Medieval Laments of The Virgin Mary Text Music Performance and Genre Liminality Early Social Performance Eliška Kubartová Polácková

Medieval Laments of the Virgin Mary
Text Music Performance and Genre

Liminality Early Social Performance
Eliška Kubartová Polácková
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EARLY SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
Further Information and Publications

arc-humanities.org/our-series/arc/esp/
MEDIEVAL LAMENTS
OF THE VIRGIN MARY
TEXT, MUSIC, PERFORMANCE,
AND GENRE LIMINALITY
by
ELIŠKA KUBARTOVÁ POLÁČKOVÁ
This publication is co-financed by
the Czech Academy of Sciences
funding scheme AV 21 Strategy
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
© 2023, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds
The authors assert their moral right to be identified as the authors of their part of this work.
Permission to use brief excerpts from this work in scholarly and educational works is hereby
granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is
an exception or limitation covered by Article 5 of the European Union’s Copyright Directive
(2001/29/EC) or would be determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act
September 2010 Page 2 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copy
right Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Publisher’s permission.
ISBN (print): 9781641894562

e-ISBN (PDF): 9781802700787
www.arc-humanities.org
Printed and bound in the UK (by CPI Group [UK] Ltd), USA (by Bookmasters),
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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Introduction. The Suffering of the Virgin Mary as an Inner Drama. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Chapter One. Marian Lament and Medieval Piety. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Chapter Two. Genre, Mediality and Aesthetics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Chapter Three. Modes of Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Chapter Four. Bohemian Laments:

Feeling Like a Woman, Thinking Like a Man. Or Not?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Appendix: Bohemian Marian Laments — Excerpts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1: Schreinmadonna, West Prussia: linden, polychrome, gilding, ca. 1390. . . 37
Figure 2: Madonna from Sázava or The Infantia Christi, Sázava,

Bohemia, fourteenth century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Figure 3: Crucifixus dolorosus, Corpus Christi Church, Lower Silesia,

Poland, ca. 1300. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Figure 4: Sculpture of Christ with movable limbs, St. Wenceslas Church,

Litovel, Czech Republic: polychrome, wood; 115 cm, 1520s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Figure 5: Holy Sepulchre, St. Mauriceʼs Rotunda, Konstanz Minster,

Germany, 1260‒1280. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Figure 6: Holy Sepulchre, St. Maria zur Hӧhe, Soest, Germany, ca. 1260. . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Figure 7: Crucifixion, Vyšší Brod Cycle, Master of the

Hohenfurth Altarpiece, 1345–1350. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Figure 8: Crucifixion and Pietà, Passion and Marian Cycle,

Church of St. Climent, Levý Hradec, Czech Republic, 1350s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
Figure 9: The Pietà from Lásenice, Jindřichův Hradec, Czech Republic,

third quarter of the fourteenth century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
Figure 10: “Arma Christi” and the “Crucifixus,” Passional of

Abbesse Kunigunde, Prague. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Figure 11: “Arma Christi,” in the Passional of Abbesse Kunigunde, Prague. . . . . . . . . . 146
Figure 12: “Šafařík Lament,” Prague. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Figure 13: “Planctus Mariae,” Passionale quod dicitur

Cunegundis abbatissae, Prague. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
Figure 14: “Christ’s Side Wound,” Psalter of Bonne de Luxembourg,

attributed to Jean Le Noir and Workshop, before 1349. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
PREFACE
This work is an outcome of several years of research on the medieval lamentations

of the Virgin Mary. I researched the Bohemian laments in my dissertation on medieval
Bohemian literature and performance, defended at the Department of Theatre Studies,
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic in 2017, and published it two years later with
the Filosofia, Prague, thanks to the financial support of the Academy of Sciences of the
Czech Republic. I have also dealt with the Bohemian laments in several studies pub-
lished in English in scholarly publications in the Czech Republic and abroad. This book
would not have been written without the encouragement of Pamela King, who gave
me the confidence to write it and invaluable assistance in the whole process. It would
also not have been written without the financial support of the Academy of Sciences
from the AV 21 Strategy Programme. I was assisted by a large number of colleagues and
friends in my research on the Marian Lament as a genre, as well as in preparation of
this book, especially Tomáš Weissar, who helped me with the reading and translation of
the Latin laments and liturgical manuscripts. Furthermore, discussions with him often
made me aware of important points that I would otherwise have missed. Similarly, I am
very grateful to Pietro Delcorno for his valuable suggestions and for the opportunity to
publish part of my research in his project on the Central European Passion Devotion. I
am also indebted to Jan Hon, Martin Bažil, and Klára Š� krobánková for their help with
the translation of the German, French, and Polish laments, respectively. I thank Alena
Sarkissian and Martin Bernátek for their helpfulness and the space they gave me to
work on the book, magnanimously limiting the scale of my other duties. I thank Evina
Stein for her help in deciphering the illegible rubrics in the Lament of Roudnice, and
Hana Vlhová-Wörner for drawing my attention to the evidence from Bohemia of the
performance of a Marian composition in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary. My special
thanks go to the anonymous reader of Arc Humanities Press, whose valuable comments
were of immense help and spared me some embarrassing mistakes. All possible errors
that remain in the text remain my sole responsibility.
Introduction
THE SUFFERING OF THE VIRGIN MARY

AS AN INNER DRAMA
The figure of the Virgin Mary ranks among the most prominent figures of medi
eval Christian culture, and, for that matter, Christian culture in any historical period
from the institution of the Church in the first centuries of the first millennium until
the present. A woman who bore the Son of God, she can be counted among similar fig-
ures, divine and non-divine, in other religions, such as the Phrygian Cybele, Greek Rhea,
Roman Magna Mater, or Indian Parvati. Through them, the appearance of the divine
in the world is likened to the basic human experience of (giving) birth, elevating the
concept of motherhood to a universal theological principal.1 While sharing some char-
acteristics with these instances of maternal deity, the Christian Virgin also appears
to differ substantially from them in several ways. Most importantly, the mother of the
Christ is not conceived of as a deity but, on the contrary, her humanity is emphasized
to underscore the paradoxical nature of the Christian god who decided to take on him-
self the human condition, to the extent of being born to the world in flesh and even of
dying the most terrible death on the cross, in order to redeem the sins of humankind. As
Theotokos or Deipara, the god-bearer, Mary, in Christian thinking, symbolizes and accen-
tuates this ultimate proof of God’s love for man. She also creates a powerful and mean-
ingful link between theological discourse and the lived experience of ancient and medi
eval Christian believers. The abstract notions of the redemption of sin and the dogma
of one god in three persons become concretized and more familiar in the image of the
Virgin giving birth to the Son of God, and suffering together with him in the moment
of his death. This introduces into Christian doctrine universal elements of the human
condition such as affectionate relationships between parents and children, grieving over
the death of loved ones, or being subject to an authoritative vocation. The Mother of God
thus bridges the gap between the human and the divine, sharing, on one hand, Christ’s
divine status, as his coredemptrix, co-saviour, while she nonetheless remains palpably
human in her motherhood of the divine child, which leaves her vulnerable and exposed
to experiences very much like her earthly devotees. Thanks to this in-between position,
Mary qualifies as an ideal intercessor for the mediation of human prayers to Jesus Christ
as a King and Great Judge, to whom, as his mother, taken after her death to her son in
heaven, she has unique access. It is precisely this role, of an intermediary between God
1 For a detailed discussion on the archetype of the mother goddess, see James, The Cult of the
Mother Goddess.
2 Introduction
and his flock, which makes Mary, alongside the Trinity and the saints, a subject of inter-
cessory prayers through which devotees ask her for support, advice, and help. Medieval
Christians, very much like contemporary ones, prayed to the Virgin because they felt she
was close enough to earthly things to understand and empathize with them, and close
enough to the heavens to pass their requests on to their addressee, God the Father, and
his son, Jesus Christ.
These characteristics of the Virgin Mary can be traced in a number of medieval
devotional and literary genres, including the planctus Mariae, or the lament (planct) of
Mary. As a literary, visual, and dramatic motif, the image of the Mother of God, weeping
in desolation at the base of the cross, watching the painful death of her son, appears
in innumerable chants, poems, prose texts, liturgies, paintings, sculptures, and other
objects and phenomena of Christian culture almost from its very beginnings in the
Imperial Rome of the first century CE.2 In Western Europe during the twelfth century,
however, Marian laments emerged as a distinct literary and musical genre characterized
by its focus on the perspective of Mary in the rendition of the Passion. It was through
the eyes of his mother that the recipient of Marian laments was encouraged to experi-
ence Christ’s suffering on the cross. The emphasis of the genre is on the human nature
of Jesus Christ and the emotional response of the Virgin to her son’s torments, especially
her ultimate love, resulting in deep compassion with the suffering Christ, even to the
extent of partaking in his wounds and their redemptive power. Dramatic effects, such as
direct address to the recipient, visual language, and rhymed verse form, are embedded
in the poetic characteristics of the compositions, as well as in their distinct mediality, as
the laments were often sung or recited out loud, or performed in liturgical or paralitur-
gical contexts. In their participatory nature, the recipient is invited and encouraged to
engage mentally, and sometimes even bodily, in the scene of Christ’s death.
As Sandro Sticca reminds us in his seminal book The Planctus Mariae in the Dramatic
Tradition of the Middle Ages (1988), the image of the weeping Mary was important not
only as a narrative and visual motif, but also as an exegetical thought that corresponded
with the major shift in devotional practise occurring around the middle of the eleventh
century and called “affective piety.”3 Described by J. A. W. Bennett as “one of the greatest
revolutions in feeling that Europe has ever witnessed,”4 this profound change in both
spirituality and related devotional praxis had, as its central focus, the image of the griev-
ing Mary and her compassionate response to Christ’s inhumane suffering. Sarah McNa-
mer discusses planctus Mariae among the representatives of the broad generic cat-
2 For the general overview of the imagery of the Virgin as mater dolorosa, see chap. “Mary at the
Foot of the Cross” in Rubin, Mother of God, 243‒55; for the interpretation of her image in medieval
literature, see especially Reed, Shadows of Mary, and for the treatment of the figure in theological
writing of the time, see Gambero, Mary in the Middle Ages; for Mary’s representation in visual arts,
see chap. “From Cana to the Foot of the Cross” in Verdon and Rossi, Mary in Western Art, 144‒67.
3 Sticca, The Planctus Mariae in the Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages, xv. For a comprehensive
introduction to affective piety as a culture complex, see especially Bynum, Jesus as Mother, and
McNamer, Affective Meditation.
4 Bennett, Poetry on the Passion, 32.
The Suffering of the Virgin Mary as an Inner Drama 3
egory of affective meditations on the Passion in her Affective Meditation and the Inven-
tion of Medieval Compassion, claiming that “[these] prose and verse laments […] seek
to elicit compassion not only through their intense evocation of maternal sorrow, but
also through the Virgin’s direct invitations to share her suffering.”5 Beyond McNamer’s
argument, I tend to include the liturgical Marian laments (which do not concern McNa-
mer in her work) as part of the “affective turn” that underscored the humanity of Christ
in contrast to his divine nature, and Mary’s compassionate response to his shockingly
inhumane death. While it is obvious that Sandro Sticca, in his time, overlooked this link
between Marian Lament and the affective mode of piety, with the upsurge of research on
forms and patterns of affective devotion in recent decades, it becomes more and more
clear that both liturgical and paraliturgical Marian laments share many characteristics
with their non-liturgical counterparts. In this book, the liturgical and non-liturgical
strands of planctus Mariae are thus treated alongside each other and scrutinized from a
different perspective than has been the case in previous scholarship. The literature on
Marian lament is, nevertheless, rather scarce compared to the scholarly interest devoted
to comparable cultural phenomena related to the figure of the Virgin Mary, such as Mar-
ian lyric and Marian imagery in the visual arts.6
5 McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion, 2.

6 Monographs on the entire genre comprise, apart from Sticcaʼs The Planctus Mariae in the
Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages (1988), two rather antiquated sources, Über die Marienklagen.
Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der geistlichen Dichtung in Deutschland (1874) by Schönbach, and
Wechsslerʼs Die romanischen Marienklage. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Dramas im Mittelalter
(1893) on the respective literary and language traditions. Besides that, a number of chapters and
articles exist on Latin as well as vernacular planctus Mariae, most notably Dronke, “Laments of
the Maries,” for the general development of the genre; Otto, “Der ʻPlanctus Mariae,ʼ” Lipphardt,
“Studien zur den Marienklagen” and “Marienklagen und Liturgie,” Henning, “Die lateinische
Sequenz ʻPlanctus ante nesciaʼ“ and De Ros, “Le Planctus Mariae du pseudo-Anselme” on the Latin
planctus; Taylor, “The English Planctus Mariae,” King, “Lament and Elegy in Scriptural Drama,” and
Keiser, “The Middle English Planctus Mariae” on the English tradition; Secor, “The Planctus Mariae
in Provençal Literature” on the French tradition; Mehler, Marienklagen im spätmittelalterlichen
und frühneuzeitlichen Deutschland, and Loewen, “Portrayals of the Vita Christi in the Medieval
German Marienklage” on Marian lament in the German milieu; and Alexiou, “The Lament of the
Virgin in Byzantine Literature and Modern Greek Folk Song,” Tsironis, “The Lament of the Virgin
Mary from Romanos the Melode to George of Nikomediea,” and Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross,”
for the Eastern Marian lament. These texts include also shorter or lengthier quotations from the
primary sources; for the bibliography of medieval lament in general, Marian and other, see Yearley,
“A Bibliography of Planctus in Latin, Provençal, French, German, English, Italian, Catalan, and
Galician-Portuguese from the Time of Bede to the Early Fifteenth Century,” and Bergmannʼs Katalog
der deutschsprachigen geistlichen Spiele und Marienklagen des Mittelalters for Marian lament in
particular. An important contribution to the issue of the generic ambiguity of medieval planctus
represents Stäblein, “Die Schwanenklage: zum Problem Lai-Planctus-Sequenz”; cf. also Grano,
“Planctus Mariae.” Case studies on individual Marian laments also exist, e.g., Engels, “Die Münchner
Marienklage D-MBS Cgm 716,” Schmidtke, Das Füssener Osterspiel und die Füssener Marienklage,
and others, referenced in the above-mentioned publications. Marian laments that form a part of
Passion plays are also treated in publications on this subject; see especially Sticcaʼs “The Literary
Genesis of the Latin Passion Play and the Planctus Mariae.” For other literature on Marian Lament,
see also the notes in other chapters, especially chap. 2.
4 Introduction
In this book, the Marian lament is discussed as a complex cultural form with not
only theological significance, but also distinct social meanings. The religious aspects of
the Marian lament are explored here not for their own sake, but as one of a number of
semantic layers that, alongside the other aspects of the genre, especially its medial and
literary qualities, contribute to the construction of its meaning. Similarly, the literary
qualities of Marian laments, such as the prominent motifs and genesis of the genre, are
discussed as one of several groups of argument, as one piece of many that need to be
inserted into the puzzle to reveal the whole picture. Equally important, in this respect,
are the performative aspects of the production and reception of the laments, namely the
various modes of their presentation: reading silently, aloud or sotto voce, individual or
collective singing, and a dramatic performance of a kind; the level of the active participa-
tion demanded of the recipient; and the intertextual and intermedial character of the
laments. Naturally, all these levels of inquiry ultimately lead to questions of meaning and
pragmatics. For example, what were these texts and performances originally intended
for? What kind of experience did their reception offer to the Christian women and men
who happened to be their primary, or secondary, recipients? How did the reception of
Marian laments shape and transform the inner world of the recipient, and the way they
related to themselves, to others, to God? How did their encounter with laments change
their values, emotions, relationships, and beliefs? These and similar questions are gen-
erally extremely difficult, even impossible to answer. However, this is no reason not to
ask them. The obstacles to providing neat and straightforward answers concerning past
events can rather be seen as an opportunity for improving the argument, searching for
analogies, and recognizing our own, contemporary reality to be equally elusive and
resistant to easy interpretation, despite its relative immediacy. Given that what we call
objective reality, past or present, can only ever be accessed directly by the subjective
mind, these difficulties should come as no surprise. ‘Reality’, thus acquired, is inevita-
bly always to some extent incomplete, fragmentary, and, therefore, open to revision.7
This also pertains to the picture of the Marian lament described in this book: it could
certainly be drawn in very different lines and colours, and even from a completely differ-
ent perspective. I tend to see this noetic precondition not as a limitation, but as a given,
determining the dynamic and open nature of the process of inquiry and the transfer of
knowledge in scholarship.
Origins of Planctus Mariae

The Virgin in Distress Between East and West
The mother-son relationship between the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ is already
emphasized in the canonical gospels of the New Testament through repeated refer-
ence (Matthew 2,11; 2,14; 2,21; 12,47‒9; Mark 3,31‒2; 6,3; Luke 1,26‒56; 2; 8,19‒20;
7 For epistemological limits of (medieval) scholarship, see e.g., chap. “The Myth of Epistemic
Transparency” in Williamsonʼs Knowledge and Its Limits, 11‒18; for the current research methods
applied in the discipline and their limits, see Jones, Kostick, and Oschema, Making the Medieval
Relevant, esp. 31 and 277.
John 2,1‒12; 19,25‒7). In the Western tradition, however, the depiction of Mary at the
foot of the cross was, for a long time, mostly impassive, the Mother of God being repre-
sented as grieving her son’s death solemnly, with stoicism derived from the premonition
of its salvific effect.8 While exceptions existed in the writings of Origen (d. 253), John
Chrysostom (d. 407), and Hrabanus Maurus (780‒856), the imagery of the Virgin col-
lapsing in agony under the cross started to flourish in the West only during the eleventh
century.9 As Sandro Sticca, Stephen J. Shoemaker, and others demonstrate, the situation
in the Christian East was, from the earliest times, substantially different in this respect
from that in the West.10
Probably the most ancient representation of Mary lamenting the death of her son at
the base of the cross comes from the apocryphal gospel Acta Pilati B (“Acts of Pilate”), a
Greek recension of the Gospel of Nicodemus from the fourth century,11 and from a Syriac
lament dated by Brock to the fifth or sixth century, which was performed during the
Syriac liturgy for Holy Saturday.12 In both of these texts, the core situation of the Vir-
gin lamenting the death of her son under the cross is depicted, although still without
much of its affective power and, in the case of the liturgical lament, also rather briefly.
As Shoemaker points out, referring to the Syriac lament, “[Mary] does not weep [in the
lament] herself but instead commands all creatures to do so, ordering the natural world
to respond with outrage at the Crucifixion of her son.”13 Another kontakion (a liturgical
hymn) in the form of a Marian lament was composed in the sixth century by the Syrian
hymnographer Romanos the Melode (d. ca. 556).14 While it can be described, according
to Shoemaker, as comparatively emotional compared to the previous examples, it does
not fit the typical situation of the Marian Lament in its setting: instead of representing
Mary watching her son suspended on the cross, Romanosʼs hymn introduces the reader
or listener to a dialogue between mother and son just before Christ is about to set out on
8 This can be seen especially in the writings of Ambrose of Milan (d. 397), Aurelius Augustinus (d.
430), Alcuin of York (d. 804), Haimo of Auxerren (d. ca. 865), and others; cf. Sticca, Planctus Mariae,
xvi, 20‒21; Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross,” 18‒19; and Fulton, From Judgement to Passion, 208‒9.
9 Fulton, From Judgement to Passion, 215.
10 For the image of the weeping Mary in Eastern tradition, see Sticca, Planctus Mariae, 31‒49, and
especially Tsironis, “Representations of the Virgin,” and Tsironis, “The Lament of the Virgin Mary
from Romanos the Melode to George of Nikomediea.” Further sources on particular compositions to
be found e.g., in Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross.”
12 Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross,” 577. Shoemaker also clarifies that this Syriac lament should
not be confused with another Marian lament previously thought to be of Syrian origin (Shoemaker,
“Mary at the Cross, East and West,” 577‒78). He also corrects Sticca (Planctus Mariae, 35‒37) and
supplements Dronkeʼs (“Laments of the Maries,” 99) and Fultonʼs (538n47) assertions in the issue.
Fulton quotes Dronkeʼs assertion that the Latin Threni, ascribed to Ephraem the Syrian, probably
never had a Syriac or Greek original, adding, however, that she was not able to verify this herself.
Shoemaker quotes Brock to similar ends, who says that there has probably never been a Syriac
original for this text (Brock, “Planctus: Syrische Tradition”).
13 Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross, East and West,” 578.
14 For its modern edition, see Romanos the Melode, Hymnes, 143‒87.
6 Introduction
his journey towards Crucifixion. However, despite preceding its Western counterparts
by several centuries, this hymn already represents Mary as desolate and shedding tears
for the imminent death of her son. Her grief is, nevertheless, alleviated in the course
of their exchange, as Christ consoles his mother from the position of male and divine
authority and by reference to his resurrection. These characteristics are unusual in the
Western laments (although the eschatological perspective is underlined in some of the
Western examples, as will be demonstrated in the following chapters). While Romanosʼs
Marian kontakion is, thus, in many respects similar to the later Western tradition of Mar-
ian lamentation, it does not fully encompass the whole range of its typical features. Most
importantly, Mary does not share her son’s torments in this composition, nor is there
any reference to her participation in his salvific role.15
As well as Romanosʼ kontakion, Shoemaker points to two compositions of Eastern
provenance that bear the closest resemblance to the Western Marian Lament in its most
typical and developed form. The first of these is a short section from the Homily on the
Dormition by Jacob of Sarug (451‒521),16 a Syriac theologian and poet known today
for a host of more than seven hundred verse homilies, or memre, in which the speaker
addresses Christ with a lengthy description of the torments his mother experienced
watching his Crucifixion and burial:
Your mother endured great suffering on your account; every sorrow beset her at your
Crucifixion. How many sighs and tears of grief her eyes shed, when they were prepar-
ing you for burial, and they carried you and placed you in the tomb! What horrors the
mother of mercy beheld at your burial, when the guards at the tomb seized her, lest she
draw near you! She suffered sorrow when she saw you suspended on the cross, and they
pierced your side with a spear on Golgotha, and when the Jews sealed the tomb in which
was lain your living body, life-giving and debt-forgiving.17
Shoemaker sees this emotionally-charged passage from the homily, which served cat-
echetical purposes through the liturgy, as an important precedent for another Eastern
model for the Western Marian Lament, the earliest Byzantine Life of the Virgin.18
Composed most probably in the seventh century, this very first Byzantine-Greek com-
plete biography of the Virgin, attributed to Maximus the Confessor, drew on several
ancient traditional versions of the life of the Mother of God to create an extremely
influential piece of hagiography that served as a template for many Eastern, and later
also Western, renditions of Mary’s life story. In contrast to most of the previously-men-
tioned examples of Eastern Marian lament, in the Life of the Virgin the compassionate
response of the mother to her son’s torments is repeatedly underscored, together with
15 Cf. Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross, East and West,” 577‒78.

16 Sticca, Planctus Mariae, 37‒38; Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross,” 578; cf. also Shoemaker, Ancient
Traditions of the Virgin Maryʼs Dormition and Assumptio, 405.
17 See the Syriac original in Sahdona, S. Martyrii, qui et Sahdona, quae supersunt omnia, 710–11.
Translation in Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition, 409.
18 Modern edition: Maximus the Confessor, Vie de la Vierge; English translation in Maximus the
Confessor, The Life of the Virgin. The original version of the Life has not survived, probably because
it was replaced by its later versions; see Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross, East and West,” 576.
the emphasis on Mary’s participation in Christ’s suffering. Through extensive depictions

of her enormous grief, the Virgin is depicted in the Life as suffering together with her
son: for example, parallels are drawn between Christ’s physical wounds and the mental
wounds afflicting Mary in observing her son’s agony:
Then, O mother of Christ, a sword pierced through your soul, as Simeon told you. Then
the nails that pierced the Lord’s hands pierced your heart. These sufferings overcame
you more than your all-powerful son, for he suffered voluntarily and knew everything
that would come upon him, and so he suffered as much as his authority wished. […] but
you suffered unimaginably, and you were still ignorant of the mystery of the Passion. And
the abundance of the sufferings and the wounds pierced your heart: streams of blood
came down from his incorruptible wounds, but fountains of tears came down from your
eyes.19
The passage is startling not only because of its surprisingly “realistic” detailed evocation
of the unprecedented level of Mary’s suffering, but also because of its explanation as to
how Mary’s torments, as presented here, were actually greater than those of the saviour
himself. The anonymous author of the lament explains this shift by saying that, because
of her humanity, the Mother of God did not possess the divine foresight of her son, and
thus was unable to recognize the salvific outcome of his martyrdom when standing at
the foot of the cross. This emphasis on Mary’s humanity, reflected in her incapacity to
foresee the forthcoming resurrection of her son, foreshadows the later Western accen-
tuation of Christ’s humanity as expressed in the detailed depiction of his suffering in the
passion narratives, of which Marian laments formed an important part. The emphasis
on Christ’s human nature, crucial for the development of the Western passion devotion,
can thus be traced, albeit indirectly, all the way back to early Byzantine Marian laments,
with their insistence on the humanity of his mother and, through her, also of her son.
A significant exegetical trope, this emphasis on the humanity of the Virgin and the
human side of the incarnate Christ represents an important devotional mechanism
which is also found in the Western medieval Marian Lament. When the human existence
of the incarnate Christ in the world is underscored, the divine is rendered more tangible
and closer to the experience of the faithful. It allows the devotee to create an intimate
bond with the deity and, through this, to deepen their understanding of the spiritual
truths taught by the Church. Emotions work in this process as a catechetic tool, facilitat-
ing the absorption of Christian doctrine by paralleling transcendental divine truths with
the everyday experience of the devotees. In the image of a mother who lost her child
for a higher good, the devotee internalizes the dogma of Christ’s salvific death and the
redemption of sins through an emotional model, taken from the catalogue of universal
human experience, which they can embrace and with which they can empathize. The
humanized figures of Christ and Mary are rendered more approachable than the early
medieval hieratic image of the Virgin as the dignified Queen of Heaven (Regina caeli),
or the regal depiction of Christ as Pantokrator (“ruler of all”). In contrast to the earlier
detached and iconic depictions of the two central Christian figures, this mode of pre-
19 See the Old Georgian original in Maximus the Confessor, Vie de la Vierge, 67‒68, 99‒100.
Translation in Maximus the Confessor, Life of the Virgin, 78.
8 Introduction
senting the passion in general, and Marian laments in particular, offered devotees a dif-
ferent perspective on Mary and Christ almost as their peers sharing their earthly tribu-
lations. At the same time, this “closeness” of the Saviour and his mother to the human
experience renders them ideal models for teaching appropriate Christian attitudes and
modes of devotion. Devotees were taught the proper Christian virtues by imitation,
when they witnessed Mary and Christ loving each other even on the threshold of death,
and beyond, Mary feeling deep compassion with her suffering son, and her son enduring
his agony with patience and acceptance. They were encouraged to experience the same
emotions, more directly than solely by reading the devotional writings or listening to the
priest’s sermons.
As we have seen, the seeds of this affective and participatory or interactive mode of
catechesis, grounded in the viewpoint of the Virgin watching her son’s death at the foot
of the cross, were sown in the first centuries after the establishment of the Church in
the Eastern, Byzantine, and Syriac part of the Christian world. But how does this early
Eastern devotional tradition relate to the fully-developed genre of the Marian lament
as we know it in its Latin form, from the beginning of the twelfth century, and in the
vernacular versions appearing in the thirteenth and flourishing in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries? The question is an intricate one, and difficult to answer, as Stephen
J. Shoemaker, Rachel Fulton, and others demonstrate.20 However, the recent study by
Shoemaker presents a number of convincing arguments which, if not conclusive, are
certainly strong evidence for the direct influence of the Eastern Marian lamentations on
their Western counterparts.
* * *
According to Shoemaker, the early Byzantine Life of the Virgin represents “a consider-
ably more advanced expression of affective contemplation of the Passion and Mary’s
compassion than the incipient [Western] forms of such devotion”21 that comprise the
works of Anselm of Lucca (1036‒1086), John of Fécamp (d. 1079), and Anselm of
Canterbury (d. 1109), the immediate precursors of Marian devotion, including the genre
of Marian Lament, that emerged during the twelfth century. While irrefutable evidence
for the direct influence of the Eastern lamentations on the Western tradition cannot be
provided at present, several arguments are worth considering.
Among these is the evidence of the Byzantine influence on Latin Mariology as a
whole, which can be traced back to the eleventh and twelfth centuries as observed by
René Laurentin. According to Laurentin, the main grounds for recognizing the Western
adoption of Eastern Marian devotion were liturgical and paraliturgical performances
which might also comprise the Eastern liturgical laments discussed above.22 The Eastern
origin of Marian lament is claimed by Sandro Sticca, Jaroslav Pelikan, and, especially,
Benedicta Ward, according to whom many of Anselmʼs prayers are, in fact, contingent
20 Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross”; Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 3–4, 216–18.
21 Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross,” 583.
22 Laurentin, Court traité de théologie mariale, 47–50.
on the Eastern monastic liturgical tradition.23 This is a crucial argument, as Anselmian

prayers to the Virgin Mary are considered an important source of the imagery of West-
ern Marian lament by Shoemaker and Fulton.24 Shoemaker, similarly to Ward, contests
this assertion, claiming that Anselmʼs prayers are, in fact, hugely indebted to the Eastern
laments in overall tone as well as in the actual motifs and tropes. Shoemaker relates the
tone of the Western laments especially to the earliest Life of the Virgin, exemplifying the
correspondence in, for example, the following prayer:
Most merciful Lady, what can I say about the fountains that flowed from your most pure
eyes when you saw your only Son before you, bound, beaten, and hurt? What do I know
of the flood that drenched your matchless face, when you beheld your Son, your Lord, and
your God, stretched on the cross without guilt, when the flesh of your flesh was cruelly
butchered by wicked men? How can I judge what sobs troubled your most pure breast
when you heard, “Woman, behold your son,” and the disciple, “Behold, your mother,”
when you received as a son the disciple in place of the master, the servant for the Lord.25
Shoemaker hypothesizes that the direct link between Eastern and Western lament
might have been the contacts between Byzantium and the Venetian church that were
very fervent, especially in the tenth and eleventh centuries. From this period come two
Italo-Greek hymns for the liturgical services of Holy Friday, cited by Shoemaker as evi-
dence that some elements of Byzantine affective devotion to the Passion were known
to westerners even in these earlier times.26 Shoemaker also notes that many promoters
of Western affective piety either came from northern Italy or had some connections
there: Anselm of Canterbury was born in the town of Aosta, John of Fécamp was native
to Ravenna, Anselm of Lucca came from Milan, etc. In addition, Shoemaker mentions the
influence of Greek monasticism in many parts of tenth-century Europe and flourishing
pilgrimage between the Christian East and West in the same period, concluding that
“[Marian affective] piety may have passed from East to West and lain more or less dor-
mant for centuries before [the ] ‘Anselmian transformation.’”27
23 Sticca, Planctus Mariae, 31‒49; Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries, Mary through the Centuries,
127–28; Ward, “Background to the Prayers and Meditations,” 27.
24 Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross”; Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, chap. 4.
25 “Domina mea misericordissima, quos fontes dicam erupisse de pudicissimis oculis, cum
attenderes unicum filium tuum innocentem coram te ligari, flagellari, mactari? Quos fluctus credam
perfudisse piissimum vultum, cum suspiceres eundem filium et deum et dominum tuum in cruce
sine culpa extendi et carnem de carne tua ab impiis crudeliter dissecari? Quibus singultibus
aestimabo purissimum pectus vexatum esse, cum te audires: ʻmulier, ecce filius tuus,ʼ et discipulus:
ʻecce mater tuaʼ? Cum acciperes in filium discipulum pro magistro, servum pro domino?” Anselm of
Canterbury, Oratio 2. Translation in Anselm of Canterbury, The Prayers and Meditations, 96.
26 Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross,” 592.
27 Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross,” 592. Shoemaker mentions also other arguments for the
connections between Eastern and Western church in the given period, namely the connection
between the community of Latin monks on Mount Athos at the same time when the Life of the
Virgin was translated from Greek to Georgian in a nearby monastery, and the relations with
Greek monks cherished by abbot William of Volpiano, whose successor in the position of abbot at
Fécamp monastery was John of Fécamp, an important promoter of the Western affective devotional
tradition.
10 Introduction
Nevertheless, affective depictions of the Virgin under the cross can be found in West-
ern Mariology even before the onset of compassionate modes of devotion in the eleventh
and twelfth centuries. Scant in number, these emotional images of the Crucifixion, and
Mary’s role in it, went against the dominant contemporary “stoic” depiction epitomized
by the assertion of Ambrose, who says of Mary, “I read that she was standing, I do not
read that she was weeping.”28 Against this Ambrosian image of Mary standing emotion-
lessly under the cross, expressed in his exegetical meditations on the renderings of pas-
sion scenes in the Gospels, stood a rather different image presented by Hrabanus Mau-
rus in his meditation Opusculum de passione Domini (Little Work on Christ’s Passion). In
imagery peculiar to the passion discourse of the ninth century, the Abbot of Fulda tells
the story of the Crucifixion from the perspective of Christ as he hung on the cross, devot-
ing a large section of the narrative to the reactions of his mother. These are related in a
surprising narrative twist: not claiming explicitly that the Mother of God grieved when
witnessing the death of her son, Hrabanus leaves it to his reader or listener to decide if it
was actually possible that she would not weep in such a situation. In a series of compel-
ling rhetorical questions, the author asks the addressee of his meditation, in a proleptic
echo of Ambrose: “How therefore was the mother of the Lord standing, and not rather
striking her palms over and over again or falling down dead? What was she doing, how
was she able to stand and to be silent, when she heard all speaking to each other and to
her son? How did she not run to the cross, shouting and wailing, separating her son from
them, or begging with tears that he at the very least take revenge?”29
Here, and elsewhere throughout the tract, Hrabanus covertly suggests that it feels
highly improbable that Mary, in the face of the terrible torments suffered by her son,
would be able to retain the stoic composure attributed to her by Ambrose (“Where is
the mother who is able to see her son hanging from the gibbet and endure it, even if
her son deserved [such a death]?”).30 In a startling reversal, Hrabanus implies the con-
trary, introducing in the course of his narrative several motifs that would, two centu-
ries later, become part of the vocabulary of affective devotion: the dialogue between the
son and his mother (“What would the mother have said to the son, and the son to the
mother, if they had been able then to speak to each other for a longer time?”);31 Mary’s
unrestrained expression of grief, full of sobbing and wailing; her pleas to Christ to let
her die with him and, probably most strikingly, the thirteenth and fourteenth-century
visual image of Mary’s swoon implicit in Hrabanusʼ question, “How then was John able
to support [Mary], lest she fall, when he himself was overcome with the greatest grief?”32
Apparently, the hieratic, impassive representation of Mary watching her son’s death
unemotionally from the foot of the cross was not as monolithic in the early-medieval
Western Marian tradition as it might seem at first glance.
28 Ambrose, De obitu Valentiniani consolatio, para. 39.

29 Hrabanus, Opusculum de passione Domini, chap. 6.
The question remains, nevertheless, how these shaded references to Mary’s com-
passionate and grieving response to her son’s suffering and death developed into the
expressive and moving forms of passion devotion, including the Marian (and Magda-
lenian) laments, of the twelfth, and especially the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth
centuries. According to Rachel Fulton, the change in the devotional paradigm consisted
in substantial reframing of several aspects of early medieval devotion to the crucified
Christ and the role of his mother in his salvific death. One of the early medieval concepts
that needed to be rethought so that the image of the grieving Mary could be admitted,
was the idea of appropriate as opposed to inappropriate reasons for mourning. In early
medieval and patristic literature, excessive mourning for the dead was considered incon-
sistent with a Christian stance, as it seemed to deny (at least implicitly) the benefits of
God’s mercy, granted to all who believed in Christ after their death.33 Therefore, while it
was acceptable to mourn the dead because of their sins, excessive lamentation for the
loss of loved ones, as represented in the high-medieval Marian laments, would appear
unseemly, even un-Christian to the Church fathers in the tenth and previous centuries.
Fulton persuasively demonstrates that the roots of the paradigmatic shift towards Mary
weeping under the cross, rather than standing there impassively, can be found in Mar-
ian prayers for intercession from the eleventh century. Here, surprisingly, it is not so
much the Virgin, but first of all the devotee her/himself, i.e., the lyrical subject of the
prayer, who feels grief and compassion for the Virgin as (s)he imagines her watching
her son’s death. In some of these prayers, Fulton argues, Christ tended to be perceived
more as an intransigent judge than as a journey to salvation (cf. e.g., 2 Corinthians 5,10),
arousing terror instead of consolation in the hearts of the praying faithful.34 As in the
prayer assigned in the twelfth century to Anselm of Canterbury but probably of earlier
origin, the lyrical “I” turns its sight towards the Virgin to ask for her intercession with
her uncompromising son, terrible in his judgemental appearance and ready to weigh the
sins of his flock: “O most sweet and holy ever-virgin Mary, behold, I stand grieving before
the face of your piety, confounded beyond measure by the abominations of my sins [...].
Therefore weeping and wailing I beseech you, lady, […] do not turn your face from me,
but rather look and see with what a grave wound I have been stricken […].”35
The vocabulary used in this prayer to describe the supplicant’s state of mind bears
striking similarities to the diction of later Marian laments and other narratives repre-
senting Mary at the foot of the cross from the twelfth century onwards. The only differ-
ence is that we are presented with a sort of inverted image of the situation of the Marian
lament: instead of a weeping Mary watching the suffering of her son on the cross, we
have here a weeping devotee watched by Mary herself standing under the cross. The
cross, however, is equally important in both, as is apparent in another prayer asking for
Mary’s intercession that uncovers further analogies between these Marian prayers and
33 On this topic, see, e.g., chap. “Ancient Laments: Sexuality, Rage and Doubt” in Lansing, Passion
and Order, 99‒122.
34 Fulton, From Judgement to Passion, 218‒32.
35 “Oratio de sancta Maria [O dulcissima et sanctissima uirgo semper Maria, ecce adsto],” in Barré,
Prières anciennes, 165‒6 (emphasis author’s); cf. Fulton, From Judgement to Passion, 540n72.
12 Introduction
the laments. In another prayer, written by Maurilius of Rouen (ca. 1000‒1067), Arch-
bishop of Rouen, the devotee asks the Virgin to have pity on her similar to what she felt
for Christ when she saw him hanging on the cross: “To whom should I, dying, offer my
wound? To whom should I go, in whose presence should I lament my grief? [...] And if for
that innocent crucified one a sword pierced through your soul, how are you able, O lady,
to contain yourself over your orphans dying in sin, how are you able to restrain your
maternal weeping and tears?”36 Using the word pupillis (“orphan”), the devotee explic-
itly equates her/himself with Mary’s son, counting herself as her child in a reference to
her title as the Mother of all Mankind.37 As Fulton observes, “her compassion for [Christ,
…] is the model for her compassion for those who pray to her.”38
This concept of compassion was further elaborated by Anselm, Bishop of Lucca,
spiritual adviser to Duchess Matilda of Tuscany, for whom he wrote a series of affective
meditations or prayers to the Virgin. In these, he instructs Matilda—probably for the
first time in the history of the Western tradition of Marian devotion—not only to ask
Mary for intercession and to meditate on her suffering from a distance as the observing
“Brechtian” spectator,39 but to step into the image, so to speak, and empathize with the
Virgin directly (“suffering with you I may console you”).40 And not just that: in a dis-
tinctly “Stanislavskian” manner,41 Matilda is encouraged by Anselm to immerse herself
in the situation as if she were present at the Crucifixion, and to imitate the Mother of
God in her compassion and grief for her dying son, in order to seek forgiveness for her
sins: “And yet again, if this is still not enough to outweigh the great heap of my misdeeds,
I look (expecto) to that time when you will come to the cross of your Son, that when you
and the holy women are given over to John’s custody, suffering with you (compaciens) I
may console you in your immense grief, until you forgive me and pardon my iniquities.”42
This performative gesture of adopting Mary’s emotional response to Christ’s suffering
36 “Oratio Maurilii episcopi rothomagensis ad sanctam Mariam [Singularis meriti sola sine
exemplo mater],” in Barré, Prières anciennes, 184.
37 Cf. e.g., Fastiggi, “Mary in the Work of Redemption,” 304.
39 The Brechtian type of performance refers to an anti-illusive, presentational mode of the
construction of meaning in which the spectator is not supposed to become immersed, so to speak,
in the represented action, but to reflect on it from an emotional distance as a “bystander,” as Bertolt
Brecht, German theatre director, has it in his first formulation of this issue in his seminal article
“The Street Scene”; see Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 121‒29.
40 “compaciens inmenso dolori consoler te […].” Anselm of Lucca, “Oratio venerabilis Anselmi
episcopi ad sanctam Mariam,” 231.
41 In contrast to the Brechtian mode of representation, in performance as envisaged by Konstantin
Stanislavski, Russian theatremaker and theoretician, the ultimate goal and dominant mode of
spectatorial reception is that of the dramatic illusion and emotional immersion in the dramatic
narrative; cf. Benedetti, Stanislavski: An Introduction.
42 “Quodsi adhuc ad malorum meorum cumul est parum, expecto donec venias ad crucem filii tui,
ut cum Iohanne custode et sanctis mulieribus vociferetur tecum, et compaciens inmenso dolori
consoler te donec ignoscas mihi et iniquitates meas condones.” Anselm of Lucca, “Oratio venerabilis
Anselmi episcopi ad sanctam Mariam,” 231. Translation in Fulton, From Judgement to Passion, 226.
would then be expanded in the writings of John of Fécamp, Anselm of Canterbury, and
other theologians and mystics, to create a completely new devotional idiom. Usually
called affective prayers and meditations, these texts were conceived as part of a larger
category of affective piety, a conglomerate of images, texts, devotional practises, sets of
values and beliefs, modes of behaviour, etc., woven around the idea of the imitatio Mar-
iae (imitation of the Virgin Mary), characterized by adoption of the emotional response
of the Virgin to the horrific death of her son on the cross, in a similar way to Anselmʼs
prayers for Matilda.
The connections between affective devotional texts and Marian Lament are multiple:
genealogic, formal, and functional, as well as socio-pragmatic. Sarah McNamer, in her
study of Marian compassion and affective devotion, counts Marian laments among the
standard representatives of this broad generic category. Of course, not all extant medi
eval texts labelled as Marian laments can be classified as representatives of affective
devotion; some of the liturgical and paraliturgical compositions would be especially dif-
ficult to squeeze into this category without gross distortion, though they undoubtedly
share many of its characteristic features. However, if we understand medieval genres not
as a normative set of clear-cut categories, but rather as an interconnected web marking
strong and weak traits, or generic “centres” and “peripheries,” facilitating orientation in
the labyrinthine landscape of medieval literature, it does not seem altogether without
justification to discuss Marian laments in the context of affective devotional writing.43
The following characteristics of affective meditations and prayers, described by McNa-
mer, could be applied more or less accurately to most of the texts that have been tagged
in previous scholarship as planctus Mariae; they: “insist on imaginative performance as
a primary means of producing emotion, casting the reader as eyewitness to the events
of the Passion”; “portray Christ not as King or Lord but as ‘Jesu’: a pitiable human victim
who stoops under the weight of the cross”; elicit affective response through the “power
of visual detail”; structure the way of seeing the scene of Crucifixion not primarily as a
triumph over death, but as a moment of utter pain and suffering “by giving the text’s
performer the eyes of a lover,” mother, and sponsa Christi; create a sense of participa-
tion, often through the use of the first-person singular, present tense, and; have a “driv-
ing rhythm that has profound somatic effects.”44 These general characteristics obviously
apply to actual extant laments to a varying degree (actual examples will be discussed
in the following chapters). With regard to the potential limitations of this approach, it
seems nevertheless fruitful to consider Marian laments in the context, among several
43 That medieval genres are a troublesome category is without question, considering the
amount of scholarly work devoted to issues related to the various aspects of the debate. For an
introduction to the discussion in relation to the larger categories of medieval lyric, narrative texts,
and drama, see Paden, Medieval Lyric, Davenport, Medieval Narrative, and Dane and Morgan, Gale
Researcher Guide for: The Languages, Codes, and Genres of Medieval Theatre, respectively. For the
nonhierarchical, interconnected structure as an epistemological tool, see the concept of rhizome
e.g., in the eponymous chapter of Adkins, Deleuze and Guattariʼs A Thousand Plateaus, 22‒33; for
the concept of cultural centre and periphery, see Lotman, Universe of the Mind, 127‒42.
14 Introduction
others, of affective devotion in the Passion as it started developing in Western Europe

towards the end of the eleventh and in the twelfth century.45
One reason for the existence of such links could be the chronological overlap
between affective devotion and the independent Marian Lament. It is noteworthy that
the upsurge of the tradition of affective writing coincides with the appearance of the
first known examples of Marian laments, namely Planctus ante nescia (“Not having
known grief before”) and Flete, fideles animae (“Weep, faithful souls”), both first extant
in manuscripts from the twelfth century.46 Similarly, the beginnings of affective writing
can be traced to the twelfth-century compositions of John of Fécampʼs Libellus de scrip-
turis et verbis patrum (The Little Book of Writings and Words of the Fathers, ca. 1060)
addressed to Agnes of Poitou and an unknown nun; Marian prayers by Anselm of Can-
terbury sent first to the recluse Adelaide (ca. 1081) and later, expanded substantially,
to Matilda of Tuscany (ca. 1104), also addressee of the poems of the earlier Anselm of
Lucca;47 meditations on the Passion as a part of the De institutione inclusarum (Rule of
Life for a Recluse, c. (1160‒162) by Aelred of Rievaulx (1110‒1167), or; the passion sec-
tion of De perfectione vitae ad sorores (On the Perfection of Life, Addressed to Sisters, ca.
1260), written by Bonaventure (1221‒1274) for a convent of Poor Clares.48
Flourishing from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, first in Latin and later in ver-
naculars, Marian laments tend to appear in two distinct forms as either more or less
independent compositions, or as a part of larger textual wholes. The former can be
exemplified firstly by Marian devotional lyric meant for silent reading or declama-
tion, such as the Latin lament of Italian origin, Planctus magistrae doloris (Lament of
the Teacher of Pain), or for singing, such as the famous thirteenth-century hymn Stabat
mater by Franciscan friar Jacopone da Todi, and secondly by Marian laments intended
for public preaching (homilies, verse sermons) and private devotion (affective writings
in prose or verse). As for the latter, as previously mentioned, the narrative situation of
Mary weeping at the foot of the cross can be found in many medieval religious texts
45 This classification does not contradict Sandro Sticcaʼs assessment of Marian Lament and its
roots and generic characteristics as presented in his The Planctus Mariae in the Dramatic Tradition
of the Middle Ages. In the chap. “Marian Exegesis: Meditation and Maternity” and in chaps. 6 and 7
about the relation between planctus Mariae and the medieval compassio, Sticca actually argues for
the same before the invention of the term affective devotion, see n5 and Sticca, The Planctus Mariae
in the Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages, 50‒58, 71‒117.
46 Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 1:496. In this regard, it is nevertheless necessary to
differentiate clearly between planctus Mariae as a specific type of medieval lament, and planctus
as a more general category representing any instance of mourning, be it for a friend, consort, or a
patron. These non-Marian types of planctus have generally no relation to the affective devotion and
its textual or performative tradition. For medieval lament in general, see e.g., Yearley, “The Medieval
Latin Planctus as a Genre”; and chapter “Planctus” in Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages,
119‒40.
47 According to Fulton, however, Anselm of Canterbury originally wrote his Marian prayers not
for a woman, but for his brothers in the monastery at Bec and for his adviser Gundulf, bishop of
Rochester, see Fulton, From Judgement to Passion, 228.
48 Cf. McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion, 60.
of various kinds: affective meditations on the Passion, verse and prose alike, as well as
liturgical scripts, especially for the liturgy of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, the
dramaturgy of which corresponds most closely to the situation of the Marian lament in
the historical chronology of the Passion. Moreover, a Marian lament forms part of most
extant Passion plays as a more or less developed dramatic situation comprising either
just Mary herself or, more often, Mary accompanied by John the Evangelist and Jesus
Christ in speaking roles. This formal variety is furthermore reinforced by the polyglos-
sia of the genre which encompasses a considerable number of compositions written in
Latin, but which also proliferated in vernaculars, especially in French, Italian, Catalan,
German, Spanish, English, Hungarian, and Czech literary traditions.
Is there, in such profound formal variety, something more substantial connecting all
the individual representatives of the genre than just a handful of the most basic narra-
tive and formal common denominators? Or, to put it differently, can a meaningful per-
spective be found that would allow us to talk about the genre in a different way than
tracing its roots, sorting the actual compositions into clearly-defined subcategories and
listing their common and exceptional features? By no means designating these catego-
ries as unimportant, I would like to offer a slightly different perspective from which to
assess individual instances of texts commonly understood as Marian laments than has
previously been applied to the genre. Rather than executing the standard textual and
literary analysis, my aim here is to explore the texts I am concerned with from three
distinct, yet overlapping perspectives: those of the history of gender, the social history of
emotions, and medial theory.
Planctus Mariae as an Inner Drama: Methodology

Sarah McNamer has convincingly demonstrated that affective meditations and prayers
on Christ’s suffering, and Mary’s share in it, represent a deeply gendered viewpoint of
this central Christian narrative. Composed from the beginning for women and often
by women, McNamer claims, the tradition of affective writing largely contributed to
the constitution of the feeling of compassion as a devotional mechanism with distinctly
feminine connotations. In affective meditations on the Passion, Christ’s suffering is pre-
sented as if observed through the eyes of a female—the Mother of God, Mary Magdalene,
or a feminized man, John the Evangelist—and, consequently, their emotional response
to the situation is conceptualized by the audience in the process of reading as a princi-
pally feminine response. Enabling the reader to see the moment of the Crucifixion “like
a woman,” the tradition of compassionate writing thus encourages the devotee also to
feel like a woman. Similarly, as Mary shared the torments of her son in her own body and
mind, as Anselm and others have it, the devotee is supposed to share Mary’s perspec-
tive on, and reactions to, these torments. In opposition to Rachel Fulton,49 McNamer
interprets affective tradition as substantially grounded in the experience and demands
of religious women, especially nuns, recluses, and pious aristocrats. Narratives invoking
deep feelings of love and compassion for the suffering Christ were, for these women,

16 Introduction
not simply escapist literature or religious romance with erotic undertones. They offered
actual mechanisms through which religious women were able to secure their position
in society as verae sponsae Christi, real brides of Christ. Feelings of love and compassion
thus represented for them not just private emotions, but emotions externalized in order
to have a certain effect in their social reality, legitimizing them as women consecrated to
God even on legal grounds.50
At the same time, McNamer claims that it was by no means just women who ben-
efited from affective meditation while reading prose and verse narratives of the Passion,
including the Marian laments. Although representing compassion with the suffering
Christ as a distinctly feminine emotional stance, affective writing counted men among
its recipients, too, as they also read, heard, and performed these texts for various pur-
poses and in various contexts. As producers of these texts, they could be their initiators
and sole authors, as well as co-authors collaborating on their production with religious
women. McNamer argues that the latter was the case with the pseudo-Bonaventuran
Meditationes vitae Christi (Meditations on the Life of Christ),51 and I suggest in Chapter
Four that it might have been the case with the Marian and Magdalenian lament in the
Bohemian Passional of Abbess Kunigunde. Men could also be the recipients of these texts,
meditating on them during their moments of personal devotion or listening to them as
they were read aloud in communal worship. Last but not least, it was probably male
clerics who most often performed the liturgical and paraliturgical laments and preached
them as homilies or verse sermons. Given the manifold opportunities for males to
encounter Marian laments, it would be preposterous to conceive of the genre as aimed
solely at female readers, listeners, and spectators. It seems more sensible to view the
genre as underscoring the medieval concept of male and female gender in various ways
and for different purposes. Drawing on the concept of gender as conceived by Judith
Butler, especially in her Gender Trouble, I do not identify medieval notions of femininity
and masculinity as stable categories, not even from the synchronic perspective, but see
them rather as dynamic entities, constantly constructed and re-constructed in the pro-
cess of communication between individuals, social groups, and institutions.52 Since the
production and reception of texts was one of the important communication channels
in the high and later Middle Ages, the period during which Marian lament flourished,
gendered genre as it was, it must have inevitably had an influence on the performative
construction of male and female gender in its time as described by Butler.
In the following chapters I will discuss how the performative construction of gender
categories can occur alongside or in opposition to dominant contemporary norms, effec-
tuating either affirmative or subversive responses to these norms. For example, perfor-
mance of the liturgical or paraliturgical lament of the Mother of God by a male cleric
had the potential to cement, rather than subvert, the dominant patriarchal patterns of
religious power, according to which women could not give sacraments and often had
50 McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion, 25‒57.

52 Butler, Gender Trouble, 40.
only mediated access to the divine through the spiritual guidance of male clerics. By
contrast, Nicholas Loveʼs Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (ca. 1400) or laments
such as the Magdalenian planctus in the Bohemian The Manuscript of Hradec Králové
(fourteenth century), present an unusually subverted image of the normative gender
categories, introducing an inverted character of, respectively, John the Evangelist as a
feminized man and Mary Magdalene as a masculinized woman. In these compositions,
the contours of what male and female usually stand for in medieval culture fade and
blend into each other to create a transitory, liminal image of both and, at the same time,
neither one nor the other. What the effect of such depictions of male and female gender
was on its target audience is not possible to assess generally, but it is necessary to place
these texts into their historical and cultural context, as will be done in Chapter Four for
the corpus of Latin, Old Czech, and German laments of Bohemian origin, in order to con-
struct hypotheses about their pragmatics and reception.
One way or another, the gender perspective is vital for the understanding of some
fundamental characteristics of Marian laments, especially their emphasis on the com-
passionate response of the Virgin, and consequently of their audience, to the suffering
of the crucified Christ. Tracing the roots of medieval compassion as it was cultivated in
the tradition of affective writing and devotion, Sarah McNamer describes it as “a his-
torically contingent, ideologically charged, and performatively constituted emotion—
and one that was […] insistently gendered as feminine.”53 That is not to say that any
expression of compassio in medieval culture was charged, or should be understood, as
an exclusively feminine emotional response; the argument, rather, is that the distinctly
feminine response to Christ’s suffering described in eleventh- and twelfth-century writ-
ing — that of loving compassion — brought about a substantial change in the current
emotional paradigm, comprising the legitimization of excessive lamentation over the
death of Christ as an accepted mental, and indeed, devotional, stance.54 Beyond the
scope of mere legitimization, compassion came to be institutionalized through affective
devotional practises as a model response to Christ’s Passion, worth following not only
by women, but also by men. Thus, female emotion was rendered universal in a strik-
ing act of reframing the contemporary cultural norm, as Caroline Bynum meticulously
explains in her seminal book Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food
to Medieval Women (1987). The commonplace medieval association of femininity with
the flesh, and masculinity with the soul, was transgressed in passion writing, Bynum
argues, especially in the devotional practise called imitatio Christi (imitation of Christ).
In the image of Christ’s terribly lacerated physical body representing a passage to spiri-

54 Cf. Fultonʼs shaded suggestion that while the development of the Passion devotion is traditionally
understood as fuelled by the change in the image of crucified Christ from impassioned redeemer
to suffering human, only followed by the change in the depiction of Mary as the compassionate
weeping witness of his Crucifixion, an opposite view is, in fact, also relevant. In that case, the new
tendency in depicting grieving Mary could be instrumental to, not a consequence of, the change in
the contemporary devotional paradigm, paving the way to the development of the new mode of
the Passion devotion through the transformed image of the Virgin, not that of Christ; Fulton, From
Judgement to Passion, 214.
18 Introduction
tual truths about God’s infinite love of man and the redemption of sins, the sharp divide
between the material and spiritual was diminished, paving the way for a substantial
exegetical shift. The tradition of affective writing gives rise to a new interpretation of the
dichotomy of the human and the divine, the material and the spiritual, based on the cor-
poreal understanding of femininity paralleled with the incarnation of God in the world
in the person of Jesus Christ. This analogy makes female corporeality a universal value, a
symbol of the way in which all humankind is perceived as akin to God in his fleshly, his-
torical existence as the “Word made Flesh” (John 1,14).55 In Bynum’s words, “Subsum-
ing the male/female dichotomy into the more cosmic dichotomy divine/human, women
saw themselves as the symbol for all humanity.”56 What Bynum claims for mystical or
affective writing could also be applied to the Marian Lament in particular, insofar as the
female experience, a specific emotional response to the Passion in this case, is presented
as a model for a universal Christian stance towards the suffering Saviour and a prec-
edent for an array of devotional practises based on this emotion.
This change of the devotional paradigm was far-reaching, comprising rethinking of
important cultural constants such as the aforementioned understanding of weeping for
someone’s death as being inappropriate. In the Marian Lament, Mary sheds streams of
tears at the sight of the mutilated body of her son, and the authors of affective med-
itations explain, in contradiction with existing cultural practise, that it should not be
understood as a lack of faith, but rather as an excess thereof. As Brian Patrick McGuire
points out, the proper response to the decease of a loved one, before the affective shift,
lay not so much in grieving for the loss as in rejoicing in the acceptance of the person
to God’s grace and in the hope for her salvation.57 In the mid-twelfth century, however,
a different attitude is to be found in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) and
Aelred of Rievaulx who express, over the death of their beloved, a feeling of joy from
the eternal happiness awaiting the deceased in heaven mingled with deep remorse over
being deprived of their physical presence. Rachel Fulton argues that this is, in fact, an
attitude similar to the one Mary adopts at the foot of the cross, for instance, in Aelredʼs
De institutione inclusarum.58 In this, Aelred explains to his sister the beneficial spiritual
effect of weeping over the suffering of her Lord in the following words: “Meditation will
arouse the affections, the affections will give birth to desire, desire will stir up tears so
that your tears may be bread for you day and night until you appear in his sight and say
to him what is written in the Song of Songs: ‘My Beloved is mine, and I am hisʼ [Song of
Songs 2,16].”59 The tears she should shed are apparently “good tears” (McGuire) as they
55 For the idea of man created in God’s likeness, see e.g., Paul, Philippians 2,5; I Cor. 15,49; II Cor.
4,4; cf. also Augustine, Trinity 2.35 et passim.
56 Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 263.
57 McGuire, The Difficult Saint, 135‒39.
58 Fulton, From Judgement to Passion, 424‒25.
59 “meditatio affectum exerceat, affectus desiderium pariat, lacrymas desiderium excitet: ut sint
lacrymae tuae panes die ac nocte, donec appareas in conspectu ejus, et suscipiaris ab amplexibus
ejus, dicasque illud, quod in Canticis scriptum est, ʻDlectus meus mihi, et ego illiʼ.” Aelred, De institutis
inclusarum, paragr. 78. Translation in Aelred, “A Rule of Life for a Recluse,” 102. For a detailed discussion
bring closeness to Christ in this world before the final union of the recluse with her
Bridegroom in eternity. Elsewhere, Aelred defends weeping as an acceptable expres-
sion of mourning with reference to the fact that Christ himself wept for the loss of Laza-
rus: “Yet the tears you shed over the death of your friend excuse us, Lord Jesus, for they
express our affection and give us a glimpse of your charity. You took on, Lord, the attach-
ment of our weakness (nostrae infirmitatis affectum) but only when you wished it, and
were also able not to weep.”60
Aelredʼs narrative underlines the importance of affection (affectus) in passion devo-
tion as a means of fostering both spiritual and physical attachment to the crucified
Christ, a crucial attitude which a woman consecrated to Christ should adopt. In cultivat-
ing love for the embodied Christ (amor carnalis Christi) through affective meditation,
Aelred explains, the devotee cultivates her desire to be unified with him. This desire
for unity was crucial for the recluse, or any nun, as a means by which she could prove
herself to be vera sponsa Christi, a true bride of Christ. As Aelred indicates above, and as
McNamer explains in detail, the betrothal of the bride to her lover-Christ was regarded
as principally unaccomplished and unachievable in this world and the nun or anchoress
was thus under constant pressure to defend her consecrated status. One means of doing
so was the ostentatious performance of her desire for union with her spouse as mani-
fested in the expression of her affection for him.61 A primary model for the affectionate
response to Christ’s Passion in the writings of Aelred and others was, unsurprisingly, the
Virgin Mary as the one who bore Christ in her womb and shared, in the words of Wil-
liam of Newburgh (1136‒1198), “all of the sufferings of her most sweet son through her
maternal affection (per maternum affectum).”62 The image of Mary weeping at the base
of the cross can be seen from this viewpoint not only as a powerful narrative scene rep-
resenting an important moment in the history of salvation, but as an “emotion script”
which, when realized in performance, helps the devotee conceptualize the truths of the
faith and interiorize them through a set of actual devotional practises.63
Examining the Marian lament from this viewpoint, I make use of the discourse
developed within the strand of cultural studies called “history,” or rather histories, “of
emotions,” that has developed over the past three decades to widen research into the
past by an array of questions asking how people felt about themselves, and about them-
selves in the world, in previous centuries. In accordance with current scholarship, I see
on Aelredʼs explanation of the benefits of the grieving response to Christ’s suffering, including its
analogy with mourning a dead friend, see Fulton, From Judgement to Passion, 417‒25, esp. 421.
Here and throughout, the New King James Version of the Bible is quoted for Biblical references.
60 “Sed excusant nos tuae lacrymae, Domine Jesu, quas in morte amici tui fudisti, exprimentes
quidem nostram affectionem; sed tuam insinuantes charitatem. Induisti, Domine, nostrae
infirmitatis affectum, sed quando voluisti: ideo et non flere potuisti.” Aelred, “De speculo caritatis,”
bk. 1, chap. 34. Translation in Aelred, The Mirror of Charity, 157.
62 William, Explanatio, pt. 3. Translation in Fulton, From Judgement to Passion, 428.
63 The term was developed by Sylvan Tomkins in “Script Theory: Differential Magnification of
Affects,” and elaborated by Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling.
20 Introduction
emotions in this book as “historically shaped sociocultural constructions more than […]
personal possessions” and as “processual events tied fundamentally to other domains
of culture.”64 The acknowledgment of emotions as an important cultural force in the
development of medieval thinking brings with it recognition of their role in the constitu-
tion, maintenance, questioning, and destabilization of medieval social institutions and
hierarchies. As McNamer indicates in her discussion of affective meditation in the high
and later Middle Ages, emotions could perform various social functions, from allowing
consecrated women to legalize their position of sponsae Christi to “reinforcing struc-
tures of subordination” in the conflicted fifteenth-century ecclesia, or exposing the ter-
rible consequences of violence inflicted and legitimized by ruling powers.65 The notion
of an emotion script can be extremely useful in discussing these phenomena if under-
stood broadly as a prescription for the performance of what could be called “emotional
norms.” These norms function as building-blocks in the establishment of communities
as they accommodate the feelings of individual members of the group to generally-
accepted norms. In this way, emotional norms are represented and disseminated, as
well as contested, in activities performed collectively, or even individually, by the mem-
bers of the group. The performance of emotion scripts can thus be seen as a crucial
mechanism for the establishment of so-called “emotional communities,” a term coined
by Barbara H. Rosenwein and developed by other scholars, especially Bronwyn Reddan,
in her research into emotions and gender in seventeenth-century French literature.66
Gathering people around shared emotions and values expressed in ways prescribed by
the emotion scripts, emotional communities form a basis for the more broadly defined
“social communities” presupposing, as articulated by Foucault, that emotions represent
“the place in which the most minute and local social practises are linked up with the
large scale organization of power.”67 That is to say that social hierarchies should not be
seen exclusively as the product of a one-way channel of power imposed by dominant
institutions on passive articles, as it were, located on the lower levels of the social ladder.
On the contrary, from the Foucaultian perspective, (medieval) society is understood as
a web of continuous exchanges of values, norms, and practises between its members. In
such a dynamic system, paradigm changes do not tend to emerge from a single source,
but rather as the result of a variety of different causes and reactions to them. Among
these causes can be counted normative documents, such as foundation documents and
collections of laws, as well as non-normative texts and acts, such as the performance
of local customs, the adoption of new cultural forms, or certain changes in devotional
praxis. An ostensibly personal and private devotional form, such as the veneration of
64 Middleton, “Emotional Style,” 187. For further reading on the history of medieval emotions and
their understanding as socio-cultural instruments, see especially Akestam, Engwall, Kihlman, and
Förnegrad, Tears, Sighs and Laughter; Broomhall, Ordering Emotions in Europe; and Kasten and
Jaeger, Codierungen von Emotionen im Mittelalter.
66 Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods of the History of Emotions”; Reddan, Love, Power, and
Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales, 14‒21.
67 Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 111.
the Virgin Mary desperately weeping for her dying son can, by this reasoning, become a
decisive cultural agent in the performative constitution of a social community such as,
for example, a monastic community. This will be illustrated in Chapter Four, in the case
study of the Benedictine nunnery of St. George at Prague Castle in the first half of the
fourteenth century.
The history of emotions is thus, alongside the gender perspective, an important the-
oretical paradigm framing the discussion of the genre of Marian lament in this book as
not only an aesthetic, but also a socio-cultural phenomenon. One further important per-
spective from which to consider the genre, already hinted at above, can be introduced
with the assertion of Sarah McNamer who, adopting the socio-anthropological approach
to affective writing, says that these texts had “practical work to do: to teach their read-
ers, through iterative affective performance, how to feel.”68 The word “performance” is
crucial here, drawing attention to the fact that emotion becomes “social” only once it is
externalized and can be thus shared among a number of people, the community. The
materialization of emotion in and through performance is crucial for the emotion to
become more than an evanescent singularity trapped in the cage of the individual mind
—to become a socio-cultural force. It is, however, crucial to explain what is meant here
by “performance.”
I do not use the word in the general sense of “execution of an action,” or in the the-
atrical context as “the action of representing a character in a play,” nor more broadly
as “a public presentation or exhibition.”69 I use it as a distinct theoretical concept with
a long discursive history developed by many scholars from different fields of humani-
ties such as linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and the-
atre studies. In my use of the concept I draw mostly from the linguistic theories of J.
L. Austin, further elaborated by Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida, from the cultural/
anthropological approach promoted by Erving Goffman, Victor Turner and Richard
Schechner, and from the theatre-oriented, eclectic work of Erika Fischer-Lichte.70 Based
on research by these and other scholars, performance is in this book understood as a
“communicative behaviour” (Goffman) governed by conventions and rules (Huizinga),71
of which it is also a constituent part (Butler), and as a “social drama” (Goffman) in
which each person becomes a “social actor” on the stage of life, displaying and explain-
ing her- or himself through the adoption of a series of different roles. This tendency
to role-playing represents, according to Russian actor, director, and theoretician Niko-

69 Merriam Webster, 920.
70 Cf. especially Austin, How to Do Things With Words; Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender
Constitution”; Derrida, Limited Inc; Goffman, The Presentation of Self; Turner, The Anthropology of
Performance; Schechner, Performance Theory; and Fischer-Lichte, Performativität. For the overview
of various definitions of the concept of performance, see e.g., Shepherd, The Cambridge Introduction
to Performance Theory; for philosophical and epistemological features of the term, see McKenzie,
Perform or Else.
71 Huizinga, Homo Ludens; see also the critique and extension of Huizingaʼs concept especially in
Caillois, Man, Play, and Games.
22 Introduction
lai Evreinov, a constitutive element of human nature, an anthropological constant that

exposes human existence as performative-bound — and ultimately playful.72 A concept
grounded in the anthropological strand of performance theory that hugely informs my
study of Marian Lament is that of “liminality,” or “in-between-ness,” coined by Arnold
van Gennep and elaborated by Victor Turner to become one of the most universally
employed tools of cultural analysis. I employ it here not in its original sense, in which
it pertained exclusively to the various rites de passage performed by primordial soci-
eties, but in its more recent form as a universal term denoting the ephemeral states
“betwixt and between” the standard discursive structures of a given culture. As such,
the term draws attention to the moments of destabilization of the existing meanings in
the cultural matrix, in which a “void” opens in the normative order for the emergence
of new meanings, even new social realities,73 as will be discussed later in relation to the
performative constitution of the social role of vera sponsa, the Bride of Christ. Last but
not least, and vital for the argument of this book, is the understanding of performance
as an “embodied enactment of cultural forces,”74 in which meaning is articulated and
transferred not between immaterial human minds, but between “embodied minds,”75
for which the intellectual and material order of existence are not two separate uni-
verses, but two sides of one coin.
According with this phenomenological approach to the cultural research, I see cogni-
tion and communication as deeply embedded in and determined by the corporeal level
of human existence in the world, this determination having various consequences. One
of them is that all human communication necessarily occurs as an interaction of mate-
rial bodies with other bodies and/or objects in a three-dimensional space.76 The com-
munication process is inevitably shaped by the materiality of the bodies and objects
taking part in it, underlining the importance of such physical determinants as oriented
spatiality (the binaries of “up” and “down,” “right” and “left,” “behind” and “in front
of,” etc.); sonority as a quality closely related to spatiality (as voice and noise spread
through the space based on physical givens); visuality as the dominant aspect of the
materialized communication; olfactory impulses transmitted to human senses from the
surrounding environment as well as from the individual body; and haptic qualities of
the material world, including human bodies. Equally important is the fact that these
material determinants of communication are by no means static, but are set in action, so
to speak, with the start of the communication process, partaking in the constitution of
meaning through their mutual interaction. It is the moving bodies of the subject(s) and
72 Evreinov, “Apologija teatralʼnosti.”

73 Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, 21; cf. the chap. “Liminality and Communitas” in Turner, The
Ritual Process, 94‒130; and Turner, “Liminality and the Performative Genres.”
74 McKenzie, Perform or Else, 8.
75 For an introduction to the vast literature of the concept of the embodied mind, see Lakoff and
Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, The Embodied Mind.
76 See a complex eclectic approach to the issue in Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, The Embodied
Mind; a comprehensive theory in Johnson, The Body in the Mind; and an example of its applications
on variegated material in Frank, Dirven, Ziemke, and Bernárdez, Body, Language, and Mind: Volume 2.
object(s) of the communication that change a previously inanimate scene into a “the-
atre of communication,” since it is motion that creates meaningful relations between the
individual elements of the three-dimensional communication process. In other words,
when a nun reads a book in the seclusion of her chamber, or when a group of clerics
perform a dramatic chant during the Easter liturgy for other clerics and the lay congre-
gation, all material details of the event matter in the constitution of the meanings of the
respective events for their target audiences. The arrangement of the cleric-performers
in the church space, the intensity, direction, and colour of the light illuminating the let-
ters written on the parchment, the smell of frankincense spreading through the church
during the liturgical performance, the smoothness of the parchment and a presence or
absence of colourful illuminations in the codex, the potential physical discomfort expe-
rienced by the nun, the clerics, and their audience because of hunger, cold, or lack of
sleep — all these factors and thousands more influence the “reading” of the event by its
participants and the way they decode its meaning(s).
The embodied nature of human existence in general, and communication in par-
ticular, is also important for the exploration of Marian laments, as undertaken in this
book, because of this requirement for emotions to be performed in order to become
social agents capable of effecting social affirmation, critique, and innovation. McNamer
summarizes the findings of neurobiology, cognitive studies, psychology, and other dis-
ciplines concerned with the process of cognition, in stating that “actions and emotions
are of a piece, that actions both produce and reflect emotion.”77 For anyone interested
in the genre of Marian lament as an element of the socio-cultural milieu of its time, this
assertion inevitably draws attention to its “performative aspects,” that is, to the way it
was — or rather may have been — performed in the past for its target audience(s). Such
a journey of inquiry is extremely complicated and tricky to embark on, as Claire Spon-
sler shows in her study “Tracing Medieval Performance: The Visual Archive,”78 where
she discusses the various sources a scholar of medieval performance culture has at her
disposal when researching actual performative praxis or trying to recreate an actual
medieval performance. Nonetheless, the difficulty of such endeavours does not presup-
pose their impossibility altogether. Traces of past performances can still be found in a
variety of sources: texts, including scripts, both private and public, secondary references
in chronicles, diaries, travelogues, letters, etc., musical scores, marginal notes in codices
referring to stage design, acting, and other aspects of the performances, and accounts
shedding light on the number of performers, stage props bought for the production, etc.;
visual sources, such as illuminations, panel paintings, sculptures, and other objects of
art that either depict some performative practise (or rather its stylized image) or could
be themselves part of the original performance; and evidence found in landscape and
77 McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion, 50. For the Theatre
and Performance Studies perspective on the interconnectedness of bodily action and emotions and
their mutual influence on the construction of meaning, see McConachie and Hart, Performance and
Cognition; for the psychological perspective, see Lynott, Conell, and Holler, The Role of Body and
Environment in Cognition.
78 Sponsler, “Tracing Medieval Performance.”
24 Introduction
architecture, such as the arrangement of an actual or generic liturgical space, or vestiges

of architectonic spaces in which the performance might have taken place: for example,
a cubicle in the nunnery or female chambers in an aristocratic household. Investigating
these and similar remains of past events provides, if not a direct gaze at how the texts in
question were performed, then at least a quick glimpse through the keyhole.
Before we discuss other aspects of Marian lament —for example, the context of
Marian and passion devotion, its literary characteristics and relation to other media,
especially the visual register of medieval culture, and the various modes of performance
the individual texts may have been subject to — a few words need to be said about the
terms liturgical and non-liturgical drama, which are often used in the related literature.
I count myself among the long tradition of researchers who tend to reject the terms
“liturgical” and “paraliturgical” or “non-liturgical” drama as unfaithful to the variety of
the actual cultural forms as observed in the above-mentioned medieval sources.79 This
tradition originates in the middle of the last century when O. B. Hardison, in his Chris-
tian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages (1965), unambiguously stated that “the
boundary that Chambers and Young posited between religious ritual (the services of
the Church) and drama did not exist,”80 a key principle that remains relevant to this day.
This position, which could be termed as “pre-performative,” encapsulates the argument
probably most deeply elaborated by Richard McCall, four decades after Hardison, in Do
This: Liturgy as Performance (2007). Both Hardison and McCall argue to the same effect:
more often than feels comfortable, no substantial difference can be seen between actual
textual scripts subsequently classified in literature as non-dramatic liturgy or liturgy
proper, dramatic liturgy, and liturgical play. On the other hand, many liturgical scripts
not typically understood as dramatic actually bear distinct traits of “drama” (such as
impersonation, and mimetic representation of narrative situations from the history of
salvation) and “theatricalization” (references to costuming, use of “stage” props, etc.).81
At the same time, many scripts usually categorized in literature as drama, without any
serious doubt, especially some instances of the Easter Visitatio sepulchri (Visitation of
the Sepulchre), appear, on closer inspection, peculiarly non-dramatic in their minimal
requirement of representational acting, and almost complete absence of illusive stag-
ing and other “necessary ingredients” for an action to be regarded as dramatic.82 The
79 E.g., Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama; McCall, Do This; Flanigan, Liturgical Drama
and Dramatic Liturgy and “Medieval Latin Music-Drama”; Norton, Liturgical Drama and the
Reimagining of Medieval Theatre; Hughes, “Liturgical Drama”; and others.
80 Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama, viii; Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church;
Chambers, The Medieval Stage.
81 The term “theatrical” is used here in the specific sense employed in the study of ritual and
liturgy which draws attention to the “staged” nature of events, such as baptism ceremony, Christmas
Mass, or Marian Office, when applied to medieval ecclesiastic praxis. Theatrical terminology, e.g.,
prop, script, role, costume, setting, etc., is applied in order to draw attention to the spatio-temporal
organization of the event and the level of its spectacularization. Cf. e.g., chap. 1, “Reconceptualizing
Theatre and Ritual” in Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual, 17‒45; Fischer-Lichte, “Theater und
Fest”; Bailey, “The Priest as Liturgist.”
82 The term “dramatic” itself represents one of the points of confusion in discussions about
dichotomy of liturgy proper and liturgical drama, with all its consequences, thus proves
difficult, if not impossible to sustain in the light of current knowledge about medieval
performance, drama and theatre.
Drawing on the arguments of Clifford Flanigan,83 Michael Norton, in his ground-
breaking book Liturgical Drama and the Reimagining of Medieval Theatre (2017),
comes to the decisive conclusion that, “The repertory of what we have come to know
as ʻliturgical dramaʼ was not […] a division of similar things into multiple branches, but
rather an amalgam of different kinds: liturgical ceremonies, religious plays, and perhaps
other things as well.”84 In an attempt to navigate this epistemological and taxonomical
problem, Norton proposes another set of terms to differentiate between the various
levels of drama, or indeed performativity, in the texts in question. In his book, Norton
uses the term “representational rites” for texts preserved in liturgical manuscripts that
served as a basis for the performance of liturgical services at a distinct moment in the
liturgical cursus (sequence of liturgical services at a given date and time of the liturgical
year), and “religious plays” or “religious representations” for texts found in non-liturgi-
cal manuscripts or contexts that “offer scant evidence for [their] liturgical attachment.”85
This categorization, and way of thinking about the “dramatic” and “non-dramatic” char-
acteristics of medieval liturgy and religious theatre, is adopted in this book. The textual
exemplars here represent in themselves a g raphic example of the ineffectuality of the
binary categories of liturgy proper, understood as non-dramatic and non-dramatized,
and liturgical drama as its opposite. Such simple duality cannot be found with the texts
investigated in this book: on one hand, there are texts extant in liturgical manuscripts as
well as texts that look very similar to these but are found outside the liturgical context
for reasons that can be purely haphazard and, on the other, texts resembling theatrical
scripts as well as texts commonly tagged as affective writing that are, nevertheless, dis-
tinctly script-like in their form. The term liturgical drama, however, won’t be completely
absent in this book because of its persistence in the discipline, especially as far as the
Easter and Christmas liturgical and paraliturgical representations are concerned.
In order to be faithful to the material under scrutiny here, I tend to see, in accordance
with McCall, “both liturgy and drama […] as subcategories of a larger human activity
that has come to be called performance or enactment,” and, consequently, understand
medieval liturgy and religious theatre because of its non-fixed, variable meaning. In contrast to
the probably more standard association with the Aristotelian concept of drama as a script for an
(imagined) theatre performance constructed according to given norms, some authors including,
for instance, Richard McCall, use the term in a more general sense as a denotation of a structural
principle of representing a narrative in a “dramatic,” that is, dialogic and essentially performative,
way; cf. e.g., McCallʼs assertion that “any attempt to enact remembrance contains the seeds of what
can be called drama” (McCall, Do This, 2); his concept of “dramatic analysis of the liturgy” that he
recognizes already in writing of the early Christian exegetes, Maximus Confessor and Amalarius of
Metz (McCall, Do This, 4); or his assertion about the enrichment of liturgical chants by tropes as
“rekindling of dramatic instinct in Western Europe” (McCall, Do This, 9).
83 Especially Flanigan, Liturgical Drama and Dramatic Liturgy.
84 Norton, Liturgical Drama and the Reimagining of Medieval Theatre, 6.
85 Norton, Liturgical Drama and the Reimagining of Medieval Theatre, 6.
26 Introduction
liturgy as a species of performance.86 Furthermore, literature as a conglomerate of writ-

ten texts is not excluded from the sphere of medieval performative culture either, for
reasons that have also been sufficiently discussed in scholarship.87 While not having
enough space here to summarize the arguments concerning the performative aspects of
medieval texts in their entirety, several important frames of thought will be pinpointed
relating to the issue of Marian laments. One of the important sources of thinking about
performative aspects of medieval literature was the research into orality introduced to
literary studies almost half a century ago by Walter Ong in his seminal work Orality and
Literacy: The Technologizing of the World (1982), and elaborated for medieval literature
by Paul Zumthor (La poésie et la voix dans la civilisation médiévale, 1984), Michael Rich-
ter (The Oral Tradition in the Early Middle Ages, 1994) and others. From this research
into the oral qualities of medieval compositions which have been passed down to us as
written texts, but were once listened to as a declamation or song (or composed as such
for aesthetic reasons), stemmed a branch of studies that asks questions about the pos-
sible ways in which written texts were once publicized to reach their target audience.
This, like the mixed or residually oral culture of the time, vacillated between the oral
and textual mode.88 In this type of culture, caught between textual and oral modes of
communication, medieval literature sought to address not only the literate, (which, until
the high Middle Ages, consisted almost exclusively of the clergy and some of the high-
born women), but also those people who could not read. For these people, the “mass
medium” of the time was performance in the above-mentioned sense of the word — as
the transmission of meanings embedded in a distinct period of time and an actual three-
dimensional space and employing human bodies and other objects as crucial agents in
the process. It was through such oral and bodily performance that many people in the
early and high Middle Ages grasped the content of texts that some of their associates
were able to read, but which they could not.
Yet another strand of the research of performative aspects of medieval textual and
literary culture concerns itself with questions related to the physicality of manuscripts,
such as how they could be handled as material objects.89 Such studies explore, for exam-
ple, the relations between the textual and visual elements of particular manuscripts and
how they were activated during the process of reading in what is often called a textual
86 McCall, Do This, 5.
87 For performative aspects of medieval literature, see e.g., Vitz, Regalado, and Lawrence,
Performing Medieval Narrative; Reichl, Medieval Oral Literature; Postlewate and Hüsken, Acts and
Texts; and individual case studies in collective monographs, such as Regalado, Doss-Quinby, and
Krueger, Cultural Performances in Medieval France.
88 I borrow the term from Gleasonʼs research of the culture of Ancient Rome, which bears many
similarities with that of the Middle Ages, see Gleason, Making Men, xxiv. Cf. the concept of a residual
orality and the mutual interdependence of text and performance in medieval culture, e.g., in Chinca
and Young, Orality and Literacy in the Middle Ages; Weissenrieder and Coote, The Interface of Orality
and Writing.
89 See a general overview of this branch of medieval studies, first acknowledged in the issue of
Speculum from 1990, e.g., in Müller, “The Identity of a Text”; and an example of its application in
Kempf, Performing Manuscript Culture.
performance, a term coined to foreground the physical, material, and sensual aspects
of (medieval) textual reception.90 Evidence of the performative handling of manu
scripts can be found in physical traces, such as smearing in places where the surface
was touched repeatedly as a part of a ritual reading practise, as will be shown in the last
chapter on the example of the Passional of Abbess Kunigunde, as well as in other physical
aspects of the manuscript (e.g., its size, traces of folding on separate foils, reading marks,
etc.). All in all, the material state of preservation of the texts investigated in this book can
reveal a lot about their possible modes of reception, especially if complemented with
evidence taken from other sources and from the knowledge of contemporary cultural
artefacts and practises.
Marian lament will thus be examined in this book from three mutually interdepen-
dent perspectives, namely that of gender, mediality, and performance theory. Combined,
I believe that these three modes of inquiry can allow us to grasp the genre more or less
in its entirety—not just as a set of written compositions with certain poetics and con-
tent, but as a multi-media cultural phenomenon in which texts of various forms and
pragmatics referring to the suffering of the Virgin Mary, confronted with the dying agony
of her son, are realized in different performative modes, from silent reading involving
active participation, to full-fledged theatrical liturgical performances in an actual his-
torical environment for actual audiences. In order to penetrate the social and perfor-
mative aspects of Marian laments, it may be useful to look first at their relation to the
devotional contexts in which they emerged, from their origin in the twelfth century up
to the fifteenth century. At this time, the Middle Ages start to give way, at least as regards
certain cultural tendencies, to the new era, and Marian Lament as a live textual and per-
formative form fades along with them.91
90 See e.g., Gertsman, “Introduction,” 1‒13; and chap. 4 in this book.

91 I tend to see the terminus ad quem of the periodization of the Middle Ages as extremely
unstable and dependent on which cultural phenomena we explore. As far as the planctus Mariae
is concerned, its heyday falling in the thirteenth to fifteenth century, the latest representatives of
the genre can be found in the first half of the sixteenth century in vernaculars. For this “liberal”
approach to historical periodization, see e.g., Le Goff, Must We Divide History Into Periods?
Chapter One
MARIAN LAMENT AND MEDIEVAL PIETY
From the early Christian period up to the later Middle Ages, the Virgin Mary is
an omnipresent figure in medieval religious practise and culture. From her withdrawn,
hieratic representation as the Queen of Heaven in late Antiquity and the first centuries
of the medieval era, Mary would gradually grow closer to the terrestrial experience of
her devotees, firstly of the religious women and men in monastic communities, and
later, from the thirteenth century onwards, also of the lay believers. To all of them, Mary
increasingly appeared not only as a graceful Regina Coeli, but also as a loving, caring, and
suffering Mother of God. The various images of Mary reached medieval Christians by
way of different cultural media through which veneration of the Virgin was expressed
and experienced. Marian liturgies, prayers, hymns, sermons, sculptures, relics, Books of
Hours, and other textual, visual, and performative media, all contributed to the estab-
lishment of the various faces of Mary as a virgin, bride of God, mother of the Saviour,
second to Christ in salvation history, Porta Coeli, a gateway to heaven through whose
advocacy devotees could approach the Lord with their prayers without fear of rejec-
tion. Part of this Marian imagery was also her rendition as Mater Dolorosa, a mother
desperately lamenting the death of her son on the cross, as represented in various types
of Marian Lament.
As indicated earlier, the planctus Mariae was one element of this all-encompassing
Marian veneration, occurring in the paraliturgical context as part of the Easter celebra-
tion during the Paschal Triduum; as part of the Passion plays performed during the lon-
ger period of time from the Holy Week to the end of the Easter octave; as part of the
individual and collective acts of piety carried out by members of convents and other
religious communities, and equally by devoted individuals such as anchorites, recluses,
and well-off aristocratic women and men who did not belong to any organized group,
cultivating their spirituality in their courtly and urban homes or in the solitude of their
anchorages. Marian Lament was interwoven in the complex web of various devotional
practises and idioms related to the Virgin Mary and her Son, most importantly the com-
passionate devotion to the Passion discussed in the previous chapter, and the eucharis-
tic devotion closely related to it. Within these two devotional paradigms, Mary’s image
developed as that of a co-sufferer, and later even co-redeemer with her Son; as a media-
trix between God and man thanks to the unique role she played in salvation history as a
God-bearer, having given birth to the Son of God, nursed him, cared for him, and brought
him up, like any other mother; and as a Bride of Christ, who loves her Bridegroom with-
30 Chapter One
out measure, seeking unification with him in the after-life by being elevated to him,
crowned by him, and placed on his right in heaven.
In order to understand the imagery, mediality, and performativity of Marian Lament,
it is thus necessary to situate it within the larger context of devotional practises that
informed, accompanied, and reflected its production and reception. We need to imagine
the poetic, artistic, exegetic, and performative background on which the original audi-
ence encountered these compositions, since without reference to that archive of Marian
motifs, images, objects, and events, they may appear dull, or at best enigmatic, to the
modern mind. This chapter seeks to introduce some of the elements of Marian devotion
prominent in the repertoire of the laments — intertextual, or rather intermedial, clues
which the original audiences were quick to recognize and integrate in their reception of
these compositions. Mediality appears especially noteworthy in relation to the Marian
laments, since depriving them of their original performative context (be it the liturgy,
preaching, or individual contemplation) with its textual, aural, and visual layer, it would
be impossible for us to recognize the profoundly synaesthetic means by which mean-
ings were conveyed in this genre to its recipients. The subsequent chapters will concen-
trate on the poetic devices, mediality, and performance of individual Marian laments,
with the ambition of formulating some more general conclusions about the genre as a
whole. Thus the present discussion aims at presenting the devotional practises, texts,
and images that shed light on the figure of the Virgin in the throes of lamenting the
tortured body of her crucified son, and supplying it with an emotional urgency and the
desired doctrinal meaning.
* * *
Marian Lament as a genre (not a topos of devotional texts and imagery) originated, as
mentioned in the previous chapter, in the eleventh century, as a consequence of a sub-
stantial change in perception of the figure of Mary in the theological thinking of the
time. Whereas, before that time, Mary had been depicted and venerated primarily as
the Theotokos, the Mother of God, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the prayers
of Anselm of Canterbury, Anselm of Lucca, and other, mostly Cistercian authors, began
to stress also her role as the intercessor to and co-sufferer of Christ. Since it has been
suggested but not yet sufficiently proven that this shift was a result of Eastern influence,
it would be safer to trace the new way of conceptualizing Mary in the West in the writ-
ings of Anselm of Lucca and Anselm of Canterbury, and their slightly later counterpart,
another Cistercian, John of Fécamp. In the prayers, sermons, and meditations of these
theologians, the Mary of the planctus emerges for the first time in the Western religious
tradition, overwhelmed by grief as she watches the deadly torments of the crucified
Christ. Mary’s suffering is described in these texts, not as a self-referencing narrative
element, but as a mechanism through which the pious reader may seek her support in
petitioning for her son’s mercy, by imitating her compassionate response to his suffer-
ing. In this vein, Anselm of Canterbury teaches his protégé, Duchess Matilda of Tuscany
(1046‒1115), to pray to the Virgin in the following words, already encountered in the
previous chapter:
Marian Lament and Medieval Piety 31
“bind up my wounds, pour out wine and oil, apply poultices, soften the great pain, and if it
is necessary, open the ulcer with a lance. For I am sustained alone by you whose soul the
sword of compassion transpierced, by you whose maternal bowels no little pain trans-
fixed. [...] I look to that time when you will come to the cross of your Son, that when you
and the holy women are given over to John’s custody, suffering with you (compaciens) I
may console you in your immense grief, until you forgive me and pardon my iniquities.”1
Notably, the devotee is encouraged in the wording of the prayer to describe her
shortcomings to the Mother of God using the imagery of a wound. A striking parallel is
drawn between the determination of the penitent to console Mary for the pains experi-
enced watching the death of her son, and the willingness of the Mother of God to relieve
the devotee’s pain and heal the wounds caused by her sins. In prayers such as this one
for Matilda, Mary emerges not only as the mother of the redeemer, but as his co-redemp-
trix, the one who can also, just like Christ himself, “forgive [the believers] and pardon
[their] iniquities.” Such an active role in the process of redemption, thus, makes her a
natural focus not only of prayers asking for protection and advocacy in front of Christ
as the Great Judge, but also of petitions for her personal assistance in the remission of
one’s sins, as well as for protection in different life situations.
Mary appears in this role of protectrix in another touching prayer, composed by
Fulbert of Chartres (d. 1028), one of the promoters of the shift in Marian veneration
towards the more emotional rendering of Mary’s participation in the Crucifixion. In
Fulbertʼs prayer, Mary’s protection is asked for with reference to the imagery of Mary as
Mater Dolorosa, mother in pain at the foot of the cross:
Through the triumph of his holy cross and through your glorious intercession, holy
mother of God, perpetual virgin Mary, may the Lord guard my veins, teeth, jaw, mouth,
from all pain and infirmity. With the sign of his holy cross, may the Lord protect my
throat, my chest, my heart, my stomach, and all my members, interior and exterior, and
especially my hands, that they might be more prompt in giving alms, than in receiving,
plundering or thieving. May the Lord guard my feet, lest they be swift in running to evil.
[…]. Amen.2
1 “alliga vulnera, tu infunde vinum et oleum, tu appone malagma, tuis fomitibus dolorem
immensum mitiga, et si necesse est, cauterio aperi ulcera. Cum securitate et fiducia leta substineo,
cuius animam compassionis gladius penetrat et non minor dolor materna pertransit viscera. [...]
Quodsi adhuc ad malorum meorum cumulum est parum, expecto donec venias ad crucem filii
tui, ut cum Iohanne custode et sanctis mulieribus vociferetur tecum, et compaciens inmenso
dolori consoler te donec ignoscas mihi et iniquitates meas condonas.” Anselm of Lucca, “Oratio
venerabilis Anselmi episcopi ad sanctam Mariam,” 230–31. Translation in Fulton, From Judgement
to Passion, 226.
2 “Per tryumphum sanctae crucis suae, et per gloriosam intercessionem tuam, sancta Dei genitrix,
perpetua virgo MARIA, custodiat Dominus venas meas, dentes, maxillas, fauces, ab omni dolore et
infirmitate. Muniat Dominus signaculo sanctae crucis suae guttur meum, pectus meum, cor meum,
ventrem meum, et omnia membra, interiora et exteriora, et percipue manus meas, ut magnas sint
promptae ad aelemosinam dandam, quam ad accipiendum, rapiendum aut furandum. Custodiat
Dominus pedes meos, ne veloces sint ad currendum in malum. […] Amen.” Fulbert of Chartres, “Pia
virgo Maria,” 157–58. Translation in Fulton, From Judgement to Passion, 220.
32 Chapter One
Several features of these two eleventh-century prayers are noteworthy in relation to the
planctus Mariae which originated at about the same time. There is the accent on the car-
nality of both Jesus and the petitioner in the latter prayer, and the explicit reference to
the redemptive power of the Virgin herself, not only of her son, in the former. These two
notions were, in fact, interconnected in the line of exegetical thinking that started devel-
oping at that time, reaching its peak in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Cistercian,
Franciscan, and Dominican theologians and preachers who promoted it emphasized the
human aspect of the Son of God, recounting biblical events testifying to his incarnation
in the world and his inhuman suffering on the cross, terminated by his all-too-human
death and burial. Emphasis on Christ’s carnality correlated with two other important
revolutionary innovations of the time: the institution of the doctrine of the “real pres-
ence” of Christ in the Eucharist at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and the advance-
ment of the above-mentioned image of Mary as the one who gave birth to God and suf-
fered with him in his final hour. These devotional impulses fertilized each other to gen-
erate an entirely new form of devotion that developed and was disseminated all around
Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—the Passion devotion, of which
the Marian Lament is considered to be a representation.
It was, however, certainly not the only one. In liturgies, images, texts, and performa-
tive practises related to Christ’s last days and moments in this world, and the terrible
suffering he experienced to redeem human sins, the image of Mary with the infant Jesus
represents the beginning of his earthly journey, while Mary under the cross stands out
as a desolate witness of its unhappy ending. The abstract doctrinal truths of the incar-
nation and the redemption of sins were, thus, made conveniently actual and accessible
in the familiar imagery of a mother who carries a baby in her womb, and loves him as
a child and as a man with all her heart, following him almost to the brink of her own
self-destruction. As Mater Dolorosa, Mary is also presented as one who, while suffering
immensely, never succumbed to utter despair, since she had the consolation of foresee-
ing her son’s resurrection.3 It is precisely this capacity to foresee the future suffering, but
also elevation, of her son that provides the foundation for Mary’s role in Passion nar-
ratives as an intermediary between humankind and its saviour; she is almost on a par
with divinity with the latter, yet she knows how to suffer with the former, the children
of God, and knows their petitions and weaknesses as they confide them to her in prayer.
Mary in the Passion appears as a magnifying glass through which the pivotal Christian
story, of God who became man and sacrificed himself for the sake of humanity, can be
seen in vivid, moving detail, adjusting it to the noetic horizon of a medieval believer.
This reimagining of Mary led to a considerable increase of her importance as an object
of veneration and petition, almost comparable to the figure of Christ himself. Conceptu-
alized as a porta, a gateway, she started to be seen not only as a means of access to his
3 To be found already in the writings of the Church Fathers, the idea would gain particular strength
in late medieval Passion and Marian devotion; e.g., Ambrose, De obitu Valentiniani consolatio; The
Myroure of Our Ladye, 250; and late medieval Joys of the Virgin (Ross, Medieval Art, 226). See also
Munns, Cross and Culture in Anglo-Norman England, 94; Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations
of the Flesh, 178; and Donavin, Scribit Mater, 52.
throne, but as a true path to heaven in its own right. As a maternal figure, she also repre-
sented a haven for those who were lost, motherless, or otherwise in distress and in need
of protection. Last but not least, she became a convenient example of proper Christian
behaviour in various respects—the story of her life rendered her as a model not only for
chaste virgins, both male and female, but also for mothers and wives, queens and kings,
and even preachers and priests.
All these aspects of Mary can be traced in innumerable liturgies, chants, prayers,
images, and devotional practises related to her person between the eleventh and fif-
teenth centuries, the time when Marian laments were produced and received. One
aspect of Marian devotion in particular grew to be of immense importance during these
times; this was the practise of likening oneself to Mary, to imitate her in her devotion
to and compassion for Christ, as well as in her other virtues, which became part and
parcel of the aesthetic and performative effect of the Marian Lament. Before focusing
on the imitatio Mariae (imitation of Mary) as a devotional practise, it is necessary to
step back and ask where exactly the co-redemptive power of Virgin Mary first appears,
as it is the pivotal motif of the planctus found in every single composition of this type,
and most probably also the chief reason why people read them and participated in their
theatrical(ized) presentation. In order to answer this question, we need to ponder for
a while the meaning and consequences of the message sent by the Church through
the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, which concluded a centuries-long debate over the
nature of the divine presence in the host. Confirming that God was made flesh during
the Incarnation, the council also declared that this flesh was verily and wholly present
in each and every piece of the consecrated host — thus setting in motion far-reaching
changes in medieval devotion, including the redefinition of the role of Mary in the mys-
tery of the incarnation and the Eucharist.4
God Born in Mary’s Flesh

The conviction of the Fourth Lateran Council about Christ’s being “true and wholly” pre-
sent in the Eucharist, in effect, ruled out other hypotheses about the relation between
the elements of Communion and Christ’s presence in them, such as the assertion of
Ratramnus (d. ca. 868), drawing on Augustine, that the bread and wine only symbolize
Christ’s body being changed spiritually, not physically, in the Mass. The official state-
ment of the Fourth Lateran Council that Christ is really present, with his flesh, blood,
humanity, and divinity, in the eucharistic bread and wine once the words of consecration
are pronounced by the priest during the Mass, predictably required some explanation
from preachers and priests in order for the new doctrine to be recognized and dissemi-
nated among both people and clergy. A brand-new array of devotional texts, images, and
practises was devised to spread the idea around Western Christendom, and to eliminate
the roots of potential blasphemy before they could sprout (an impossible task, as testi-
4 For a detailed discussion of the issue of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, see A
Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages, 370‒78.
34 Chapter One
fied to by accounts describing the occult practises people performed with stolen conse-
crated hosts).5
In most of these new forms of devotion, Mary played a central role as the one who,
through her maternal body, endowed Christ with his carnal nature. In the contempo-
rary understanding of parenthood, the mother was considered the one who gave the
offspring its physical substance, the body, while the father endowed it with its spiritual
nature, the soul.6 Applying this notion to Christ, it was surmised that he adopted his
human body from his mother, the Virgin Mary, while simultaneously retaining the divine
nature acquired from his Father. Establishing this double nature of Christ, with all poi-
gnancy and beyond any doubt, was the objective of countless medieval exegetes both
before and after the Fourth Lateran Council, as follows also from the fact that it became
a common motif in Easter liturgical drama through the metaphor of the two tunics of
Christ. It is explained figuratively by the persona of Christ himself in a bilingual, Latin-
Old German version of the Easter play from the fourteenth century:
In truth, that first tunic
brought only physical comfort,
for it could only reveal itself
in the common manner of nature.
[…]
This [second] is quite unlike what was before,
this is uncorruptible.
That which was before could suffer,
whereas now it cannot be destroyed.7
Through this and similar evocations of the two bodies of Christ, Mary was recognized
as a crucial agent in Christ’s humanity: through her, especially through her consent to
becoming the Mother of God and to giving birth to him, in the Annunciation, Christ’s
human nature was invoked with a considerable degree of realism in image, text, and
performance. The imagery of Annunciation, Christ as a child, and the Crucifixion, proved
especially convenient in this respect, representing, respectively, Mary’s acceptance of
providing God with her flesh, her role as his mother, and the death of his human body on
the cross. The two latter concepts became the staple of the Passion narratives in general,
and Marian Lament in particular, insofar as they underlined the physicality of Christ’s
historical existence in the body and its relation to his eschatological existence in the
host. The tender, delicate body of the infant Christ is thus, in Passion texts and images,
often juxtaposed with the mutilated, bleeding body of the Crucifixus accompanied by
symbols emphasizing the analogy between the historical bodies of Christ and his eternal
body, the host, as we will see later in this chapter.
5 A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages, 393‒94. Cf. Bailey, Magic and Superstition in
Europe, 86.
6 Neff, “The Pain of Compassio,” 265.
7 “Prima quidem suffragia / stola tulit carnalia, / exhibendo communia / sed per nature munia. /
[…] Hec priori dissimilis, / nec est incorruptibilis, / qui dum fuit passibilis, / iam non erat solubilis.”
“Das Innsbrucker Osterspiel,” vv. 1188‒91, 1193‒96 (including translation by Nigel F. Palmer).
While the imagery depicting Mary’s motherhood of her son had been the subject
of visual art from the beginning of the Christian era, the devotional shift towards the
eucharistic interpretation of the infant Christ in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
kick-started a swell of artistic and textual production that strove to underline this aspect
of the Mary‒Christ relationship, and to communicate it with the necessary degree of
persuasion and poignancy. Among these belong panel paintings such as the fourteenth-
century anonymous Madonna of Rome from Bohemia8 and Botticelli’s Madonna of the
Eucharist from the late fifteenth century. In the former, the prefiguration of Christ’s sal-
vific death on the cross is evoked by the common visual trope of medieval art, the gold-
finch with its red-coloured head, which was related, in medieval imagination, to the Pas-
sion through its association with the thistle and, figuratively, Christ’s crown of thorns.9
In Botticelli’s painting, the Eucharist is evoked by the sheaf of wheat Mary holds in her
right hand, which refers to the panis eternis, eternal bread baked from Christ’s resur-
rected body (i.e. the host), juxtaposed by his historical body in the form of the infant,
carried in Mary’s left arm.
Before the universal dissemination of the Feast of Corpus Christi, achieved by the
mid-fourteenth century, which came along with the development of such explicit imag-
ery relating Christ’s historical body unmistakeably with the eucharistic host, Christ’s
human body, in its vulnerability and humility, was represented in texts, images, and
performative practises underscoring the maternal bond between Christ as a child and
his mother. The relationship of mother and son took significantly homely and intimate
shape in Franciscan and Dominican piety, targeted predominantly at cultivating faith in
the laity, stimulating devotees to contemplate the humanity of Christ and his vulnerabil-
ity through the evocation of the care and anxieties of his mother towards him. Honorius
of Autun (d. ca. 1140), a twelfth-century theologian and disciple of Anselm of Canter-
bury, illustrated this warm relationship in his homily, with touches of everyday realism,
presenting the Virgin Mother as cultivating the active life in caring for her child as she
“nourished him with her own breasts when he was hungry, she consoled him on her
knees when he was weeping […] warmed him with baths when he was ill, wrapped him
up in swaddling clothes when he was naked, […] wrapped him with bands when he was
crying, she planted sweet kisses on him when he was smiling.”10
Mary’s motherly care for the infant Jesus, described by Honorius and other religious
writers, was represented in various media on different occasions throughout the liturgi-
cal year. By the mid-thirteenth century, most of the crucial liturgical feasts incorporated
the image of the Madonna with Child in such a way as to accentuate her maternity in
8 Fajt and Chlumská, Bohemia and Central Europe 1200‒1550, 29‒30.

9 Master of the Straus Madonna, “Madonna and Child of the Goldfinch,” 56. For the imagery of
goldfinch as related to the Passion, cf. e.g., Freeman, The Unicorn Tapestries, 108.
10 “Propriis uberibus pavit eum esurientem, super genua consolabatur flentem. Infirmum eum
fovit balneis, nudum involvit pannis, vagientem fasciis cinxit, arridenti ducia oscula fixit.” Honorius
od Autun, “Sigillum beatae Mariae ubi exponuntur Canta canticorum,” col. 497. Translation in Carr,
The Seal of Blessed Mary, 48.
36 Chapter One
relation to the salvific role accomplished by Christ through the suffering and death of
his human body.
A motif of special importance in this respect is the image of Maria Lactans, or the
Nursing Madonna, representing her breastfeeding the baby Jesus, sometimes symboli-
cally, sometimes in a more or less realistic depiction of her bare breast offered to the
baby. This was an image unusually rich in meaning with strong catechetic potential
based on its emotional force. Underlying it was the unity of mother and child in the
flesh, and it also contributed to rendering Mary and her son in a form more familiar
to the experience of the devotee, and hence more suitable as a model for emulation,
as will be discussed later. Domestic scenes from the life of the holy family became a
staple, especially in Franciscan devotion, one which enhanced a personal and emo-
tional approach to the divine. Capturing Mary in a state of ultimate dedication to her
child’s needs, perfectly familiar to any human mother, was one of the extremely effec-
tive methods employed to create this type of response. Pictures from the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries in particular, such as the late-fourteenth-century panel paint-
ing The Madonna of Humility by Florentine painter Agnolo Gaddi (1350‒1396), repre-
sent Mary and Christ in this way. In this painting, Mary, with the baby Jesus seated in
her lap, offers him the breast with her right hand while supporting him with her left.
Both suckling infant and nursing mother direct their gaze not to each other, but to the
spectator, in direct encouragement to her/him, not simply to observe the scene, but
to participate in it emotionally and intellectually. In Chapter Three, the performative
aspect of these and similar works will be discussed more deeply, but it is important
to note here that they should not be considered as inactive or passive objects discon-
nected from space and time. Rather, they always need to be imagined as experienced in
their original context (however vague our idea of that may be) with actual artefacts, in
communication with relevant texts remembered, read, or performed in front of these
images, and accompanied by the devotional gestures spectators were expected to make
during these acts of veneration.
Beyond these common performative practises of prayer and empathizing gaze, some
Marian devotional images not only encouraged, but directly demanded a physical inter-
action to fully reveal their devotional meanings.11 An example of these “performative
sculptures” are the so-called Shrine Madonnas (Schreinmadonna, Vierge Ouvrante), or
the opening sculptures of Mary with the Child, that—when opened—reveal yet another
layer of meanings invisible when the sculpture is closed (Fig. 1).
The additional scenes hidden inside the Madonna’s body usually represent events
from the life of Mary and Christ, stressing the salvific, or specifically eucharistic, aspect
of the mother-and-son relationship. The exterior of one of these sculptures, The Opening
Virgin, from ca. 1300 and of unknown provenance,12 represents the breastfeeding Vir-
gin, similar to the one described earlier, with the infant Jesus clutching a bird in his hand,
in a prefiguration of the Crucifixion as we have seen in the Madonna of Rome. On being
11 For the different modes medieval devotees were interacting with devotional objects, including
sculptures, see, for example, Blick and Gelfand, Push Me, Pull You.
12 Brisman, “ʻOpening Virgin (Vierge Ouvrante),ʼ Object Narrative.”
opened, the sculpture

reveals God the Father
carved inside, enthroned
and holding a crucifix
between his knees (the
body of Christ now miss-
ing, as is the dove of the
Holy Spirit which once
complemented the spiri-
tual programme of the
sculpture to represent
the Holy Trinity). This
opening Madonna thus
g raphically depicts the
eschatol ogical implica-
tions of Mary’s mother-
hood, rendering Christ’s
humanity, acquired from
and through his moth-
er’s body, as a necessary
precondition to his sal-
vific death on the cross.
The slit between the
two halves of the sculp-
ture, clearly visible in
its exterior when closed,
has been understood to
emphasize the role of the
Virgin as a gateway to
Figure 1: Schreinmadonna, West Prussia: linden,
Christ and, consequently,
polychrome, gilding, ca. 1390. Germanisches
Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg. Photograph by to salvation. The eucha-
Rufus46, CC BY-SA 3.0. ristic dimension of this
and similar sculptures
is equally important, as
Mary has been perceived in Christian thinking from early medieval times as a symbol
of the Church, the Ecclesia.13 Mary’s historical body nurturing the infant Christ thus rep-
resents a parallel to her symbolic body—the Church—protecting believers and feeding
them the body of Christ in the form of the host. The relation of Mary’s breast to her role
of protectrix and mediatrix between God and man is expressed in the thirteenth-century
prayer by the Irish poet Giolla Brighde Mac Con Midhe (1210‒1272), who prays for the
13 Rubin, The Mother of God, 159‒61, 168.

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[Listen]
Scale practice.
Scale practice demands diligent application. By its means we
attain certainty of intonation, power and flexibility of tone, as well as
familiarity with the various kinds of bowing.
The beginner must now practise all the major and minor scales, in
the first position, first in moderate tempo, with whole bows:
[Listen]
[Listen]
Then with short detached strokes in the middle of the bow, at the
point, and also at the nut, and with the foregoing “primary” bowings,—
[Listen]
all with the utmost possible tone, and afterwards with varying
nuances:—
[Listen]
The scales are then practised with varying bowings and rhythms,
legato and staccato, for example:—
[Listen]
Fingering of the scales.

To each note in the first position belongs its own finger, whether
the note is raised or lowered a semitone, the same finger being used.
As a rule in ascending passages the open string is used; downwards,
the 4ᵗʰ finger is preferred in its stead. If the notes of the open strings
are raised a semitone, usually the 4ᵗʰ finger plays it on the string
below.
[Listen]
If the scale begins with such a note, the first finger will be used
twice in succession; for example:—
[Listen]
The chromatic scales.

In the chromatic scales, the 1ˢᵗ, 2ⁿᵈ and 3ʳᵈ fingers will each be
used twice in succession, and of course must be pushed forward (or
backward) with firmness to the next note. The 4ᵗʰ has one note only
on each string assigned to it. The fingering will be the same, whether
the scale is expressed by sharps or flats:—
[Listen]
Another system of fingering, utilizing the open strings, is as
follows:—
[Listen]
The Positions.
The various places for the left hand, up and down the neck, are
known as the positions, and each is determined by the place reached
by the first finger. If the hand is so placed that the first finger is ready
to press down these notes
it will be termed the first position. If the first finger is upon these
it will be the second position.

The ball of the thumb must not touch the neck. As in the first
position the first finger remains upon the strings as guide. The thumb
also, lies opposite the first and second fingers.
III. Position.
In this position the ball of the hand comes in contact with the ribs
of the violin.
IV. Position.
From this position upward the thumb is withdrawn further and
further underneath the neck of the instrument.
V. Position.
VI. Position.
VII. Position.
Besides these there is the half position (nut-position, or back-shift)

which, when enharmonically changed to
belongs to the first position.

The positions retain their names when the notes are sharpened or
flattened a semitone, only one must frequently change the finger in
enharmonic passages, or the position.
Changing the position.

Sliding from one position to another must be executed with ease
and certainty, and it is especially necessary to grip the violin between
the chin and the collar bone, in order to give the hand free play.
Particular care must be bestowed upon
Sliding the fingers whilst

changing positions.
If in passing to a higher or lower position, the last note of the
position just left, and the first of the position aimed at, have to be
played by the same finger, it must slide over the string firmly, and
without leaving it, whether the notes in question are legato or not.
[Listen]
[Listen]
If the first note, when ascending to a position, is to be played by a
finger following that used in the lower position, the first must slide with
it, remaining until the position of the hand is again changed, or until
released by an advancing finger. The first note must be played firmly
by the finger assigned to it, without causing the slide to be heard.
In the following examples, the accompanying fingers are indicated
by small notes.
[Listen]
[Listen]
[Listen]
If the notes of the different positions are to be taken upon two
strings, the finger goes with it to the higher position, but without
necessarily remaining on the string.
[Listen]
In proceeding downward to another position, the finger on the last
note slides with that which is proceeding in advance so far as to find
its place in the lower position, but with the understanding that in case
the note that follows is not to be played with the same finger, it must
not remain down.
[Listen]
If the first note of higher position is to be played by a finger which
is not the last used in the lower position, it must slide with it until the
proper place in the higher position is reached, but must be lifted as
soon as the finger which has to play the first note is put on the string.
[Listen]
If the first note in a lower position is to be played with a finger that
in the upper position is ultimately replaced by the finger following, the
finger in question must slide from the upper position to its place in the
lower. But ere it has reached it, the first note in this position must be
gripped.
[Listen]
If the notes of the different positions are not bound together by
means of legato signs, this sliding of the finger must take place so
quickly that no notes are heard between. If the notes are bound
together to be played in one bow, then the portamento or slide will be
audible. The player must beware lest the portamento from one tone to
another becomes exaggerated, or perhaps the entire enharmonic
scale lying between the notes will be produced. All “whining” must be
avoided, and the note next that to which the finger is sliding should
not be heard.
The violinist must know the major and minor scales in all the
positions, above all acquiring certainty in the various positions. On
this account stress must be laid on the study of the same with the
greatest possible diligence.
Double stops.
The violin is capable of producing a great variety of double notes
or double stops. In conjunction with an open string, all the intervals
may be given.
Unisons:
[Listen]
In unisons, the note given by the open string is produced
simultaneously on the next lower string. The fingering adjusts itself
according to the position in which one is playing, and it may be
practised in the first four positions.
Seconds:
[Listen]
At a, the lower note will be played on the lower string, but at b the
upper note is produced on the lower string. The fingering at a is
conformable to the position employed—either the 3ʳᵈ, 2ⁿᵈ or 1ˢᵗ finger
may be on the lower note. At b, the upper note can be played either in
the 2ⁿᵈ, 3ʳᵈ, 4ᵗʰ or 5ᵗʰ position and either the 4ᵗʰ, 3ʳᵈ, 2ⁿᵈ or 1ˢᵗ finger
may be placed on the upper note.
Thirds:
[Listen]
[Listen]
The thirds at a lie in the first two positions. At b, the upper note is
taken on the lower string, and either in the 3ʳᵈ, 4ᵗʰ, 5ᵗʰ or 6ᵗʰ position.
Fourths:
[Listen]
a lies in the first position, at b the higher note is again produced on
the lower string (as a harmonic note) in the 4ᵗʰ position.
Fifths:
[Listen]
The perfect fifths in this example have each two open strings; the
imperfect fifths are played either in the first or half position.
Sixths:
[Listen]
in the first position.
Sevenths:
[Listen]
in the first and second positions.
Octaves:
[Listen]
in the first three positions.
Ninths:
[Listen]
The upper notes in the 1ˢᵗ, 2ⁿᵈ, 3ʳᵈ or 4ᵗʰ positions.
Tenths:
[Listen]
The upper notes in the 2ⁿᵈ, 3ʳᵈ, 4ᵗʰ or 5ᵗʰ positions.
Double stops without open strings.
Unisons.
[Listen]
Seconds.
[Listen]
Major Thirds.
[Listen]
Minor Thirds.
[Listen]
Thirds are fingered with the 1ˢᵗ and 3ʳᵈ, or the 2ⁿᵈ and 4ᵗʰ, also with
the 3ʳᵈ and 4ᵗʰ fingers in a series of thirds.
Fourths.
Perfect 4ᵗʰˢ.
[Listen]
Augmented 4ᵗʰˢ.
[Listen]
1 2 3
Fingering: , and
2 3 4
Fifths.
Perfect 5ᵗʰˢ.
[Listen]
Imperfect 5ᵗʰˢ.
[Listen]
Perfect fifths are fingered
1 2 3 4
, , or .
1 2 3 4
Imperfect fifths are fingered with the same fingers as fourths.
Sixths.
Major 6ᵗʰˢ.
[Listen]
Minor 6ᵗʰˢ.
[Listen]
1 2 3
Fingered , and
2 3 4
Sevenths.
[Listen]
1 2
Fingered ,
3 4
Octaves.
[Listen]
1 1 2
Fingered , in the upper positions frequently and
4 3 4
It is necessary to remark that the foregoing examples do not give

the fingering of the scales in double stops, only the fingerings which
may be used in double stops as met with singly.
To these double stops without open strings, those in conjunction
with an open string (pp. 53, 54) can still be added by this means, —
that they are played on two lower strings; e. g.
The first stops on the D and G string are obviously excluded from
this.
Chords of three notes.

In triple stops the two upper notes have mostly the same duration,
the lower note being previously released by the bow. Three notes
may, however, be made to sound simultaneously, but special
skilfulness is requisite, and the sounds cannot be of long duration.
Formerly Paganini, Ole Bull, and other violin virtuosi, used a very flat
bridge in order to play in three and four parts. Such tricks may be
produced even with the ordinary bridge, by unscrewing the nut of the
bow, passing the stick underneath the fiddle, letting the hair lie upon
the strings, and holding both hair and stick together with the right
hand.
As a rule, when several chords in three or four parts succeed each
other, they are played with down bows in order to obtain the
necessary power and equality of tone. Here and also in the four part
chords which follow, the easiest are those which make use of the
open strings:
Triple stops with two open strings:

Medieval Laments of The Virgin Mary Text Music Performance and Genre Liminality Early Social Performance Eliška Kubartová Polácková

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Medieval Laments of the Virgin Mary

Text Music Performance and Genre

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Further Information and Publications

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

© 2023, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds

ISBN (print): 9781641894562

Introduction. The Suffering of the Virgin Mary as an Inner Drama. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter One. Marian Lament and Medi­eval Piety. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Chapter Two. Genre, Mediality and Aesthetics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

Chapter Three. Modes of Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

Chapter Four. Bohemian Laments:

Appendix: Bohemian Marian Laments — Excerpts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

Figure 1: Schreinmadonna, West Prussia: linden, polychrome, gilding, ca. 1390. . . 37

Figure 2: Madonna from Sázava or The Infantia Christi, Sázava,

Figure 3: Crucifixus dolorosus, Corpus Christi Church, Lower Silesia,

Figure 4: Sculpture of Christ with movable limbs, St. Wenceslas Church,

Figure 5: Holy Sepulchre, St. Mauriceʼs Rotunda, Konstanz Minster,

Figure 7: Crucifixion, Vyšší Brod Cycle, Master of the

Figure 8: Crucifixion and Pietà, Passion and Marian Cycle,

Figure 9: The Pietà from Lásenice, Jindřichův Hradec, Czech Republic,

Figure 10: “Arma Christi” and the “Crucifixus,” Passional of

Figure 12: “Šafařík Lament,” Prague. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

Figure 13: “Planctus Mariae,” Passionale quod dicitur

Figure 14: “Christ’s Side Wound,” Psalter of Bonne de Luxembourg,

This work is an outcome of several years of research on the medi­eval lamentations

THE SUFFERING OF THE VIRGIN MARY

5 McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medi­eval Compassion, 2.

Origins of Planctus Mariae

15 Cf. Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross, East and West,” 577‒78.

the emphasis on Mary’s participation in Christ’s suffering. Through extensive depictions

on the Eastern monastic liturgical tradition.23 This is a crucial argument, as Anselmian

28 Ambrose, De obitu Valentiniani consolatio, para. 39.

others, of affective devotion in the Passion as it started developing in Western Europe

Planctus Mariae as an Inner Drama: Methodo­logy

49 McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medi­eval Compassion, 69.

50 McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medi­eval Compassion, 25‒57.

53 McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medi­eval Compassion, 3.

68 McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medi­eval Compassion, 2.

lai Evreinov, a constitutive element of human nature, an anthropo­logical constant that

72 Evreinov, “Apo­logija teatralʼnosti.”

architecture, such as the arrangement of an actual or generic liturgical space, or vestiges

liturgy as a species of performance.86 Furthermore, literature as a conglomerate of writ-

90 See e.g., Gertsman, “Introduction,” 1‒13; and chap. 4 in this book.

MARIAN LAMENT AND MEDI­EVAL PIETY

God Born in Mary’s Flesh

8 Fajt and Chlumská, Bohemia and Central Europe 1200‒1550, 29‒30.

opened, the sculpture

13 Rubin, The Mother of God, 159‒61, 168.

Fingering of the scales.

The chromatic scales.

it will be the second position.

Besides these there is the half position (nut-position, or back-shift)

belongs to the first position.

Changing the position.

Sliding the fingers whilst

Chapter One. Marian Lament and Medieval Piety. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

This work is an outcome of several years of research on the medieval lamentations

5 McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion, 2.

Planctus Mariae as an Inner Drama: Methodology

49 McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion, 69.

50 McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion, 25‒57.

53 McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion, 3.

68 McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion, 2.

lai Evreinov, a constitutive element of human nature, an anthropological constant that

72 Evreinov, “Apologija teatralʼnosti.”

MARIAN LAMENT AND MEDIEVAL PIETY