Various hypotheses have been advanced concerning the reason for the prominent role accorded to woman within the western discourses of idealized love. In my view, both their contradictory idea of a chaste female beloved, and the political significance of these discourses (in particular the implications of their appropriation by Renaissance absolutism), are best illuminated by reference to a theological source. Some scholars have attempted to relate the cult of the Virgin Mary to the rise of idealized attitudes to love, since the precursor of the Renaissance systems, medieval courtly love, reached its peak of greatest popularity and sophistication at a time when devotion to the Virgin was accelerating. 1 In fact, Mary had little in common with the idealized women of courtly love, whose unavailability was usually strictly temporary. But the emphasis upon chastity in both Petrarchism and Florentine Neoplatonism meant that there were more parallels between Mary and the beloved in these systems (this is anticipated by Dante’s Paradiso, where Dante’s vision of the Virgin is a culminating point in the process of growth initiated by his love of Beatrice). In the Christian monastic tradition, ascetic practices were seen as necessary for the attainment of an especial intimacy with God; however, the physical purity of Mary was of a different order. Its chief purpose in the religious scheme of things was not her own refashioning or rebirth, but the birth of a being of a completely new order, who was seen by Christian theology as constituting a vital link between a divine transcendent principle and a fallen natural world, since his incarnation was held to have initiated the process of that world’s redemption. Just as Mary was seen as a selfless material mirror of heavenly purity, a ‘speculum sine macula’ worthy to be the theotokos, mother of God, so the idealized women of the love discourses were the nurses or receptacles of new men, intermediaries between their lovers as they were, and as they hoped to be.
Yet, on the other hand, the cult of Mary did not define her worship in terms of desire. It did not see her as a bestower of creative as well as worldly power. Nor was emphasis upon her physical and spiritual purity