Being the woman who brought to the world the historical body of Christ, Mary can also be perceived as the provider of his Eucharistic body, since these two physical entities were considered one and the same corpus according to Late Antique and Medieval Christian belief.  Indeed, the 2nd-century Protevangelion of James included a number of allusions to Mary as high priest(ess), while Late Antique and Byzantine literary and visual production regularly hailed her in more or less explicit Eucharistic terms. At the same time, the institution of the Church was male-dominated at least from the 4th century onwards and women’s access to the clergy was increasingly restricted. This paper asks what Mary’s Eucharistic role could have meant for women who could never aspire to become priestesses or even enter the space of the sanctuary and yet saw the Mother of God presiding over a male clergy and dominating that same holy space as provider of the food of salvation. A close reading of primary and secondary textual and visual sources will show that, contrary to what is argued in recent scholarship, women’s liturgical roles were drastically curtailed from the 4th century onwards and the growing Eucharistic role of the Theotokos cannot be seen as evidence for a contemporary female priesthood. Instead, women could relate to Mary through traditional gender roles (textile- and food- production and child-bearing/-rearing), although even such connections were often discouraged by Church leaders. Using the 6th-century Euphrasian basilica in Poreč (modern Croatia) as a case study, the paper will also explore why, in comparison to that early period, later Byzantine visual production did not emphasize empowering aspects of Mary’s motherhood (such as pregnancy and breast-feeding) that could have made her Eucharistic role more relatable to women.

Maria Evangelatou is Associate Professor at the Department of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her first book examines Ethiopian crosses as visual discourse and her second book will discuss 9th-century Byzantine Psalter illustration as political and theological discourse. She has published articles and book chapters on Byzantine manuscript illumination, the cult of Mary, and the art of El Greco (who will be the subject of her third book).