The Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Devotion and Iconography

Dear Colleagues,

You are kindly invited to submit your articles to this Special Issue.

This Special Issue will explore some of the various ways in which the Virgin Mary was venerated and represented within Christianity during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. During that long millennium, the figure of Mary acquired an increasingly relevant role among Christians as virginal Mother of God the Son, perpetual Virgin, Queen of Heaven, and helper and mediator between God and men, especially in the Last Judgment. Based, above all, on the Christological and Mariological dogmas established by the Church in the successive Ecumenical Councils of Nicaea I (325), Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451) and Constantinople II (553), the cult of the Virgin was rapidly consolidated in Christianity, expressing itself in a varied panoply of Marian dedications, numerous religious festivals, a multitude of hymns, prayers and liturgical services in her honor, as well as in an endearing popular devotion to the "Mother of God and our mother". All these experiential manifestations were translated, in turn, into a wide corpus of artistic, pictorial and sculptural images, which sought to make visible that protagonism of Mary in the lives of the faithful.

There are countless academic studies that deal separately with one or another of these expressions toward the Virgin. In this sense, the fundamental purpose of this monographic Special Issue of Religions is to try to gather several specialists from various academic fields and combine their contributions on this subject from a multidisciplinary and transversal perspective.

In this way, scholars of history, Mariology, theology, philosophy, arts and humanities, iconography, sociology and other branches of knowledge will contribute to shaping a book with a polyhedral and multifocal approach that aspires to provide a useful supplement to the existing literature.

Prof. Dr. José María Salvador-González
Guest Editor

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