“Julia Kristeva calls the Virgin a "combination of power and sorrow, sovereignty and the unnnameable," making up "one of the most powerful imaginary constructs known in the history of civilization" It is Kristeva's "unnameable" by which I am primarily fascinated, both in relation to the Virgin herself (insofar as we can speak of "her" as dissociated from any construct of her), and in relation to the reactions of attraction and repulsion to the Virgin in early modern England. The force of that "unnameable" may at times be explicit, but more likely has to be inferred, forcing us to search for the non-saids and the unsayables as well as the saids, probing silences (what was not said_ and the absences (what was not able to be said) of recorded events, records, and literary and other "cultural" texts.”
