ABSTRACT
This chapter explores an earlier, less familiar, epoch of Marian piety. In the ninth century, what we find is a devotional culture held in thrall by the power of the ruling family, the Carolingians. In this era, then, motherhood' was yet to be fully abstracted from the family matrix. Twelfth-century contemplation of Mary as a mother changed the way men thought about motherhood. In the later Middle Ages, female mystics might seek to refashion Jesus in their own image but in the first instance, those who imagined Jesus as Mother were not themselves mothers, nor were they female. They were male ascetics. In the following generation, Bernard of Clairvaux and other Cistercian monks began to imagine the crucifixion, startlingly, in terms of a mother nursing her children: the piercing of Jesus' side became, in this perspective, a scene of lactation. This devotion to Jesus as Mother found its modern interpreter in Caroline Bynum.
