The Virgin Mary is a crucial figure for Western culture and Christian worship, and has always been strictly connected to women and their status in society. A large amount of literature in Latin and the vernacular was written about Mary in early modern Italy and Europe, by both lay and religious men and women, representing her in different ways and with different purposes, transforming and adapting her traditional image.
The aim of the symposium is to increase our understanding to what extent the Virgin was presented as an empowering figure for women, or on the contrary, as a model of subjection and domesticity; how her characteristics changed in different moments and places in the early modern period; how the Reformation and the Counter Reformation influenced the ways in which the Virgin was described and connected to women; and how these transformations shaped the definitions and representations of women and the semantic of virtues. An evaluation of these aspects can shed new light on the development of women’s history, on the theorization of political and religious thought and on the construction of women’s identities in the Western world.
Organiser: Dr Eleonora Carinci eleonora.carinci@ifikk.uio.no at the University of Oslo in collaboration The Pontifical Faculty of Theology Marianum
The workshop is organised as a part of the project "Rethinking Virgin Mary in Early Modern Europe", under the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo.
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement N°101031720.
Kindly contact Dr. Eleonora Carinci if you are interested in participating, in person or remotely.