Chapter 1 From A Cultural Study of Mary and The Annunciation

1 HISTORY AND HISTORIA: READING
THE ANNUNCIATION STORY FROM THE

SIXTEENTH AND THE TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURIES
I start (and will conclude) this introductory chapter in confessional mode. Part,
though not the only part, of the stimulus for this study which, it should be
stressed, is a cultural and not a theological analysis, although many theological
and biblical commentaries, ancient and modern, have contributed to it has
been the Christian New Testaments story of the Annunciation, Gabriels
appearance to Mary, in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 1:2638). Once established
within the Christian canon, the Annunciation story became a standard Christian pericope.1 In the Christian calendar, probably starting in seventh century
Rome, it was celebrated on 25 March; in medieval England that feast became
known as Lady Day (marking the start of the New Year as late as 1752 when
England finally adopted the Gregorian Calendar). In the Catholic tradition
(including the Church of England), Lukes account provides a liturgical reading
for both the Feast of the Annunciation itself and leading up to the celebration
of the Nativity nine months later (25 December). It also became the basis of
one of Christendoms most popular prayers, the Hail Mary, and the associated
devotion of the rosary, still a binding icon for many traditional Catholics. Even
in the twenty-first century, in the secular multi-cultural West, the Annunciation scene is familiar as the initial tableau of the extended Christmas story and,
within the frenzy of seasonal consumerism, appears on greeting cards, postage
stamps, and posters; it also remains passionately affirmed by Christian believers
and (not always the same thing) churchgoers, as a central historical or at least
symbolic event. As Marina Warner comments on the conception and nativity
narratives, it requires a herculean effort of will to read Lukes infancy Gospel
and blot from the imagination all the paintings and sculptures, carols and hymns
and stories that add to Lukes spare meditation.2 It is, I will argue, an extraordinarily rich story, some might say archetypal, that has become deeply embedded
in our cultural history.
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A Cultural Study of Mary and the Annunciation: From Luke to the Enlightenment
However, an even more powerful stimulus than its New Testament origins
for my fascination with the Annunciation and what I present as its gradual disenchantment within the turbulent and contradictory period we have come to
term early modern, are the many years I have spent contemplating paintings,
sculptures, and other visual representations of the scene. As Chapter Five will
discuss, pictorial representations of the Annunciation date back perhaps to the
third century ad. They proliferated in the late medieval and early modern periods: many drafts of this book were written in Florence, surrounded by seemingly
innumerable frescos, paintings, sculptures and tabernacles of the scene. Like its
rival Siena, Florence saw (and still sees) itself as under the special protection of
the Virgin along with the citys official patron saint, John the Baptist. Florentia
implies the city of the flower, the Annunciation lily which became central to
Florentine civic and religious symbolism, from the medieval coinage, the florin,
to the contemporary football team, Fiorentina. The New Year festival is still
celebrated on Annunciation Day and the basilica of the Annunziata contains
both Vasaris rendition of Luke the painter being instructed by the Virgin, and a
miraculous Annunciation fresco, reputedly completed by an angel at the Virgins
request.3 Ghibertis celebrated designs for the doors of the Baptistery next to the
Duomo in Florence include a heightened Annunciation, a masterpiece of dramatic tension, stressing the perturbation of the Virgin, who is raising her arm as
if to protect herself. Ghibertis work, undertaken to complement Brunelleschis
Duomo, provided, Michael Levey argues, a special challenge to Florentine artists to rival the psychological realism of his portrayal.4 Indeed, as I show, it is the
artistic renditions that over the centuries made the Annunciation real, despite
increasing scepticism about its historicity, even among Christian believers and
certainly among many modern New Testament scholars.
However, one painting in particular has played a powerful formative influence upon this study, although it was not painted by a medieval or Renaissance
artist. But it does capture what I hope is the spirit and the intellectual substance
of my argument. In the mid 1970s the German painter Gerhard Richter, according to his own account, imitated a postcard of an Annunciation painting by the
sixteenth-century Venetian artist Titian.5 He produced a series of works which
he entitled Verkndigung nach Tizian (the Annunciation after Titian) in which
the familiar traditional figures of Mary and Gabriel were, over the course of five
canvases, gradually dissolved and smeared into bursts of colour and textured
swipes of paint (see Figure 1.1). Representations of the Annunciation have inevitably wrestled with the challenge of giving artistic expression to transcendent
truths and with the mystery of representation itself; Richters gradual dissolving
of the possibility of depicting the scene marks what he saw as the end of painting in post-modernity and (more to my purposes) the fading and blurring of the
Annunciation story itself over the course of what Max Weber, famously, seductively but over-simply, termed the disenchantment of the post-medieval world.6
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History and Historia
Figure 1.1: Gerhard Richter, Verkndigung nach Tizian (1973). Reproduced with permission of Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.
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I extend the implications of Richters reworking of Titian into broader cultural

analysis, taking up but modifying Webersclassic observation, as I illustrate the
slow and still incomplete fading of the Annunciation from event to story, history to historia, that occurs in early modern Europe. The causes of the blurring
that Richter illustrates is a complex process that does not happen overnight, but
it starts to emerge some 1400 years after it appeared in the Gospel account, and
provides a window into the complexity and contradictions of the early modern
period. Disenchantment is a key concept in this study. Enchantments of various kinds appear and disappear (and reappear) throughout human history, and
the Annunciation story is, in many profound senses, a story of enchantment.
With two of the three Abrahamic religions not only Christianity but, perhaps
surprisingly to many Christians, Islam giving the Annunciation to Mary a central place, the Lukan story has generated countless re-tellings, imitations and
transformations. Almost certainly a late addition to the text of what became the
canonical Gospel of Luke, it developed into a centrepiece of the cult of the Virgin, which took shape slowly and flowered substantially after the fifth century.
The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation became closely involved with (even if
it is not, as many recent commentators make clear, identical with) the Annunciation story. The leading modern Catholic commentator on the Conception and
Nativity narratives, Raymond E. Brown, comments that in Christian theology
and devotion there has been more Marian reflection (and literature) based on
this story than on any other in the New Testament.7
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The goal of my study is not simply to parade examples, however varied, magnificent, or bizarre, of this long fascination; nor is it to decide which interpretation
or representation of the scene is authentic or correct. In pursuing my subject, I
have read, as exhaustively as possible, hundreds of commentaries on Luke, from
the patristic fathers to modern historical/critical studies and todays on-line blogs.
All contribute to what I present as the scenes many invented traditions. I am here
adapting Hobsbawms and Rangers celebrated term the invention of tradition,
which they define as a set of practices or accounts of values and norms of behaviour, created for ideological purposes and thereafter assumed to have continuity
with and the authority of the past.8 The particular traditions they discussed
were mainly concerned with the construction of national cultures or ethnic identity, predominantly in the nineteenth century, but the term has received much
wider application, including within religious and cultural history.9
We cannot, however, re-construct invented traditions as complex as the
Annunciation by simply following authorized statements of belief or even works
of religion or philosophy. They are constituted and enriched by a variety of cultural forms, and so we need as well to examine art, literature, popular culture,
and also emergent and incipient discourses, thereby focusing on the gaps and
silences, the saids and not-saids as well as what is apparently there. It is also
often on the apparent margins of society that cultural changes can often be first
sensed and where eventual ideological transitions may start to take visible if
not yet definable shape. Throughout therefore I use Raymond Williamss classic argument that a societys changing structures of feeling may best be seen as
social experiences in solution as opposed to those that have been precipitated
and are more evidently and more immediately available. Signs may be found not
only in established cultural practices, but also in new forms or adaptations of
forms, and they may well appear within, without directly confronting, existing
social forms. Williams adds that no analysis is more difficult than that which,
faced by new forms, has to try to determine whether these are new forms of the
dominant or are genuinely emergent. 10 The central questions I ask are therefore
not only or even primarily theological ones but incorporate literary, historical,
cultural and psychoanalytical issues. My task as a cultural analyst is to speculate
why the Annunciation story had acquired such a central place in European history and why in the early modern period that place came under pressure (or
under duress, as a recent conference at which I first articulated some of my arguments, put it). I ask most particularly why this story had (and to some extent
continues to have) such a powerful hold over the Western imagination.
There are two seemingly easy answers to that question. The first is the explanation that would have seemed natural to virtually all Christians around 1500
and which, for some, continues without embarrassment into the present. It
is simply that God a God up or out there, even the Tillichian God as the
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ground or depth of being chose the Annunciation and all that followed after
as His way of bringing salvation to the world, and there is no need to explain the
matter by speculative reference to any further human cause or motivation. Virtually no scepticism about such an explanation surfaced among Christians before
the late fifteenth century and even then for a century or more it was questioned
largely only in elitist scholarly circles.
The second, closely related but not identical, explanation is that the authority of the Church and what it decreed to be the revelation found in the canonical
Gospels, along with authorized traditions, became so powerful that any available
or discussable alternatives would not have been given minimal if any credibility.
It is only in the past two or three centuries that widespread (and even, in some
places, legally permissible) challenges to the authority of Christian belief and
practice have seemed plausible, except perhaps (and then often precariously)
among the intellectual elite. By the nineteenth century, David Friedrich Strauss
could speak, though not without causing scandal, of the Annunciation storys
raising questions that made a supranaturalist interpretation implausible; he
boldly asserted that the two opening chapters of Luke were a later and inauthentic addition to the words of Jesus, echoing a view that, as my final chapters
will show, had gathered only slow momentum through the early modern and
Enlightenment periods, but which became a distinctive early modern contribution to the duress under which the Annunciation came.11 Arguments that Jesus
was an unusually charismatic but hardly unique religious figure, and that many
of the revered details of the Holy Land were legends, elaborated or invented by
centuries of pilgrims and polemicists, today no longer seems scandalous except
in the most theologically fundamentalist of circles. But the tolerant scepticism
that many educated Western men and women today take for granted is a relatively recent phenomenon. As recently as the 1960s, the shock of Bishop John
Robinsons Honest to God and the writings of radical and death of God theologians brought about demands for censorship or persecution from conservative
Church (and even some civil) authorities. Attacks on godless intellectuals (a
category that frequently includes liberal academic biblical scholars such as the
distinguished New Testament scholar Bart A. Ehrman, to whose work I frequently refer) can still be heard in parts of the United States.
This second explanation contains, I think, some truth but it is also not the
complete explanation. Studies of popular religion like Michael Carrolls have
repeatedly stressed that the long-lasting appeal of religious beliefs and practices
depends on a combination of the power of ecclesiastical and civic authorities
acting in accord with and reinforced by underlying psychological and social factors.12 It is those underlying factors that I wish, even in a small way, to investigate.
When we consider how the Annunciation story was overwhelmingly understood around 1500, why for a millennium and a half (and indeed beyond) has
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it retained such power? What needs and desires below the level of intellectual
assent, does it, as Lacan would put it, open up a relationship to the psychological
real? What knowledge that is not known or even difficult to admit, might it
convey? 13 What are, as I phrase it throughout, some of the stories behind (and
projected upon) the Annunciation story that made it so taken-for-granted in the
beliefs and practices of late medieval and early modern men and women?
The main historical focus of my study is therefore what leads up to and culminates in that rich and contradictory period we have come to term early modern,
roughly from the mid fifteenth century in parts of Europe such as Florence perhaps as early as the 1420s to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth. Before,
virtually all Christians were in agreement that the Annunciation story was an
actual historical event recorded by Luke, an educated Greek Christian believer and
sometime companion to St Paul who was later accorded sainthood, and that it had
been written with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit or even, according to some,
with the help of Mary herself. Since the Enlightenment, however, while those
affirmations have remained the pious, if perhaps unexamined, beliefs of many, the
historicity of the scene and the identity of its authorship have been increasingly
called into question, most significantly by many modern New Testament scholars.
In the early chapters, I reach back to the history of the traditional Annunciation storys origins and to the speculations, squabbles, and battles through
which what came to be orthodox (via what Ehrman terms proto-orthodox)14
Christian beliefs about the Annunciation triumphed over heretical views in the
first four Christian centuries. Chapter Two examines the alternative versions of
what became the canonical Gospel of Luke, both with and without the initial
Conception and Nativity stories, and their circulation within what Diarmaid
MacCulloch terms the cacophony of opinions and assertions of early Christian communities, before the more powerful of those voices tried to bring about
a unity of belief and devotion.15 In Chapter Three and Chapter Four I survey
some of the intellectual and underlying psychological structures by which the
Annunciation story was constructed, especially to exclude certain explanations,
and to privilege one in particular, the association of the Annunciation scene with
a virgin birth. I also glance at Muslim and Jewish stories of the Annunciation,
most notably the version in the Quran.
In the second half of the book I focus on the transition between the late Middle
Ages, when Marian devotion was at the centre of most European societies, and the
early modern period, when a multiplicity of emerging cultural shifts the impact
of humanist learning, the accelerating effects of the Reformation, the slowly and
spasmodically emerging Enlightenment, and anticipations of our own fragmentarily secularized post-modern culture start to be felt. Chapter Five investigates
how the Annunciation was represented by literary and especially visual artists, thus
overwhelmingly reinforcing what had become its orthodox interpretation, and
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how that consensus was challenged by the emergence of a new aesthetic, especially
seen in late fifteenth century representations of the scene. Chapter Six combines
theological with such artistic and architectural evidence, providing a comparison
between two late medieval/early modern place relics, two special sites dedicated
to the historical reality of the Annunciation, the shrines of Loreto and Walsingham, both charismatic manifestations of the supposed Annunciation site of
Nazareth and its own shifting and ambiguous invented traditions. Chapter Seven,
Chapter Eight and Chapter Nine move further into the early modern period and
look at the different Catholic and Protestant re-positionings of the Annunciation
story. In the last chapter, I take the emerging divisions and duress to the brink
(and a little beyond) of the Enlightenment, returning to my overriding metaphor
of disenchantment, at which point Richters after Titian therefore becomes, I will
argue, an apt symbol of gradual cultural disenchantment.
Like most humanistic disciplines, New Testament scholarship has undergone seismic changes in the past fifty years. Yet much has gone unnoticed even
(or especially) by those for whose benefit it has been undertaken: most academics in the field, as Burton L. Mack, among many others, comments, are frustrated
by the frightful lack of basic knowledge about the formation of the New Testament, especially among average Christians.16 Jane Schaberg , writing in the
1990s, spoke of what she saw as the enormous gap between the desk and the
pew.17 The scholars in the prestigious Jesus Seminar are also very direct on the
frustration of New Testament scholars towards popular misconceptions about
the Conception and Nativity narratives.18It is therefore useful here to summarize
relevant aspects of the majority scholarly view of the place occupied by the Lukan
Annunciation story within the texts that have come down from early Christianity. For more than ten years now, as a literary scholar and critic peering into the
mysteries of a neighbouring discipline, first with curiosity and then with admiring astonishment, I have read hundreds of commentators on the Annunciation
scene, and then gingerly and with even more astonishment, worked my way into
broader scholarship on the transmission of the texts, canonical and otherwise, of
the New Testament. I tentatively summarize here, largely for readers as ignorant
as I was and to a large extent remain, something of what I have learnt to be a
general scholarly consensus19 (though certainly by no means unanimous) of the
majority of modern academic scholars on how the New Testament text emerged
from its obscure origins in what MacCulloch terms an eccentric little sect on the
fringes of the Jewish synagogue.20 While many details are still hotly debated, and
therefore qualifiers like probably, possibly, perhaps, need to be inserted frequently,
it is largely shared by contemporary New Testament academic scholars, except
for those at the fundamentalist ends of the religious spectrum.
Challenging what for nearly two millennia was taken, at least by Christian
believers, as the historical veracity of the Gospels, in the past century (and antici-
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pated, as Chapter Eight and Chapter Nine will show, by isolated early modern
and Enlightenment voices) a series of scholarly discoveries about the construction of the New Testament text and related early Christian documents showed
that the Gospels (in likely order of composition, Mark, the closely related sayings Gospel of Thomas, Matthew, Luke, and quite separately and later, John)
were attempts to create what Mack terms a Christian myth of origin. They set
out their stories of Jesus which as Lee McDonald comments (pointing out
the parallel with the early history of the Quran) were initially primarily communicated orally.21 Not yet able to be labeled as Christians, these groups were
likely fragmented or wiped out in the Roman armys sack of the area and the
destruction of the Temple in the year ad 70. Part of their memories and records,
often referred to by modern scholars as the sayings of Jesuss, primarily transmitted orally, were probably collected in a conjectural document referred to as Q
[from the German Quelle, meaning source], and later incorporated into what
became the Gospels, narratives designed both to consolidate Jewish Christian
communities and seek out Gentile converts.Some scholars designate the material unique to Luke, including the Annunciation narrative, as L to distinguish it
from material from Mark and Q itself..
The earliest of the eventually authorized three synoptic Gospels, Mark
(originating no earlier than ad 70) incorporated much of Q; mention of Jesuss
background is cursory, with no conception or nativity stories; the only reference
to his family is that they believed him to be out of his mind (Mark 3:1921),
and that not even his brothers believed in him (Mark 7:5). The so-called fourth
Gospel, attributed to John (around the year 90) along with the earlier Pauline
writings, from around 5055, construct a different, semi-divine figure, born, as
Paul puts it, of a [unnamed] woman. All these accounts were written well after
the events by believers who had never witnessed them or (as is evident from
inaccurate or contradictory geographical details) had even visited the areas in
which they occurred. The members of these communities were, in effect, trying to interpret their origins through the traditional Jewish process of midrash,
expanding and elaborating texts and prophecies to explain the significance of
what they or others in previous generations, had lived through and reported,
eventually devising what Ehrman terms strategies of containment in order to
impose limits on the interpretation of their beliefs.22 The competitive heteroglossia, the multiplicity of dialogues and debates of these early communities, which
Clement of Rome was speaking of as an odious rivalry as early as around 100,23
culminated in the controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries, in which the
formulations of belief associated with communities under the influence of Rome
and Constantinople won out, and those of other communities, notably in Syria,
Mesopotamia, Egypt or Ethiopia, were condemned or marginalized. Insofar as
the writings accepted into the New Testament canon were selected and codi-
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fied by the patristic Church, the canon is a record of the historical winners. As
Schaberg notes, much of the literature of the Christian losers has not been preserved, though some has been indirectly revealed as recent scholars have pored
over the archeological findings at Qumran and Nag Hammadi.24
As the controversies and anxieties concerning the Annunciation that eventually surface in the early modern period will show, historical veracity is both the
central claim and the central problem of Christianity. The claim that the events
within its stories actually happened, often despite any other corroborating evidence, is especially problematic with the Conception and Nativity stories. Today,
even the sincerest Christian believers might ask (or perhaps prefer not to ask)
why the stuff of legend and folk story dreams, angelic visitations, a miraculous star with no known historical record, a miraculous conception and birth
characterize the story. There are also many historical puzzles regarding what
became the canonical writings. Why does the narrator of Luke or, for that matter,
Matthew in its very different account of events, get dates and places, rulers and
customs, so radically wrong? 25 The most notorious (repeatedly noticed as the
early modern period merges into the Enlightenment) is that Matthew and Luke
state that Jesuss birth occurred under Herod the Greats rule; yet Herod died in
4 bc, making it likely that Jesus was born around the years 57 bc. Jesuss place
of birth is ambiguous, with a significant number of modern Christian scholars
now acknowledging it probably occurred in Nazareth rather than Bethlehem
without, it might be added, such knowledge having any impact on Christmas
pageants, carols, or the sale of Christmas cards or stamps. Historical records show
no identifiable census such as Luke mentions.26 No slaughter of the innocents
by Herod is recorded elsewhere; modern biographies of Herod find no evidence
for it, however evocative the event became in later drama, music, and art.27 To
the many such historical anomalies in the Gospels can be added many internal
contradictions. There are incompatible genealogies for Jesus in Matthew and
Luke, an observation pointed out not only by modern scholars but by the early
Jewish Christian community, the Ebionites, likely the descendants of the original
Jerusalem community associated with Jesuss brother James.28
With different traditions and emphases, often acquired or modified through
contacts with other religions, all these early accounts nevertheless were centered on the charismatic figure whose attributed title eventually provided the
seemingly unifying label of Christians to disparate beliefs and practices. The
earliest followers of Jesus seem to have recalled him variously: some as a messianic
prophet with charismatic preaching and proselytizing gifts, a not uncommon
phenomenon in the inflammable religious and political atmosphere of the rebellious outskirts of the Roman empire; others more akin to what Mack categorizes
as a Cynic-like sage; others, especially after his death, as having some uniquely
intimate relationship with the God of the Hebrew scriptures, whether by crea-
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tion or adoption or exaltation.29 It is the latter view that comes to be part of

Christian orthodoxy. Initially, the Jesus people saw themselves as faithful Jews,
and only gradually become describable as Christians, as they felt the need, with
some reluctance, to distance themselves from their parental Jewish world, and
later to differentiate themselves from rival Christian groups.30
By the last quarter of the first century, around these various memories
recalled, handed on, reinterpreted, invented a number of alternative, even
rival, cults had been built. One was in Jerusalem, headed by Jesuss brother James
which was probably wiped out in the sack of Jerusalem in the year 70, which
thereafter never became the fulcrum of Christian life until some centuries later
when what became known as the Holy Land became a site of inter-religious
conflict; others, the remnants of the original Jesus people or the people of Q,
continued in Galilee, nearby Syria and, at least according to the Coptic tradition, in Egypt; while, still others are referred to in a number of letters, dating
in their earliest extant copies from around ad 300 but many undoubtedly originally written some twenty or thirty years after the prophets death by a man
eventually known to the Christian world as Paul or by followers writing on his
behalf or in imitation of him. This alternative founding father of Christianity
probably had no contact with the original communities in Galilee or Jerusalem
but was convinced that he had encountered the prophet in a vision; his proselytizing and supervisory letters (and others attributed to him) nurtured a number
of differently focused groups in other parts of the Mediterranean.
Neither any of the Pauline letters, nor the material in Q, nor the first-written
Gospels of Mark and Thomas mention an Annunciation event regarding the
conception of the prophet. As L. Michael White comments, the matter of Jesuss
birth, family, and childhood was simply not a topic of interest for these early
communities.31 Lincoln points out that the eventual doctrine of the virginal
conception plays a minimal role outside the two infancy narratives in Luke or
Matthew and its presence within them is beset with ambiguities and alternative explanations derived from later interpretations.32
To understand the Annunciation story as it was culturally inscribed for men
and women living in Western Europe between, say, 1500 and 1700 requires us
not just to understand something of the texts origins and early history; but as
well, I believe, we must attempt to set up a dialogue (or rather a polylogue since
there are many voices) that looks back from our own time and takes into account
opinions from both within and outside the communities of believers. Throughout, therefore, I ask whether there are insights not just from New Testament
scholarship but from modern studies of the psychology or sociology of religion
that might help explain the power and indeed the distinctive narrative shape of
the Annunciation story. It is an approach that might prove to be controversial
not least to any who see the Annunciation as an historical event but I think
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it offers some helpful, admittedly speculative, answers to the question of why,

apart from the certainly not inconsiderable residual power of the Church, the
story has had such a profound and lasting impact in Western cultural history and
in particular why its power was only gradually challenged within the turbulent
transitional world of late medieval and early modern Europe.
For the past century many anthropologists have drawn attention to common patterns and motifs among religions. Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, for instance, notes that
an essential pattern of religious narratives is the recurring interconnected themes of
family, parenting and kinship. Freud offered the Oedipal motif as a universal story,
with the elimination of the father a decisive Oedipal triumph. The anthropologist
Lord Raglan described the recurring Hero myth, in which the mother is a virgin,
the father a king, the circumstances of the conception surprising and with a miracle birth narrative an assertion of uniqueness and superiority. Stephen Benko and
many others have pointed to the absorption in Christian mythology of rival religions patterns of belief and practice.33 Annunciation scenes abound in the Hebrew
Bible itself, such as those to the wife of Manoah (Judges 21) to Sarah, the wife of
Abraham (Genesis 21), or to Hagar, mother of Ishmael (Genesis 16).
But the contemporary scholarship most directly relevant to my study of the
Annunciation story comes from perspectives offered by feminist philosophers
and theologians. Feminist theory and criticism has become so taken for granted
in the contemporary intellectual scene that we may forget how relatively recent
a phenomenon it is. Major feminist revaluations of the Virgin Mary as a cultural
phenomenon dates only from the 1970s.34 A key to understanding at least some
of the stories behind the Annunciation story, I have come to believe, lies predominantly where many contemporary feminist theologians locate it, that it has been
not just male theologians but underlying patriarchal ideologies that have established the dynamics of veneration of the Virgin, and that the patterns of fantasy
and wish-fulfillment generated by the traditional understanding of the Annunciation story are primarily male-dominated ones. For 2000 years, the Catholic
theologian Jane Schaberg observes, only half of the Christian population has been
represented in serious Christian interpretation of the Annunciation story since
women have had little or nothing to do with the construction and development
of the belief , and historically women have been trained to read in accordance
with male-authored orthodoxy. For two millennia, this argument goes, women
have been positioned, with the help of the image of the humble and obedient
Virgin, to accept phallocentric values that encourage them (not, fortunately,
always successfully) to regress into a primitive world of subordination. For some
feminists, the Annunciation story in Luke is, in the title of Sandra Schneiders
study, beyond patching.35 For others, a more optimistic re-mythologization is
possible: by confronting the male-stream interests of traditional exegesis, Kilian
McDonnell argues, we need to overrule this misogyny in creative and liberating
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ways. For such optimistic readings, the aloneness of Mary with the angel is not,
as many see it, the encoding of subordination and oppression but the moment
when a complex new awareness of herself emerges into the womans existence,
with Marys response in the Annunciation seen as an act beyond the control of
the male.36 Beattie comments on the urgent need for western culture in general
and Christianity in particular to rediscover their lost connections to birth, fecundity, sexuality, and incarnation, all of which emerge from positive re-readings
of the Annunciation. For these feminist interpretations, the Annunciation thus
becomes an affirmation of womens bodies and female autonomy outside the
hegemonic power of male authority and male fantasies.37
Looking at the many sides of this debate, the special claim of feminist scholarship and specifically feminist theology is that, in all its multiple versions, the
Annunciation story has reverberated with mystery and controversy in part
because it is centred on the body of a woman, with powerful implications for
the bodies of all women. As Kristeva puts it, it is around the meeting of representation and biology in womens bodily experiences that the issues of the
Annunciation revolve. The story places its readers between the sensible and the
nameable: Woman, a being on the borderline, biology and meaning, is likely,
she argues, to participate in both sides of the sacred, in calm appeasement [and]
in spasm or delirium.38 Yet however central to the story, from the beginning
Marys actual physical body has been curiously selectively acknowledged, often
seemingly reduced to a face, two hands, two breasts (sometimes only one), and
a hymen. As Beattie comments, with some force, the male-authored theological
tradition has regarded the female sexual body as the greatest threat to mens
spiritual well-being, and will continue to distort what it is to be human until
women began to bring the seepage of bodiliness, desire, and matter into the
linguistic domain of the academic world in the late twentieth century.39 Despite
protests that the deity or deities involved are beyond gender, the Christian God
(his, her, or its Jewish and Islamic counterparts likewise) was likewise traditionally imagined (and imaged) as male, and the human response, especially as
idealized in the Annunciation, generally coded as female. Beattie speaks for many
contemporary Christian feminists when she asserts that all present constructs of
sexual difference within traditional Christian theology have been products of
masculinity, and that what poses as the feminine in western culture is in fact the
masculine imaginary; male Church authorities have created the Virgin in ways
that involve the erasure of the body and especially of the sexed female body, and
Mary has been an object that can be filled with all kinds of fantasies, which then
become the normative way of seeing her.40
Feminist exegesis focuses less on the intent of the text and more on the
underlying experiential patterns and wish-fulfillments the text enacts the
gendered stories behind the stories. Another area of contemporary thought
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on which I draw therefore is psychoanalysis, making what Kristeva calls the

psychoanalytic leap into understanding our pasts as well as our presents. 41BeitHallahmi, surveying the analysis of religious experience by various schools of
modern psychology, acknowledges that psychoanalysis has been called speculative, untested, or untestable, but also that it has nevertheless been enormously
influential on the ways we understand and explain the origins and persistence
of religious beliefs and practices. Like most religions, psychoanalysis assumes a
level of universal experience, mainly focused on such matters as the basic mechanism of projection, the universal experience of helplessness, the tendency for
compensation through fantasy, and the impact of early relations with protective figures.42 Beattie comments that both Christianity and psychoanalysis claim
humanity is marked by originating experience of catastrophic loss that gives rise
to an insatiable yearning for restoration and wholeness.43
Reality the Real comments Jacques Lacan, is phantasmatic played
out on the level of fantasy, and who knows what is happening in his/her
unconscious?44 I therefore draw on an eclectic combination of psychoanalytic
approaches, sidling up to a variety of speculations, probing the shadows of our
cultural unconscious with what help I can find.45 I have no set school or mode
of interrogation to follow. I draw on the pioneering work on the history of popular Catholicism, especially on the cult of the Virgin, by Michael P. Carroll whose
many studies have grown from the Freudian tradition. From a different psychoanalytic perspective, Carl Jung , discussing therapeutic techniques in an age when
so many traditional symbols no longer speak to us, wrote that
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analysis should release an experience that grips us or falls upon us as from above, an
experience that has substance and body, such as those things occurred to the ancients.
If I were going to symbolize it, I would choose the Annunciation.46
I have therefore found not just theoretical but clinically based observations on
recurring desires and fantasies extremely helpful, especially the work of Stoller,
Louise Kaplan, Jessica Benjamin and the classic studies of male fantasies by
Klaus Theweleit.47 Clinical psychoanalysts, especially those working with issues
of gender, have for a century and more helped us focus on the ways as adults we
develop fantasy scripts in order to undo, even if temporarily, childhood conflicts
and frustrations not only traumatic instances but the universal experiences of
separation and individuation by converting those early painful defeats and
losses into acceptable scripts and narratives. The Annunciation is one of the
stories that may help us, even temporarily, the psychoanalytical theorist and practitioner Robert Stoller comments, to fashion a new, better reality.48Studying the
history of the Annunciations interpretations, we find multiple stories that have
been attached to the original very much in the way that our unconscious desires
are projected into dream stories and inner landscapes. Some of those claims we
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might recognize as being close to our own deepest beliefs; others, with surprise
or even horror, as foisted upon us by deep-rooted psychological or broader cultural pressures. Like all of us working in this field, I am especially indebted to the
extensive work,blendng psychoanalysis and history, theory and clinical practice,
philosophy and fiction, of Julia Kristeva. Kristeva has written extensively on the
Annunciation and the cult of the Virgin. In addition to simply being an extraordinarily clever construction, one reason the Annunciation story has such power
in our history, she asserts, is that it is a before the beginning, or before-theword experience, drawing into itself multiple contradictory but deep-rooted
desires and fantasies that inhabit us, even before we attempt to formulate our
beliefs, let alone construct dogmatic statements. She speaks movingly of the
experience of the the eruption of a new pre-object: an emergence, a flash, or an
immediate perception or, to further quote her extraordinary re-creation of the
life of Teresa of Avila, that nameless threshold of the self where the erotic drive
becomes meaning in moment of infinite possession: that of you by your own
self .49 That invasive surprise and the multiple interpretive possibilities seem to
be at the heart of the Annunciatory experience.
Kristeva further comments with some irony about her Virgin Mary who,
she suspects, it is not in complete conformity with the canon of the Church,50
and I conclude my introduction with a similar confession. An objection to my
approach, especially from traditional Christians, might well be that in setting
the Annunciation story within modern speculations about the complexity of
human desires and fantasies, and drawing on cultural or psychoanalytical models
of exegesis, I am ignoring what the story itself claims and what believers would
see as its appropriate religious roots. The Bible, Timothy George firmly states,
is the churchs book; he protests that even the historical-critical approach to
the biblical text the basis of what I have termed contemporary academic New
Testament scholarship needs to asert its independence from the context of an
increasingly secularized academy divorced from the life and faith of the people
of God.51 Such an exclusivist condemnation unfortunately seems a version of
what Kristeva describes as a destructive fundamentalism that is dangerous in the
fractured world of the twenty-first century. It is also an approach that would
exclude not only scholarship like mine but also a large proportion of contemporary New Testament scholars!52 Clearly it is not a perspective I share. I look at
the Annunciation not as a believer for whom the answer to the question why
has the Annunciation been important in our cultural history? might simply
be because that is the way God chose to reveal himself but from a position
closer to that of MacCulloch, who speaks of being only at best a candid friend
of Christianity, while appreciating the seriousness which a religious mentality
brings to the mystery and misery of human existence.53 Although not a believer,
I have been absorbed for many years on this topic as intensely as many who are
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and I hope with not dissimilar reverence since I have become convinced that
the Annunciation story belongs not to one or two religious traditions but is
polyphonous, reaching deeply into multiple collective and individual psychological histories. My position therefore, at root, is one of reverent fascination
towards this fascinating story and its multiple invented traditions. Although
it may lack historical verifiability, right from its beginning, this short, cryptic,
understated story of an encounter between Mary and an angel a tableau of just
over 200 words, and with only two or three characters has been a discursive
machine of multiple stories. For those who today are (or attempt to be) outside
the cultural anxiety of the continuing Christian traditions, we may regard the
story with fascination or curiosity but perhaps with nostalgia for a world we
have (regrettably) lost, complex feelings which to come back from the personal
to the scholarly we can trace as surfacing tentatively and then more strongly in
the early modern period. I move now to analyse something of this process.
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Chapter 1 From A Cultural Study of Mary and The Annunciation

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Chapter 1 From A Cultural Study of Mary and The Annunciation

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1 HISTORY AND HISTORIA: READING

THE ANNUNCIATION STORY FROM THE

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History and Historia

I extend the implications of Richters reworking of Titian into broader cultural

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History and Historia

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History and Historia

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History and Historia

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tion or adoption or exaltation.29 It is the latter view that comes to be part of

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History and Historia

it offers some helpful, admittedly speculative, answers to the question of why,

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History and Historia

on which I draw therefore is psychoanalysis, making what Kristeva calls the

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History and Historia

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