Robin Hood and Maiden Mary

Résumé

As well as a Christian name, “Marian” is an adjective related to the cult of, and devotion to, Saint Mary, Herself traditionally associated with the month of May, which includes Mother’s Day. Mary’s own status as a ‘spiritual mother’ for Catholic and — up to the 16th century Reformation(s) — Christian believers, as well as a model for all women, a paradigm of virtue and perfection and thus the opposite of everything that Eve stood for in medieval theological thought and exegesis, account for what Derek Pearsall has suggestively called “Mariolatry”. This Marian devotion, patent in many poems of the 14th and 15th centuries, left powerful traces in the oldest surviving Robin Hood ballads, a fact which inspired my title: “Robin Hood and Maiden Mary”, rather than the phonetically akin, and more predictable one, “Robin Hood and Maid Marian”.