CMS Research Seminar: Aubrey de Vere's ecological Mary

We are delighted that Emma Mason, Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, will give the May research seminar organised by the Centre for Marian Studies.

Theme

Aubrey Thomas Hunt de Vere was born in Limerick in 1814 and began writing poetry as a student at Trinity College, Dublin. Following a trip to England in the 1840s, de Vere befriended the poet William Wordsworth and returned to Ireland in 1846 to help with relief work following the potato famine.

Received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1851, de Vere worked with John Henry Newman at the Catholic University in Dublin and finally moved back to Limerick to research Irish legend and history.

The figure of Mary became a favoured topic, and he turned to her in his poetry to counter the threat of modernity to the natural world.

Professor Mason’s paper will focus on his volume May Carols (1857) written in response to a direct request from Pope Pius IX to compose a series of poems ‘glorifying and explaining the cult of the Blessed Virgin’.

She will show how de Vere fulfils Pope Pius’ request by depicting Mary as an ecological mediator between human beings and the more-than-human world.

Guest speaker

Professor Emma Mason researches and teaches Catholic poetry, theology, and philosophy at the University of Warwick, and her books include Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (Oxford University Press, 2018), Reading the Abrahamic Faiths (Bloomsbury, 2015), Elizabeth Jennings: The Collected Poems (2012), and The Oxford Handbook to the Reception History of the Bible (2011).

Her current project explores Catholic mysticism in the poetry and philosophy of Raïssa Maritain, Edith Stein, Simone Weil, and Caryll Houselande.

Register

If you would like to receive the free Zoom link, please send an email to Catherine O'Brien at info@marianstudies.ac.uk