The Religion & Culture Web Forum
February 2012
Voices of Despair and Gestures of Grief in Rituals of Mourning and Italian Marian Laments in the late Middle Ages
by Emanuela Zanotti Carney (University of Illinois—Chicago)
As devotion to Mary as the "mother of sorrows" flourished in the late Middle Ages, poetic narratives of Mary's lamentations at the foot of the cross became an important sub-genre of Marian literature. Emanuela Zanotti Carney studies Marian laments written in the Italian vernacular, arguing that "poets and compilers ... conveyed the emotional experience of the Virgin at the cross by embodying traditional rituals of mourning performed by women (the corrotto) into their lyrical and dramatic texts" (2-3). Seeking an emotional reaction to Mary's grief, these laments "transformed audiences from passive recipients of a sacred story to active and engaged participants in the history of salvation" (32).
Read Voices of Despair and Gestures of Grief.
Invited responses are forthcoming from:
Maggie Fritz-Morkin (University of Chicago, Romance Languages and Literatures);
Laura Saetveit Miles (University of Michigan; English Literature); and
Gail Holst-Warhaft (Cornell University; Comparative Literature).
Please note that essays and responses are now available as pdfs only (requires the free Adobe Acrobat reader).
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