Beauty and Virtue in Castilian “Lives of Mary”

Abstract

There are very few descriptions of the Virgin’s physical beauty in the texts we know generically as “Lives of Mary”. This shortage could be explained by the fact that this topic is not in the apocryphal gospels related with the Pseudo-Matthew, which are the usual source of stories about the early life of Mary. Here examples of references to the beauty of the Virgin are presented, eight in Spanish works, compared with two Catalan and three Latin and Greek sources. As the corpus is classified, the particulars of the three Castilian stories of the late Middle Ages and Early Modernity that do contain prosopographies of the Mother of God are shown: the metaphorical and symbolic approach of Juan López de Salamanca (1465-1468), the synthesis of sources not without innovations by Juan de Robles (before 1511), and the more literal, physical expression of Gomez García (around 1512). Special consideration will receive the Libro de las historias de Nuestra Señora, by López de Salamanca, which provides the largest and most complex passage about the beauty of the Virgin. As regards to the shape of the text, it is remarkable the singularity of dialogue between Mary herself and a young countess (actually the person to whom the work is dedicated), converted into a disciple of the Virgin. In terms of content, it is striking the transmutation of the corporeal into doctrinal through metaphor.

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