ABSTRACT
Anna Brownell Murphy Jameson was in her century an influential practitioner of feminist scholarship and a respected and versatile professional writer, whose works were reviewed in the major British periodicals. In Legends of the Madonna, Jameson divides her discussion of artistic representations of Mary into two parts— Devotional Subjects, and Historical Subjects. The study of the Madonna and Jameson suggests some new directions for scholarship on women and religion. Jameson was quite unusual among nineteenth-century Anglo-American feminists for her ability to see liberatory potential in the figure of the Madonna. Of her contemporaries, the Americans Sarah Grimke and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were the most notable feminist interpreters of the Bible, but neither shared Jameson's high regard for the Virgin Mary. The religious experiences of Grimke and Stanton, combined with the aesthetic barrenness of their young country, help explain the almost complete absence of references to visual art in their work.
