if you ever get a chance, i highly recommend that you see the episode "a question of succession" from monarchy with david starkey, which i caught earlier on pbs. it's about henry VIII's children and their successive reigns, focusing on the religious turmoil that took place in england during that time. the actress they have portraying mary I in the documentary, even though she mostly just sits or stands there looking determined, strikes me as an excellent likeness. does anyone else actually go and compare portraits? i think there's something wrong with me.


i've been interested in mary tudor and her personal story ever since i read carolly erickson's novel-like biography, bloody mary. erickson's prose style and mary's own evident single-minded devotion to the roman catholic church are a combination that can make her long struggle with an uncertain place in royal succession and pathological need for the latin mass into a story that is one of the most fascinating things i've ever read.

catholic fanaticism is expected, though, just look at the childhood this woman had:

“From earliest infancy, he [the Spanish humanist Vives, who devised a plan of study for the young Mary] insisted, she should be kept away from the company of men, lest she become attached to the male sex. Since ‘a woman that thinketh alone, thinketh evil,’ she was to be surrounded at all times with ‘sad, pale, and untrimmed’ servants and taught to weave and spin when her lessons were over. Weaving Vives recommended as inducing a ‘love of sober sadness,’ an approved frame of consciousness likely to discourage the sensual musings native to all females. Of the ‘foul ribaldry’ of popular songs and books the young girl should know nothing, and should beware of romances ‘as serpents or snakes.’ Lest she trust herself too much, he advised, she should be encouraged to fear being alone; she should be trained to require the company of others and rely on them for everything. Vives’ recommendations amounted to a deliberate programming for helplessness, with the feelings of inferiority and depression that accompany it.” (Erickson 43)

but wait, that’s not all such godly folk had in store for their women:

“But his warnings against sensuality were even more harmful. The child’s movements should be watched, he noted, to prevent ‘uncomely gestures or moving of the body.’ Only the blandest food should be served, which would not ‘inflame the body.’ He recommended that as an adolescent Mary should fast to ‘bridle the body and press it down, and quench the heat of youth.’ Fasting, always a mark of the ascetic life, became in the early sixteenth century the special hallmark of young female saints. Popular pamphlets told of the prodigious fast of one young girl in the Netherlands, Eve Fliegen, who gave up all food and drink and subsisted for years entirely on the scent of roses. Weak wine was permissible, Vives thought, but water was best, since ‘it is better that the stomach ache than the mind.’ All adornment of the body was of course hazardous. Like the sight of men, perfumes and ointments ‘fire the maid with jeopardous heat’ and were to be avoided, and Mary’s guardians were to impress on her that an alluring woman is ‘a poisoner and sword’ to all who see her.

Mary’s education was intended to provide her with an intellectual chastity belt—a view of herself and of the spiritual dangers facing all women that would frighten her into an attitude of withdrawn virtue. For it was a vital corollary to this concept of self that it was only compatible with a life of domesticity. Public life in any form was impossible for women, for it meant loss of chastity and good repute. Vives’ model of female behavior envisioned a woman at home and silent, with ‘few to see her and none at all to hear her.’ Leaving the house was full of perils; it demanded that she ‘prepare her mind and stomach none otherwise than if she went to fight.’ In streets and public places ‘the darts of the Devil are flying on every side,’ Vives insisted, and her only defenses were the good examples she had been taught, her determination to remain chaste and ‘a mind ever bent toward Christ.’ To forestall prying eyes she should cover her neck and veil her face, leaving ‘scarcely an eye open to see the way.’

Vives’ educational doctrines called for claustration, cultivated prudery and an exaggerated horror of sensuality in every form. They were more the product of Spanish than English attitudes toward women, but Vives took many of his teachings directly from the works of St. Jerome, whose views on female education had been a respected part of Christian culture since antiquity. That women were morally inferior to men was a commonplace of theology, and the fathers and scholastics of the middle ages had elaborated dozens of antifeminist formulas. The traditional starting point of these arguments was the Christian story of creation itself, in which Adam was made directly by God but Eve was made only indirectly, by means of Adam’s flesh. Eve was thus not made in God’s image but in Adam’s, and was inferior to him. It was Eve, too, who tempted Adam to disobey God and was responsible for mankind’s fall. To these sins scholastic theologians added the Aristotelian teaching that all female creatures are “misbegotten males”—biological accidents and imperfections. Man was seen as the norm of humankind, woman as the abnormal exception, and some Christian writers wondered whether, at the last judgment, women would rise from the dead in female form or whether they would be resurrected in the perfect form of men.” (Erickson 43-44)

read that closely, and, though society has certainly come far, you'll see a lot of currents of thought that have ruling stakes in some strains of popular morality in major world religions. erickson goes on from there to elaborate on some more twisted biblical demonstrations of the rightness of male authority in all things. it's just been around for so long that most everyone has fallen into it on a cultural level, been raised into it, maybe baptised before you even knew what you were getting into like in my family, or just raised in a family that reinforced this type of thinking. patty's a strong woman and the anti-woman tides of catholicism (though all of this applies to any conservative religion) never got much play in my household growing up. we were catholics in name only, and now i'm not even that, though i constantly endeavour to find out how and why people stay with it when it seems so terrible to me. though this example is from so long ago, i think it illustrates that childhood has ever so much to do with it, and the fear of sin to a young christian is disabling. it becomes all-consuming, because so many elements of that morality seek to combat nature itself, the natural sensual urges of the body, as if they were something wicked.

that fear came at me so many times when i'd question an element of my birthright faith, and the fact that the religious education department at my church was so lax in making sure we actually knew things we were supposed to know before confirmation allowed my oft-related and off-putting brush with actual catholic dogma in book form to take place after confirmation, when i was at a more advanced and freethinking age and able to reject once and for all that which i'd only weeks earlier been officially initiated into.

katie from the neighbourhood of old came from a really religious family, and i remember her saying even when we were all in single-digit ages that she believed this life was only a practice life for whatever comes afterwards. but are we to spend our lives in a state of "practice" in avoiding what pleasures are allowed to mortal beings, immobilised by fear? does a higher being closely watch our bedrooms? i could go on, but nietzsche sums it up perfectly: "the christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad." fundamentalist religion having the power it does these days, there is cause for concern. as the expression would have it, god help us.

as for myself, i'm going to stay up all night watching björk videos and hoping for thunderstorms in the early morning hours. hello, august.