Mother Queens and Princely Sons: Rogue Madonnas in the Age of Shakespeare

Changing beliefs about the Virgin and her relationship with Christ had a tremendous impact on early modern culture, religious thought, and daily life. The development of Marian authority, with its latent potential to upset gender and power hierarchies, gradually worked to undermine medieval legal traditions such as marital coverture and the king's two bodies. In this exploration of the Madonna and Child's historical and cultural reverberations, Sid Ray examines historical queens who appropriated Marianisms to establish authority as well as representations of mothers and sons in early modern drama, arguing that they contested Protestant patriarchal authority and helped to reframe the operation of political power.