, Acre), bishop of Worcester and archbishop of Canterbury, put it in one of the earliest extended commentaries on the Ave Maria: " e matter of our salvation begins with a salutation, and the commence- ment of our reconciliation is consecrated by a proclamation of peace. . . . O saving greeting, spoken by the angel, instructing us in how we should greet the Virgin! O joy of the heart, sweetness to the mouth, seasoning of love! "47 e Benedictine nun and visionary Elisabeth of Scho? nau (d. 1165), who was accustomed to salute the Virgin in this way, enjoyed a vision of Mary standing at an altar and arrayed in a vestment "like a priestly chasuble," while on her head she wore a "glorious crown decorated with four precious gems, and the angelic salutation, 'Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you,' was inscribed around it. "48
Much as Richard of Saint-Laurent had insisted they should be, these recitations of the Ave Maria were typically accompanied by genu ections, usually before her images, sometimes multiplied tens or even hundreds of times. As the biographer of the Premonstratensian canon Hermann Joseph (d. 1241) explained:
It is the common custom in our order, and I think that the same is true of other orders also, that as o en as the venerable name of the Most Holy Virgin is mentioned in the Collect, in the Creed, in the Preface, and in the Angelic Salutation which is said for the Invitatory (in Salutatione Angelica, quae dicitur pro Invitatorio), the community makes a momentary reverence (veniam) in peniten- tial or ferial seasons by falling upon their knees, and on festivals with the hand.
Hermann himself was accustomed to make a full prostration at every mention of Mary's name, at which he experienced a scent of extraordinary sweetness, more pleasing than that of any ower or other perfume. 49 According to her biogra- pher Jacques de Vitry, the beguine Marie d'Oignies was sometimes so overcome with devotion that she would salute the blessed Virgin eleven hundred times a day, keeping this observance for forty days in a row. First, she would genu ect six hundred times without pause; second, she would recite the whole Psalter, standing, genu ecting, and o ering the angelic salutation at the conclusion of each psalm; third, moved even more strongly by the spirit of devotion, she would genu ect three hundred times while striking herself with the rod of discipline, going so far as to draw blood with the last three blows "to give avor to the oth- ers"; nally, she would consummate the sacri ce (sacri cium consummabat) with y more simple genu ections. 50 Less spectacularly if no less devoutly, the teen- aged beguine Margaret of Ypres said every day four hundred Pater Nosters and four hundred Ave Marias "with the same number of genu ections, as well as y
psalms," most likely short verses accompanied by salutations to the Virgin. Worn out by these devotions, Margaret sometimes found it di cult to stand. "At such times," according to her biographer omas of Cantimpre? , "she could palpably feel the touch of two angels, one on her right side and one on her le , li ing her by the elbows," who would sustain her until she could recite ten more saluta- tions to Mary, at which she would revive and be able to nish her prayers. 51 e Cistercian nun Beatrice of Nazareth maintained a similar observance, reciting every day, "with genu ections, the psalter of the Blessed Virgin (psalterium beate virginis) which," her biographer explained, "consists of as many repetitions of the angelic salutation as there are psalms in David's psalter. "52
Strange as these devotional exercises may seem today, it would seem that in the Middle Ages the Virgin Mother was greatly pleased by such attentions, as those who related the stories of her miracles were eager to attest. 53 e Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach (d. ca. 1240) told the story of a certain recluse who lived next to the church of Saint Severinus in Cologne "during the time of the schism between Alexander and Paschal," whom the matrons of the city would o en visit. One of these women confessed to the recluse "she could not say the name of Our Lady without tasting a wonderful sweetness. " Upon being asked the cause of such a great favor, she responded: "Every day in her honor I have been accustomed to say Ave Maria y times with the same number of genu ections (veniis), through which I have earned such sweetness that all the spittle of my mouth seems to be turned to honey during the time of prayer. " Encouraged by the matron's example, the recluse took up the exercise himself. A er six weeks, he, too, began to sense in his mouth and throat a sweetness "far surpassing the sweetness of honey" every time he greeted the Virgin. 54
Other e ects of saluting the Virgin were even more tangible, if not always enjoyed by their recipients while they were alive. A certain monk who always devoutly said her Hours was healed of a tumor in his throat by a drop of her milk. 55 A monk who fell into a river and drowned on his way to see his mis- tress was rescued from the demons who came to demand his soul because, as the Virgin said, "I know that he never le the monastery without saluting me. "56 A certain cleric who drowned while drunk was buried in unconsecrated ground until, that is, his body was exhumed and a tag was found hanging from his mouth inscribed with the words with which he had been accustomed to salute the Vir- gin: "Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. "57 An unlettered knight who had entered the Cistercian order but could learn only the two words "Ave Maria" was found a er his burial to have a lily growing from his mouth on one leaf of which were inscribed in letters of gold the same two words with which he had so devoutly honored the Virgin. 58
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Sometimes the circumstances were even more complicated, o en leading more recent readers to insist that Mary rewarded her devotees without regard for their overall spiritual or moral status. 59 And yet, as Anne Clark has elegantly shown, such stories of Mary's favor "o en suggest a more subtle message in which devo- tion to Mary is part of a complex religiosity. "60 One such story, rst recounted by the Benedictine Guibert of Nogent (d. 1124) and retold numerous times thereaf- ter, including in the vernacular, concerned an adulteress, the wife of whose lover prayed to the Virgin to punish her, only to be told that the Virgin couldn't:
Why [the Virgin reproved the wife in a vision] do you ask me for revenge over that woman? Clearly I can do nothing against her because daily she announces to me my joy, than which nothing is more pleasing for me to hear from any creature. Do you think that against her on your behalf I ought to be provoked, who, as if to remind me, cries out so sedulously concerning my ine able glory? 61
Other versions of the story recounted how the adulteress made her devotions before the image of the Virgin "every day on bare knees" (Jean Gobi), "[bowing] a hundred times, with her forehead touching the ground" (Alfonso X). All, how- ever, emphasized how her devotions rendered her apparently immune against the Virgin's anger. 62 Understandably incensed at the Virgin's reply and vowing to withdraw her own devotional attentions since the Virgin would not (again, apparently) help her, the wife railed against her rival when she met her entering the church: "O most foul one, how many torments will you in ict on my soul? "
I had only one hope, that the Virgin Mother of God might cast sentence of revenge against you, but already I have failed utterly in this hope, for she told me that that Ave, with which you capture her attention every day, has so ened her to such a degree that it is unbe tting for her to do anything against you.
Fulton
Brown
Mary & theArtof
Prayer
e Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and ought
2
Ave Maria
Imagine the scene, if you will. 1 It is dark, except for the light of a few candles, and silent, except for the breathing of those around you. Someone coughs. You are, perhaps, tired, because you have already
been singing and listening for some time, praising God through the watches of the night. Still in your stall, you turn with your brothers (or sisters) toward the altar and repeat, once again, the opening dialogue of Matins, led by your priest:
Domine, labia mea aperies. Lord, open my lips.
Towhichyouaspartofthechoirreply: Et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam.
And my mouth shall show forth your praise. Again, the priest li s up his voice:
Deus, in adjutorium meum intende. God, come to my assistance.
To which the choir responds:
Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina. Lord, make haste to help me.
48 l Ave Maria
e latter is spoken rather than sung, followed by a Gloria Patri. 2 And then, as if
with the voice of an angel, the versicularius intones the familiar chant: Ave Maria, gratia plena.
Hail Mary, full of grace.
You with the rest of the choir respond in full (CAO #1041, 1539):
Ave Maria, gratia plena, dominus tecum. Ave Maria, gratia plena, dominus tecum.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.
At once, the versicularius continues, intoning the psalm (Psalm 94):
Venite exultemus Domino, iubilemus Deo salutari nostro: preoccupemus faciem
eius in confessione: et in psalmis iubilemus ei. You respond, yet again:
Ave Maria, gratia plena, dominus tecum.
e one text is as habitual as the other; you have sung both every morning for the better part of your life. You have no need to look at the words or to think about the reciting tone; this exchange comes to you as easily as breathing. "Venite," the psalm invites you.
Come, let us sing unto the Lord. Let us rejoice before God, our Savior. Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving, and rejoice before him with psalms (vv. 1-2).
"Hail Mary," you respond, "full of grace, the Lord is with you," weaving the words that the angel Gabriel spoke to the Mother of God at the Annunciation (Luke 1:28) in among the verses of the psalm.
Perhaps, as you sing, a glint of light catches your eye, and you turn to see a pair of amber beads swaying gently in front of the image of the Blessed Virgin. Almost idly, you recall how Isabella, the wife of William Belgrafe, had bequeathed them to Our Lady along with her gold and silver ring only last year. 3 You begin to think on the joy with which Mary herself must have exulted when she understood that
she was to become Bride of God and Mother of Our Lord. Suddenly, it is as if you were present yourself at the very moment when Gabriel came to her in that "pryue chaumbure" where she was accustomed to say her prayers and meditate, with Isaiah, on the manner of the Incarnation. 4 You hear her speak:
Quoniam Deus magnus Dominus et rex magnus super omnes deos: quoniam non repellet Dominus plebem suam: quia in manu eius sunt omnes nes terre: et altitudines montium ipse conspicit.
For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods. For the Lord will not cast o his people. For in his hand are all the ends of the earth: and the heights of the mountains he beholds (vv. 3-4).
And you realize that she is waiting for you to speak in return: " e Lord is with you. " To which she responds with even greater joy:
Quoniam ipsius est mare et ipse fecit illud; et aridam fundauerunt manus eius: venite adoremus et procidamus ante Deum, ploremus coram Domino qui fecit nos: quia ipse est Dominus Deus noster: nos autem populus eius et oues pascue eius.
For the sea is his, and he made it: and his hands formed the dry land. Come, let us worship and fall down before God, let us weep before the Lord who made us: for he is the Lord our God, and we are his people and the sheep of his pasture (vv. 5-7).
You are amazed to nd your mouth lled with an extraordinary sweetness, like honey, as once again you repeat the angel's greeting: "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. "5 And in little more than a whisper, so that you are not sure whether you are hearing it or not, a voice admonishes you: "Slow down! I want to savor the joy that I have when you say those words, most especially Dominus tecum, for then it seems to me that my Son is in me, just as he was when, God and man, he deigned to be born from me for the sake of sinners. "6
Abashed, you nd yourself wanting to fall to your knees and bow down with every repetition of the angel's words and wonder what it would be like to say the salutation y, a hundred, or even a hundred and y times, when once again the Virgin's voice breaks in:
Hodie si vocem eius audieritis nolite obdurare corda vestra: sicut in exacerba- tione secundum diem tentationis in deserto vbi tentauerunt me patres vestri: probauerunt et viderunt opera mea.
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P l at e 5 Altar statue, the Virgin and Child in majesty, Auvergne, France, ca. 1175-1200. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gi of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1916, Accession number 16. 32. 194.
Image (C) e Metropolitan Museum of Art. www. metmuseum. org
If you hear his voice today, harden not your hearts: as in the provocation accord- ing to the day of temptation in the wilderness where your fathers tempted me: they proved me and saw my works (vv. 8-9).
As you answer: " e Lord is with you," you think miserably on your sins and your hardness of heart, especially your failure to honor God and his Mother as you should, for did she not su er even as her Son as he died on the cross for our sins? 7 Almost as if he could read your thoughts, her Son replies:
Quadraginta annis proximus fui generationi huic et dixi semper hi errant corde ipsi vero non cognouerunt vias meas quibus iuraui in ira mea si introibunt in requiem meam.
For forty years I was nigh to this generation, and I said: always they err in heart, for truly they have not known my ways: I swore to them in my wrath they shall never enter into my rest (vv. 10-11).
Trembling, indeed, pleading, you turn to the Virgin Mother once again: "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you," hoping against hope that she might be able to assuage the wrath of the Judge, her Son. "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit," you sing. "As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be: world without end. Amen. " ankfully, you hear the versicularius intone once again: "Hail Mary, full of grace," and you answer: " e Lord is with you," knowing that he "whom earth and sea and sky adore" vouchsafed in truth to be enclosed within her womb. 8
"Today," the great Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) advised his brothers as he turned their attention to the opening verse of the Song of Songs, "we read in the book of experience (Hodie legimus in libro experientiae): 'Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth. ' But," he cautioned them,
it is not given to just anyone to say these words from within (ex a ectu). . . . I think that no one is able to understand what [this kiss] is except the one who receives it; for it is a "hidden manna" [Revelation 2:17], and only he who eats it still hungers for more. It is a "sealed fountain" [Song of Songs 4:12], to which no stranger has access; only he who drinks still thirsts for more. 9
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What was it like for medieval Christians to pray, hour a er hour, day a er day, to the Virgin Mother of God? Much like Bernard when confronted with the mys- tical kiss of the Song, this is not a question that most recent scholars, including historians, have found themselves readily equipped to answer. e odd (if o en repeated) miracle story, the chipped and faded (if still much-loved) image before which her devotees were accustomed to kneel, the evocative (if historically and scripturally problematic) advice on how to imagine oneself in her earthly pres- ence, the repetitive (if poetic) chants and psalms of her liturgy: these are the frag- mentary objects and texts upon which we depend to imagine their devotional world. As the n de sie`cle American tourist Henry Adams--marveling at the forces brought to bear on the medieval construction of the Virgin's cult--once put it: "All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres. "10 And yet, like Adams, historians have been hard pressed to explain her appeal in other than the most psychologically reductive (or etic) terms, for example, because medieval monks and other clerics were simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the female body or because, as oblates, they had never known their mothers. 11 Did medieval Christians pray to her as if to a goddess, as the sixteenth- century reformers who rejected her cult feared they had and many twentieth- century feminist scholars have hoped modern Christians might? 12 Or was she rather for them a model or type of the Church, as Catholic theologians following Vatican II have tended to argue? 13
To be clear, no, not at least as we see her in the sources associated with her medieval cult. 14 Even at the height of her popularity in the Middle Ages, Mary was not revered as a goddess in the pagan sense of the term, that is, as if she were not a creature but herself somehow divine--although, as well shall see, this did not mean that she was not revered as other than a humble woman, as the six- teenth-century reformers seem to have preferred. Nor was she subsumed into the Church such that every image of her was always already understood as a type of the communal Body of Christ, as certain twentieth-century Catholic studies have tended to imply. 15 As the one who remained steadfast in faith during the days of her Son's entombment, she was the rst member of the Church that had been born in the water and blood that owed from Christ's side, but for all their love of personi cation allegories, her medieval devotees would never have insisted that she or Christ was thereby identical with, never mind subordinate to Eccle- sia. Nor would Mary's medieval devotees have accepted the preeminently Protes- tant claim that the scriptures say "so little" about her, any more than they would have accepted the more recent historical-critical insistence that, of the scriptures, only the texts of the New Testament contain any reliable information about the
life, death, and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. If, as they believed, Christ spoke to them through the Psalms, so Mary spoke to them through Proverbs, the Song of Songs, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), and the Wisdom of Solomon. Indeed, as we shall see, some like Richard of Saint-Laurent, a canon of the metropolitan chapter of Rouen, would insist that nearly all of the scriptures showed forth her praise insofar as they contain images of her spiritual and physical beauty and of the mystery of her relationship with God. Mary as her medieval devotees described her may not have been a goddess in her own right (that is, uncreated, herself the Creator)--much of the wonder of the Incarnation depended on the fact that she was not--but she had borne God in her womb, and for this reason she was not only blessed among women as her cousin Elizabeth exclaimed (Luke 1:42), but indeed exalted above all the choirs of the angels, as the rst antiphon for the rst nocturn for the feast of her Assumption proclaimed. 16
Nor was devoting oneself to the Virgin Mary somehow necessarily easier or less terrifying than praying directly to God. Mary, like the elephant, might be "lacking in bile" as the great Dominican preacher Jacobus de Voragine (d. 1298) put it and, therefore, only accidentally "severe," but even her sweetness had its limits. Like the elephant in battle, when provoked, she too could be "terrible as the ordered ranks of the army" (Song of Songs 6:3, 9), battling on humanity's behalf against the demons but also against sinners at the judgment, for whom "at the end she would no longer pray. "17 Indeed, as our imaginative exercise has already shown, prayer to Mary might be just as much an occasion for abjection over one's sins as prayer to Christ. Certainly, this is what Anselm of Canterbury found when he attempted to write a prayer worthy of her attention. "Good Lady," he prayed, "a huge dullness is between you and me, so that I am scarcely aware of the extent of my sickness. I am so lthy and stinking that I am afraid you will turn your merciful face from me. "18 e point for medieval Christians like Anselm was not that praying to Mary made prayer easy, but rather, as we shall see, that Mary, by giving her consent to bear the Creator of all things in her body and so make the God-man visible to the world, made prayer possible in a way that it had not hitherto been before. It was for this reason that Mary's medieval devotees delighted to recite the words with which the angel Gabriel had greeted her at the moment of the Incarnation: every repetition recalled for her--and them--the joy that she had felt when divinity joined itself with humanity in her womb. It was, they insisted, not possible to praise her enough, whom God had loved so much as to take his very esh from her.
"Prayer," as Dionysius the Carthusian (d. 1471) put it, following a tradition going back through omas Aquinas (d. 1274) to John of Damascus (d. 749),
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"is de ned as 'a li ing up (ascensus) of the mind and soul to God. ' "19 One of the most e ective ways to assist this mental and spiritual ascensus, or so medie- val Christians believed, was to address themselves to the woman through whom God had descended to the world in esh. Indeed, in their experience, the more o en they repeated the angel's salutation to her ("Ave Maria, gratia plena"), the deeper their appreciation of the mystery of God's Incarnation became ("Domi- nus tecum"). While later critics following the sixteenth-century reformers have tended to see in this practice either a superstitious dependence on the e cacy of sheer repetition or, more sympathetically, a powerful if nevertheless some- what mindless or mechanical form of self-hypnosis, medieval commentaries on the text--not to mention the Virgin's own plea that her devotees not say her salutation too fast--make it clear that, like the Virgin herself, Gabriel's greet- ing was pregnant with God. It was for this reason--not the Virgin's purported capriciousness in honoring her devotees--that repeating it mindfully, with devo- tion, could have such profound spiritual bene ts. Certainly, it might seem a little thing to say "Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum" y or a hundred or even a hundred and y times a day, but only if one had no sense of the mystery con- tained therein.
To judge from the sermons that they preached both within their own monastic or collegiate communities and, in the vernacular, to the laity at large, as well as the hymns, litanies, and psalters they composed in her praise, like- wise the popularity of such works as Conrad of Saxony's (d. 1279) Speculum beatae Mariae virginis, itself an extended commentary on the angelic saluta- tion, medieval monks, nuns, canons, and friars relished the opportunity to savor this mystery and encouraged their audiences to do likewise. As we shall see, one of the things that they enjoyed most was meditation on Mary's name, including all of the titles and typologies discovered of her in creation and in the scriptures. Mary, as they saw her, was God's handmaid, to be sure (Luke 1:38), but she was also Ark of the Covenant, Seat of Wisdom, Tower of Ivory, Litter of Solomon, Cedar of Lebanon, Garden of Delights, and Star of the Sea, not to mention Virgin of Virgins, Mother of Mercy, Queen of Heaven, and Bride of God. More to the point, Mary, as the Mother of God, the Creator of all things, was in Anselm's words the "mother of all re-created things. "20 e most perfect of all God's creatures, Mary herself was the most perfect mirror of God, the one--as the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri (d. 1321) put it in his Paradiso-- whose "face is most like / the face of Christ" and by whose radiance humanity is prepared for the vision of God. 21 is is the way that the Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen hailed her:
O how great
in its strength is the side of man,
from which God produced the form of woman. He made her the mirror
of all his beauty
and the embrace
of his whole creation. 22
Earth, sea, and sky; sun, moon, and stars; owers, trees, spices, fruits; birds and beasts; precious metals and gemstones; the products of the mechanical, archi- tectural, and liberal arts: all were invoked as symbols for or attributes of her vir- tues and beauty. 23 A creature herself, Mary re ected the virtues and beauty of all God's creatures; and yet, she had carried within her womb "he whom the whole world could not contain. "24 is was the mystery evoked at every recitation of the angel's words: "Dominus tecum. " Little wonder if, as the Benedictine poet Gautier de Coincy (d. 1236) put it, Mary "is the sea that no one exhausts" (mers que nus n'espuise). 25 She it was whom God lled with himself.
Plate 6 Calendar, Annunciation. Book of Hours, France, ca. 1400-1414. Use of Cha^lons- sur-Marne. Chicago, e University of Chicago Library, Special Collections 26, fols. 12v-13r.
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Photo courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, e University of Chicago Library.
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SALUTING MARY: AVE
Of all of the practices associated by the later Middle Ages with devotion to the Virgin--veneration of her milk, clothing, and house(s); pilgrimage to the shrines of her wonder-working statues; imaginative meditation on the events of her life leading to the conviction that she might appear to the meditants in visions--none so exercised the concern, if not the ridicule, of the sixteenth-century reformers as the recitation of the greeting of the angel Gabriel as, in e ect, a prayer. In part one might argue that their concern was justi ed. By the later eenth cen- tury, the angel's salutation as recorded by Luke had been supplemented not only with Mary's proper name (Gabriel had said only, "Chaire, kecharitomene [? ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ]," in Jerome's translation, "Ave, gratia plena"), as well as with Eliza- beth's greeting ("et benedictus fructus ventris tui," itself supplemented with Jesus' name), but also with a concluding nonscriptural plea: "Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in ora mortis. Amen. "26 Regardless of the fact that this second part of the Ave Maria was not to become standardized until the latter part of the sixteenth century (a standardization owing, not incidentally, to Protestant attacks on the recitation of the Ave Maria as such), the reformers, beginning with Martin Luther (d. 1546), were adamant that what the angel and Elizabeth had said to Mary was not a prayer but simply a greeting intended to honor and praise her. 27 As the English martyr Hugh Latimer (d. 1555) defended his rejection of the hitherto customary devotional use of the Ave:
As for the Ave Maria, who can think that I would deny it? I said it was a heavenly greeting or saluting of our blessed lady, wherein the angel Gabriel, sent from the Father of heaven, did annunciate and shew unto her the good-will of God towards her, what he would with her, and to what he had chosen her. But I said, it was not properly a prayer, as the Pater noster, which our Saviour Christ himself made for a proper prayer. 28
Arguably even more problematic than the form of the words was the way in which Christians had been accustomed to salute the Virgin. Again, in Latim- er's words: "I did not speak against well saying of [the Ave Maria], but against superstitious saying of it, and of the Pater noster too. "29 Paramount among such superstitions according to the reformers was the repeated recitation of the Ave Maria--as, for example, in the devotions of the rosary--in the hope of acquiring spiritual merit and, thereby, indulgences. Such practices were not only vain, but impious, their observance the very de nition of "popery. " Accordingly, Arch- bishop of Canterbury Edmund Grindal's Visitation Articles of 1576 speci cally
inquired whether any of the clergy encouraged their parishioners "to pray in an unknown tongue, [rather] than in English, or to put their trust in a certain num- ber of prayers, as in saying over a certain number of beads, Lady-Psalters, or other like. "30 is distrust of the mere numbering of prayers would later translate itself among the reformers' modernist descendants into a distrust of the very use of such scripted, "arti cial" prayers, for how, they argued, could any "vain exercise of words" or "mere repetition of sacred formulae" have anything to do with "the very movement itself of the soul" that is the essence of "religion in act," that is, prayer? 31 More recent phenomenological investigations have tended to be some- what more sympathetic to such regular practices as chanting the psalms or, as with the rosary, keying meditations to the repeated recitation of short phrases or mantras. 32 Contrary to the sixteenth-century reformers' conviction that such practices were at best vain, at worst the work of the devil, the tendency now is to assume that chanting Mary's name over and over again could indeed induce visions and sensations of sweetness. From this perspective, chanting almost any sacred or even not so sacred text with the proper breath control and attention would have much the same spiritual e ect. 33
Medieval Christians who devoted themselves to the recitation of the Ave Maria would have been as befuddled by the sixteenth-century reformers' insis- tence that it was "only" a salutation (that, a er all, was its point) as they would by the more recent conviction that the speci c words one uses in such exercises do not really matter. To their understanding, saluting the Virgin in Gabriel's and Elizabeth's words was not so much a prayer in the sense of a petition for something, as a service, much as chanting the Psalter as a whole in the course of the Divine O ce was a service to God. e point was not, by way of such exercises, to change one's own intellectual, spiritual, or emotional state, but to please God and his Mother. To be sure, singing the Divine O ce or saying the Ave Maria might have powerful--and, indeed, manifold--spiritual, emotional, and even corporeal e ects: stirring the soul to contrition for sins, melting the heart to greater devotion, ravishing devout souls and causing them to receive spiritual gi s, making the heart joyous and sweet, driving away evil spirits, and overcoming the bodily and spiritual enemies of the church. But, above all, as the Birgittine Myroure of oure Ladye put it, "holy chyrche songe . . . pleasyth so moche god, that he desyreth and ioyeth to here yt. "34 It was for this reason that the monks and nuns of the medieval church spent their lives singing the psalms: not because they thought thereby to achieve ecstasy (although some most certainly did), but because the Psalms were the words with which God had praised himself and therefore the words he most desired to hear. 35 As Augus- tine of Hippo explained in his commentary on Psalm 144 (Exaltabo te Deus):
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"So that God might be well praised by man, God praised himself [in the scrip- tures]; and because he has deigned to praise himself, therefore man knows how to praise him. "36
Likewise the words with which the angel Gabriel greeted the Mother of God. As Jacobus de Voragine put it, citing "Bernard," " is salutation was composed in the council chamber (in secretario) of the Trinity and written by the nger of God" (cf. Exodus 31:18). 37 To recite Gabriel's salutation was neither to ask something of Mary nor to attribute it to her divinity. Rather, it was to rejoice with her and to congratulate her, as if to say, or so Richard of Saint-Laurent put it: "O blessed Virgin, I rejoice with you and give you joy in your salvation and glory. "38 If God saw t to address her in this way through his angel, how much more ought human beings to congratulate her, being as they are in her debt for so many blessings? John the Baptist leapt in his mother's womb as Mary approached (Luke 1:41), while her Son himself rose to meet and adore her--"that is, salute her"--in heaven (3 Kings 2:19). "We ought, therefore," Jacobus chided his audi- ence, "to blush not to salute her a er such as these have saluted her. "39 Richard of Saint-Laurent was, if anything, even more forceful in his recommendations for saluting the Virgin. "When, therefore, we say Ave, Maria," he insisted, "we ought to humble ourselves before her like servants (servi) before their Lady. "40 Nor was this humiliation to be strictly spiritual:
For [Richard argued] if we salute so a ectionately and diligently, if we bare our heads, if we bow and rise to our feet and bend our knees and repeat our saluta- tion again and again to the intimate friends and relatives and companions of the great whose counsel or support we need at court, and we seek to obtain their benevolence with gi s and services, and we prevail in this way, what should we do for the mother at the court of her only Son, whom not only can she supplicate e ectively, but also command with her maternal authority? 41
Just as Mary herself served humanity in her body by giving esh to her Son, so (Richard averred) Christians ought to serve her not only in their hearts, but also with all of their bodily members and all of their senses: bowing their heads before her images whenever they passed them; averting their eyes from all vanities and praying with groans and tears; closing their ears to all obnoxious sounds and their noses to all meretricious scents; restraining their appetites so as not to give in to drunkenness or gluttony; doing good works with their hands; embracing their enemies with their arms; bending their knees before her altars and images and whenever they recited her name, "because she says with the Son: 'To me every knee shall bow' (Isaiah 45:24). "42
Saying the Ave
Stories told of the lives of the holy--and the not-so-holy--bear ample witness to these practices, particularly the reverence given to Mary's images and the genu ections with which she was regularly greeted. Moreover, as Herbert urston argued more than a century ago following the great Benedictine historians Luc d'Achery (d. 1685) and Jean Mabillon (d. 1707), such stories likewise prove that the recitation of the Ave Maria as such had its origins not as a freestanding devotion, but rather in the genu ections or bows o ered with the invitatory antiphon at the outset of the O ce of the Virgin, as, for example, in both London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii and Royal 2 B. V. 43 Once again, as with the Hours of the Virgin, Peter Damian is one of our earliest witnesses to this development. As Peter or, rather his friend Stephen, cardinal priest of the Apostolic see, told it:
I remember hearing of a certain cleric, who was simple, good for nothing, ighty and tactless. In addition, he seemed to have no talent for the religious life, no quality that re ected the gravity and decorum pertaining to canonical discipline.
Pierpont Morgan, 1916, Accession number 16. 32. 194.
Image (C) e Metropolitan Museum of Art. www. metmuseum. org
If you hear his voice today, harden not your hearts: as in the provocation accord- ing to the day of temptation in the wilderness where your fathers tempted me: they proved me and saw my works (vv. 8-9).
As you answer: " e Lord is with you," you think miserably on your sins and your hardness of heart, especially your failure to honor God and his Mother as you should, for did she not su er even as her Son as he died on the cross for our sins? 7 Almost as if he could read your thoughts, her Son replies:
Quadraginta annis proximus fui generationi huic et dixi semper hi errant corde ipsi vero non cognouerunt vias meas quibus iuraui in ira mea si introibunt in requiem meam.
For forty years I was nigh to this generation, and I said: always they err in heart, for truly they have not known my ways: I swore to them in my wrath they shall never enter into my rest (vv. 10-11).
Trembling, indeed, pleading, you turn to the Virgin Mother once again: "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you," hoping against hope that she might be able to assuage the wrath of the Judge, her Son. "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit," you sing. "As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be: world without end. Amen. " ankfully, you hear the versicularius intone once again: "Hail Mary, full of grace," and you answer: " e Lord is with you," knowing that he "whom earth and sea and sky adore" vouchsafed in truth to be enclosed within her womb. 8
"Today," the great Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) advised his brothers as he turned their attention to the opening verse of the Song of Songs, "we read in the book of experience (Hodie legimus in libro experientiae): 'Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth. ' But," he cautioned them,
it is not given to just anyone to say these words from within (ex a ectu). . . . I think that no one is able to understand what [this kiss] is except the one who receives it; for it is a "hidden manna" [Revelation 2:17], and only he who eats it still hungers for more. It is a "sealed fountain" [Song of Songs 4:12], to which no stranger has access; only he who drinks still thirsts for more. 9
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What was it like for medieval Christians to pray, hour a er hour, day a er day, to the Virgin Mother of God? Much like Bernard when confronted with the mys- tical kiss of the Song, this is not a question that most recent scholars, including historians, have found themselves readily equipped to answer. e odd (if o en repeated) miracle story, the chipped and faded (if still much-loved) image before which her devotees were accustomed to kneel, the evocative (if historically and scripturally problematic) advice on how to imagine oneself in her earthly pres- ence, the repetitive (if poetic) chants and psalms of her liturgy: these are the frag- mentary objects and texts upon which we depend to imagine their devotional world. As the n de sie`cle American tourist Henry Adams--marveling at the forces brought to bear on the medieval construction of the Virgin's cult--once put it: "All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres. "10 And yet, like Adams, historians have been hard pressed to explain her appeal in other than the most psychologically reductive (or etic) terms, for example, because medieval monks and other clerics were simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the female body or because, as oblates, they had never known their mothers. 11 Did medieval Christians pray to her as if to a goddess, as the sixteenth- century reformers who rejected her cult feared they had and many twentieth- century feminist scholars have hoped modern Christians might? 12 Or was she rather for them a model or type of the Church, as Catholic theologians following Vatican II have tended to argue? 13
To be clear, no, not at least as we see her in the sources associated with her medieval cult. 14 Even at the height of her popularity in the Middle Ages, Mary was not revered as a goddess in the pagan sense of the term, that is, as if she were not a creature but herself somehow divine--although, as well shall see, this did not mean that she was not revered as other than a humble woman, as the six- teenth-century reformers seem to have preferred. Nor was she subsumed into the Church such that every image of her was always already understood as a type of the communal Body of Christ, as certain twentieth-century Catholic studies have tended to imply. 15 As the one who remained steadfast in faith during the days of her Son's entombment, she was the rst member of the Church that had been born in the water and blood that owed from Christ's side, but for all their love of personi cation allegories, her medieval devotees would never have insisted that she or Christ was thereby identical with, never mind subordinate to Eccle- sia. Nor would Mary's medieval devotees have accepted the preeminently Protes- tant claim that the scriptures say "so little" about her, any more than they would have accepted the more recent historical-critical insistence that, of the scriptures, only the texts of the New Testament contain any reliable information about the
life, death, and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. If, as they believed, Christ spoke to them through the Psalms, so Mary spoke to them through Proverbs, the Song of Songs, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), and the Wisdom of Solomon. Indeed, as we shall see, some like Richard of Saint-Laurent, a canon of the metropolitan chapter of Rouen, would insist that nearly all of the scriptures showed forth her praise insofar as they contain images of her spiritual and physical beauty and of the mystery of her relationship with God. Mary as her medieval devotees described her may not have been a goddess in her own right (that is, uncreated, herself the Creator)--much of the wonder of the Incarnation depended on the fact that she was not--but she had borne God in her womb, and for this reason she was not only blessed among women as her cousin Elizabeth exclaimed (Luke 1:42), but indeed exalted above all the choirs of the angels, as the rst antiphon for the rst nocturn for the feast of her Assumption proclaimed. 16
Nor was devoting oneself to the Virgin Mary somehow necessarily easier or less terrifying than praying directly to God. Mary, like the elephant, might be "lacking in bile" as the great Dominican preacher Jacobus de Voragine (d. 1298) put it and, therefore, only accidentally "severe," but even her sweetness had its limits. Like the elephant in battle, when provoked, she too could be "terrible as the ordered ranks of the army" (Song of Songs 6:3, 9), battling on humanity's behalf against the demons but also against sinners at the judgment, for whom "at the end she would no longer pray. "17 Indeed, as our imaginative exercise has already shown, prayer to Mary might be just as much an occasion for abjection over one's sins as prayer to Christ. Certainly, this is what Anselm of Canterbury found when he attempted to write a prayer worthy of her attention. "Good Lady," he prayed, "a huge dullness is between you and me, so that I am scarcely aware of the extent of my sickness. I am so lthy and stinking that I am afraid you will turn your merciful face from me. "18 e point for medieval Christians like Anselm was not that praying to Mary made prayer easy, but rather, as we shall see, that Mary, by giving her consent to bear the Creator of all things in her body and so make the God-man visible to the world, made prayer possible in a way that it had not hitherto been before. It was for this reason that Mary's medieval devotees delighted to recite the words with which the angel Gabriel had greeted her at the moment of the Incarnation: every repetition recalled for her--and them--the joy that she had felt when divinity joined itself with humanity in her womb. It was, they insisted, not possible to praise her enough, whom God had loved so much as to take his very esh from her.
"Prayer," as Dionysius the Carthusian (d. 1471) put it, following a tradition going back through omas Aquinas (d. 1274) to John of Damascus (d. 749),
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"is de ned as 'a li ing up (ascensus) of the mind and soul to God. ' "19 One of the most e ective ways to assist this mental and spiritual ascensus, or so medie- val Christians believed, was to address themselves to the woman through whom God had descended to the world in esh. Indeed, in their experience, the more o en they repeated the angel's salutation to her ("Ave Maria, gratia plena"), the deeper their appreciation of the mystery of God's Incarnation became ("Domi- nus tecum"). While later critics following the sixteenth-century reformers have tended to see in this practice either a superstitious dependence on the e cacy of sheer repetition or, more sympathetically, a powerful if nevertheless some- what mindless or mechanical form of self-hypnosis, medieval commentaries on the text--not to mention the Virgin's own plea that her devotees not say her salutation too fast--make it clear that, like the Virgin herself, Gabriel's greet- ing was pregnant with God. It was for this reason--not the Virgin's purported capriciousness in honoring her devotees--that repeating it mindfully, with devo- tion, could have such profound spiritual bene ts. Certainly, it might seem a little thing to say "Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum" y or a hundred or even a hundred and y times a day, but only if one had no sense of the mystery con- tained therein.
To judge from the sermons that they preached both within their own monastic or collegiate communities and, in the vernacular, to the laity at large, as well as the hymns, litanies, and psalters they composed in her praise, like- wise the popularity of such works as Conrad of Saxony's (d. 1279) Speculum beatae Mariae virginis, itself an extended commentary on the angelic saluta- tion, medieval monks, nuns, canons, and friars relished the opportunity to savor this mystery and encouraged their audiences to do likewise. As we shall see, one of the things that they enjoyed most was meditation on Mary's name, including all of the titles and typologies discovered of her in creation and in the scriptures. Mary, as they saw her, was God's handmaid, to be sure (Luke 1:38), but she was also Ark of the Covenant, Seat of Wisdom, Tower of Ivory, Litter of Solomon, Cedar of Lebanon, Garden of Delights, and Star of the Sea, not to mention Virgin of Virgins, Mother of Mercy, Queen of Heaven, and Bride of God. More to the point, Mary, as the Mother of God, the Creator of all things, was in Anselm's words the "mother of all re-created things. "20 e most perfect of all God's creatures, Mary herself was the most perfect mirror of God, the one--as the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri (d. 1321) put it in his Paradiso-- whose "face is most like / the face of Christ" and by whose radiance humanity is prepared for the vision of God. 21 is is the way that the Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen hailed her:
O how great
in its strength is the side of man,
from which God produced the form of woman. He made her the mirror
of all his beauty
and the embrace
of his whole creation. 22
Earth, sea, and sky; sun, moon, and stars; owers, trees, spices, fruits; birds and beasts; precious metals and gemstones; the products of the mechanical, archi- tectural, and liberal arts: all were invoked as symbols for or attributes of her vir- tues and beauty. 23 A creature herself, Mary re ected the virtues and beauty of all God's creatures; and yet, she had carried within her womb "he whom the whole world could not contain. "24 is was the mystery evoked at every recitation of the angel's words: "Dominus tecum. " Little wonder if, as the Benedictine poet Gautier de Coincy (d. 1236) put it, Mary "is the sea that no one exhausts" (mers que nus n'espuise). 25 She it was whom God lled with himself.
Plate 6 Calendar, Annunciation. Book of Hours, France, ca. 1400-1414. Use of Cha^lons- sur-Marne. Chicago, e University of Chicago Library, Special Collections 26, fols. 12v-13r.
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Photo courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, e University of Chicago Library.
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SALUTING MARY: AVE
Of all of the practices associated by the later Middle Ages with devotion to the Virgin--veneration of her milk, clothing, and house(s); pilgrimage to the shrines of her wonder-working statues; imaginative meditation on the events of her life leading to the conviction that she might appear to the meditants in visions--none so exercised the concern, if not the ridicule, of the sixteenth-century reformers as the recitation of the greeting of the angel Gabriel as, in e ect, a prayer. In part one might argue that their concern was justi ed. By the later eenth cen- tury, the angel's salutation as recorded by Luke had been supplemented not only with Mary's proper name (Gabriel had said only, "Chaire, kecharitomene [? ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ]," in Jerome's translation, "Ave, gratia plena"), as well as with Eliza- beth's greeting ("et benedictus fructus ventris tui," itself supplemented with Jesus' name), but also with a concluding nonscriptural plea: "Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in ora mortis. Amen. "26 Regardless of the fact that this second part of the Ave Maria was not to become standardized until the latter part of the sixteenth century (a standardization owing, not incidentally, to Protestant attacks on the recitation of the Ave Maria as such), the reformers, beginning with Martin Luther (d. 1546), were adamant that what the angel and Elizabeth had said to Mary was not a prayer but simply a greeting intended to honor and praise her. 27 As the English martyr Hugh Latimer (d. 1555) defended his rejection of the hitherto customary devotional use of the Ave:
As for the Ave Maria, who can think that I would deny it? I said it was a heavenly greeting or saluting of our blessed lady, wherein the angel Gabriel, sent from the Father of heaven, did annunciate and shew unto her the good-will of God towards her, what he would with her, and to what he had chosen her. But I said, it was not properly a prayer, as the Pater noster, which our Saviour Christ himself made for a proper prayer. 28
Arguably even more problematic than the form of the words was the way in which Christians had been accustomed to salute the Virgin. Again, in Latim- er's words: "I did not speak against well saying of [the Ave Maria], but against superstitious saying of it, and of the Pater noster too. "29 Paramount among such superstitions according to the reformers was the repeated recitation of the Ave Maria--as, for example, in the devotions of the rosary--in the hope of acquiring spiritual merit and, thereby, indulgences. Such practices were not only vain, but impious, their observance the very de nition of "popery. " Accordingly, Arch- bishop of Canterbury Edmund Grindal's Visitation Articles of 1576 speci cally
inquired whether any of the clergy encouraged their parishioners "to pray in an unknown tongue, [rather] than in English, or to put their trust in a certain num- ber of prayers, as in saying over a certain number of beads, Lady-Psalters, or other like. "30 is distrust of the mere numbering of prayers would later translate itself among the reformers' modernist descendants into a distrust of the very use of such scripted, "arti cial" prayers, for how, they argued, could any "vain exercise of words" or "mere repetition of sacred formulae" have anything to do with "the very movement itself of the soul" that is the essence of "religion in act," that is, prayer? 31 More recent phenomenological investigations have tended to be some- what more sympathetic to such regular practices as chanting the psalms or, as with the rosary, keying meditations to the repeated recitation of short phrases or mantras. 32 Contrary to the sixteenth-century reformers' conviction that such practices were at best vain, at worst the work of the devil, the tendency now is to assume that chanting Mary's name over and over again could indeed induce visions and sensations of sweetness. From this perspective, chanting almost any sacred or even not so sacred text with the proper breath control and attention would have much the same spiritual e ect. 33
Medieval Christians who devoted themselves to the recitation of the Ave Maria would have been as befuddled by the sixteenth-century reformers' insis- tence that it was "only" a salutation (that, a er all, was its point) as they would by the more recent conviction that the speci c words one uses in such exercises do not really matter. To their understanding, saluting the Virgin in Gabriel's and Elizabeth's words was not so much a prayer in the sense of a petition for something, as a service, much as chanting the Psalter as a whole in the course of the Divine O ce was a service to God. e point was not, by way of such exercises, to change one's own intellectual, spiritual, or emotional state, but to please God and his Mother. To be sure, singing the Divine O ce or saying the Ave Maria might have powerful--and, indeed, manifold--spiritual, emotional, and even corporeal e ects: stirring the soul to contrition for sins, melting the heart to greater devotion, ravishing devout souls and causing them to receive spiritual gi s, making the heart joyous and sweet, driving away evil spirits, and overcoming the bodily and spiritual enemies of the church. But, above all, as the Birgittine Myroure of oure Ladye put it, "holy chyrche songe . . . pleasyth so moche god, that he desyreth and ioyeth to here yt. "34 It was for this reason that the monks and nuns of the medieval church spent their lives singing the psalms: not because they thought thereby to achieve ecstasy (although some most certainly did), but because the Psalms were the words with which God had praised himself and therefore the words he most desired to hear. 35 As Augus- tine of Hippo explained in his commentary on Psalm 144 (Exaltabo te Deus):
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"So that God might be well praised by man, God praised himself [in the scrip- tures]; and because he has deigned to praise himself, therefore man knows how to praise him. "36
Likewise the words with which the angel Gabriel greeted the Mother of God. As Jacobus de Voragine put it, citing "Bernard," " is salutation was composed in the council chamber (in secretario) of the Trinity and written by the nger of God" (cf. Exodus 31:18). 37 To recite Gabriel's salutation was neither to ask something of Mary nor to attribute it to her divinity. Rather, it was to rejoice with her and to congratulate her, as if to say, or so Richard of Saint-Laurent put it: "O blessed Virgin, I rejoice with you and give you joy in your salvation and glory. "38 If God saw t to address her in this way through his angel, how much more ought human beings to congratulate her, being as they are in her debt for so many blessings? John the Baptist leapt in his mother's womb as Mary approached (Luke 1:41), while her Son himself rose to meet and adore her--"that is, salute her"--in heaven (3 Kings 2:19). "We ought, therefore," Jacobus chided his audi- ence, "to blush not to salute her a er such as these have saluted her. "39 Richard of Saint-Laurent was, if anything, even more forceful in his recommendations for saluting the Virgin. "When, therefore, we say Ave, Maria," he insisted, "we ought to humble ourselves before her like servants (servi) before their Lady. "40 Nor was this humiliation to be strictly spiritual:
For [Richard argued] if we salute so a ectionately and diligently, if we bare our heads, if we bow and rise to our feet and bend our knees and repeat our saluta- tion again and again to the intimate friends and relatives and companions of the great whose counsel or support we need at court, and we seek to obtain their benevolence with gi s and services, and we prevail in this way, what should we do for the mother at the court of her only Son, whom not only can she supplicate e ectively, but also command with her maternal authority? 41
Just as Mary herself served humanity in her body by giving esh to her Son, so (Richard averred) Christians ought to serve her not only in their hearts, but also with all of their bodily members and all of their senses: bowing their heads before her images whenever they passed them; averting their eyes from all vanities and praying with groans and tears; closing their ears to all obnoxious sounds and their noses to all meretricious scents; restraining their appetites so as not to give in to drunkenness or gluttony; doing good works with their hands; embracing their enemies with their arms; bending their knees before her altars and images and whenever they recited her name, "because she says with the Son: 'To me every knee shall bow' (Isaiah 45:24). "42
Saying the Ave
Stories told of the lives of the holy--and the not-so-holy--bear ample witness to these practices, particularly the reverence given to Mary's images and the genu ections with which she was regularly greeted. Moreover, as Herbert urston argued more than a century ago following the great Benedictine historians Luc d'Achery (d. 1685) and Jean Mabillon (d. 1707), such stories likewise prove that the recitation of the Ave Maria as such had its origins not as a freestanding devotion, but rather in the genu ections or bows o ered with the invitatory antiphon at the outset of the O ce of the Virgin, as, for example, in both London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii and Royal 2 B. V. 43 Once again, as with the Hours of the Virgin, Peter Damian is one of our earliest witnesses to this development. As Peter or, rather his friend Stephen, cardinal priest of the Apostolic see, told it:
I remember hearing of a certain cleric, who was simple, good for nothing, ighty and tactless. In addition, he seemed to have no talent for the religious life, no quality that re ected the gravity and decorum pertaining to canonical discipline. But among these dead ashes of a useless life, one tiny ame continued to burn. Daily he would go to the holy altar of the blessed Mother of God, and there reverently bowing his head would recite this angelic and Gospel verse (angelicum atque evangelicum versiculum): "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you: blessed are you among women. "
Eventually, the cleric's bishop caught wind of his uselessness and deprived of him the bene ce upon which he depended to live, at which the Virgin was not pleased. Appearing to the bishop in his sleep along with a man carrying a torch in one hand and a rod in the other, she ordered him to be whipped and chastised him for depriving "my chaplain who daily prayed to me" of his stipend. " ere- fore," Peter concluded, "if this cleric was rewarded with food for his body just for having sung one prayerful verse, with what con dence can those who daily recite all the hours of the o ce to the blessed queen of the world look forward to eternal refreshment? "44
As with the full O ce of the Virgin, this "abbreviated O ce" was to become popular among monastics, clergy, and laity alike over the course of the next century or so, such that even those who could say only the invitatory antiphon were able to participate in Mary's service. 45 As early as 1125, Franco, abbot of the Brabantine house of A ighem, insisted: "Of good right does every condition, every age, every degree honour Mary with the angelical salutation; of good right does every voice, every tongue, every conscious being cry aloud to Mary with
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the angel: 'Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum; benedicta tu in mulieri- bus. ' "46 As Baldwin of Ford (d. 1190, Acre), bishop of Worcester and archbishop of Canterbury, put it in one of the earliest extended commentaries on the Ave Maria: " e matter of our salvation begins with a salutation, and the commence- ment of our reconciliation is consecrated by a proclamation of peace. . . . O saving greeting, spoken by the angel, instructing us in how we should greet the Virgin! O joy of the heart, sweetness to the mouth, seasoning of love! "47 e Benedictine nun and visionary Elisabeth of Scho? nau (d. 1165), who was accustomed to salute the Virgin in this way, enjoyed a vision of Mary standing at an altar and arrayed in a vestment "like a priestly chasuble," while on her head she wore a "glorious crown decorated with four precious gems, and the angelic salutation, 'Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you,' was inscribed around it. "48
Much as Richard of Saint-Laurent had insisted they should be, these recitations of the Ave Maria were typically accompanied by genu ections, usually before her images, sometimes multiplied tens or even hundreds of times. As the biographer of the Premonstratensian canon Hermann Joseph (d. 1241) explained:
It is the common custom in our order, and I think that the same is true of other orders also, that as o en as the venerable name of the Most Holy Virgin is mentioned in the Collect, in the Creed, in the Preface, and in the Angelic Salutation which is said for the Invitatory (in Salutatione Angelica, quae dicitur pro Invitatorio), the community makes a momentary reverence (veniam) in peniten- tial or ferial seasons by falling upon their knees, and on festivals with the hand.
Hermann himself was accustomed to make a full prostration at every mention of Mary's name, at which he experienced a scent of extraordinary sweetness, more pleasing than that of any ower or other perfume. 49 According to her biogra- pher Jacques de Vitry, the beguine Marie d'Oignies was sometimes so overcome with devotion that she would salute the blessed Virgin eleven hundred times a day, keeping this observance for forty days in a row. First, she would genu ect six hundred times without pause; second, she would recite the whole Psalter, standing, genu ecting, and o ering the angelic salutation at the conclusion of each psalm; third, moved even more strongly by the spirit of devotion, she would genu ect three hundred times while striking herself with the rod of discipline, going so far as to draw blood with the last three blows "to give avor to the oth- ers"; nally, she would consummate the sacri ce (sacri cium consummabat) with y more simple genu ections. 50 Less spectacularly if no less devoutly, the teen- aged beguine Margaret of Ypres said every day four hundred Pater Nosters and four hundred Ave Marias "with the same number of genu ections, as well as y
psalms," most likely short verses accompanied by salutations to the Virgin. Worn out by these devotions, Margaret sometimes found it di cult to stand. "At such times," according to her biographer omas of Cantimpre? , "she could palpably feel the touch of two angels, one on her right side and one on her le , li ing her by the elbows," who would sustain her until she could recite ten more saluta- tions to Mary, at which she would revive and be able to nish her prayers. 51 e Cistercian nun Beatrice of Nazareth maintained a similar observance, reciting every day, "with genu ections, the psalter of the Blessed Virgin (psalterium beate virginis) which," her biographer explained, "consists of as many repetitions of the angelic salutation as there are psalms in David's psalter. "52
Strange as these devotional exercises may seem today, it would seem that in the Middle Ages the Virgin Mother was greatly pleased by such attentions, as those who related the stories of her miracles were eager to attest. 53 e Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach (d. ca. 1240) told the story of a certain recluse who lived next to the church of Saint Severinus in Cologne "during the time of the schism between Alexander and Paschal," whom the matrons of the city would o en visit. One of these women confessed to the recluse "she could not say the name of Our Lady without tasting a wonderful sweetness. " Upon being asked the cause of such a great favor, she responded: "Every day in her honor I have been accustomed to say Ave Maria y times with the same number of genu ections (veniis), through which I have earned such sweetness that all the spittle of my mouth seems to be turned to honey during the time of prayer. " Encouraged by the matron's example, the recluse took up the exercise himself. A er six weeks, he, too, began to sense in his mouth and throat a sweetness "far surpassing the sweetness of honey" every time he greeted the Virgin. 54
Other e ects of saluting the Virgin were even more tangible, if not always enjoyed by their recipients while they were alive. A certain monk who always devoutly said her Hours was healed of a tumor in his throat by a drop of her milk. 55 A monk who fell into a river and drowned on his way to see his mis- tress was rescued from the demons who came to demand his soul because, as the Virgin said, "I know that he never le the monastery without saluting me. "56 A certain cleric who drowned while drunk was buried in unconsecrated ground until, that is, his body was exhumed and a tag was found hanging from his mouth inscribed with the words with which he had been accustomed to salute the Vir- gin: "Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. "57 An unlettered knight who had entered the Cistercian order but could learn only the two words "Ave Maria" was found a er his burial to have a lily growing from his mouth on one leaf of which were inscribed in letters of gold the same two words with which he had so devoutly honored the Virgin. 58
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Sometimes the circumstances were even more complicated, o en leading more recent readers to insist that Mary rewarded her devotees without regard for their overall spiritual or moral status. 59 And yet, as Anne Clark has elegantly shown, such stories of Mary's favor "o en suggest a more subtle message in which devo- tion to Mary is part of a complex religiosity. "60 One such story, rst recounted by the Benedictine Guibert of Nogent (d. 1124) and retold numerous times thereaf- ter, including in the vernacular, concerned an adulteress, the wife of whose lover prayed to the Virgin to punish her, only to be told that the Virgin couldn't:
Why [the Virgin reproved the wife in a vision] do you ask me for revenge over that woman? Clearly I can do nothing against her because daily she announces to me my joy, than which nothing is more pleasing for me to hear from any creature. Do you think that against her on your behalf I ought to be provoked, who, as if to remind me, cries out so sedulously concerning my ine able glory? 61
Other versions of the story recounted how the adulteress made her devotions before the image of the Virgin "every day on bare knees" (Jean Gobi), "[bowing] a hundred times, with her forehead touching the ground" (Alfonso X). All, how- ever, emphasized how her devotions rendered her apparently immune against the Virgin's anger. 62 Understandably incensed at the Virgin's reply and vowing to withdraw her own devotional attentions since the Virgin would not (again, apparently) help her, the wife railed against her rival when she met her entering the church: "O most foul one, how many torments will you in ict on my soul? "
I had only one hope, that the Virgin Mother of God might cast sentence of revenge against you, but already I have failed utterly in this hope, for she told me that that Ave, with which you capture her attention every day, has so ened her to such a degree that it is unbe tting for her to do anything against you.
