The Virgin Mary and the Sacred Body - The Ideology of Gender Embodied in the Cistercian Church

Abstract

The Cistercians' choice of dedicating the entire order to the Virgin Mary is of vital importance to an analysis of the ideology embodied in their specific architecture. Mary, the "debodied" sacred body, the "dewomanized" woman, was the very essence of the Cistercian way of life. The aim of this paper is not to make an overview of the Cistercian order but to show how ideology —here understood as a mental dimension of a material practice —can be seen in material culture and, in this case, identified in written sources.