ABSTRACT
The fear of, fascination with, and hostility toward maternal power in early modern English culture motivated attempts to understand and control, even repudiate it in medical treatises about reproduction, prescriptive writings on breastfeeding and other maternal conduct, legal constructions of infanticide, and witchcraft discourses and prosecutions. Discussions of the Virgin Mary’s apparently exceptional status participate in this more widespread construction of maternal power as a problem. Many seventeenth-century English writers, Protestant and Catholic, male and female, defended or attacked Mariolatry as a central practice in English Catholicism, as a paradigmatic example of where Catholics invested power and directed adoration, and as a telling analogy to the distribution of power in the Caroline court and in recusant households. The varied perspectives available demonstrate that, as Mary Beth Rose has argued, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, “motherhood was very slowly beginning to be construed as a problematic status, and that the perceived conflicts center on parental power and authority.”
