Mother Queens and Princely Sons: Rogue Madonnas in the Age of Shakespeare (Queenship and Power)

This study explores representations of the Madonna and Child in early modern culture. It considers the mother and son as a conceptual, religio-political unit and examines the ways in which that unit was embodied and performed. Of primary interest is the way mothers derived agency from bearing incipient rulers. By focusing on agency and authority, the book traces a pattern between the symbiotic unity of Madonna and Child and other influential, dimorphic concepts, what author Sid Ray calls 'accolated bodies,' in early modern thought: the king's two bodies, marital coverture, and the doctrine of the hypostatic union of man and God in Christ, each with its variation on how the two bodies in question share authority. Attuned to Catholic historical and cultural reverberations of the Madonna and Child and debates about the origins of power, this book reassesses the mother-son unit, focusing on its inversion of conventional gender roles and potential to destabilize and redefine the ways in which gender and power operate. Ultimately, the book argues that representations of the mother-son unit contested Protestant patriarchal authority by offering meritocratic and egalitarian alternatives to established models of governance.