5 - The Female Believers: A Deviation from the Gender Culture of the Age

Summary

Let me open this chapter with what the women members of The Poor of Lyons were deprived of – they were deprived of the worship of the Holy Virgin and of the other saints, male and female, as well as of the opportunities for social-religious activity in the community. We have seen that The Poor of Lyons regarded St Mary as the mother of God, but did not believe in her power to mediate between the faithful and her Son; they reduced her worship, and rejected her artistic depiction in paintings and statues, and even the prayer ‘Hail Mary’. This meant that the female Poor of Lyons were deprived of a central focus in the religious life of Catholic women – a female element and symbol, and an object of identification which fulfilled a profound emotional need, an expression of a transcendent feminine ideal and a return to the mother, as well as a refuge from a male deity and male priesthood. The spokesmen for the Church knew how to utilize St Mary as the model for the feminine role, whose humility and resignation supported the social and symbolic order. Yet at the same time, the Virgin was occasionally depicted as a powerful matriarchal and subversive image which challenged masculine theology. This was what the Waldensian women lost. The spiritual life of the Sisters and female Believers had no use for the imaginary matriarchate whose artistic expression, in painting and sculpture, was a female dynasty consisting of St Anne, St Mary and the infant Jesus (known in German as Anna Selbdritt); and in the figures known as the ‘Open Virgin’: a sculpture of St Mary nursing the infant Jesus which opened to reveal the entire Holy Trinity nestling in her body as in a shrine. According to Erich Wolf, St Mary, who expressed people's emotional needs, stood for the private and familial area which, though governed by the male, had the female at its focus. Jesus, on the other hand, symbolized the public arena, namely, the world of men. Mary's worship expressed the inward, private world, which was especially meaningful for women, an antithesis to the instrumental relationships which dominated the political, financial and labour arenas.