A Fierce Devotion to the “Empress of Hell”

The name sounds charming, but the “Holy Innocents” of Christian tradition are the young boys slaughtered by order of the biblical King Herod as he tried to hunt down the infant Jesus. Though the episode is recounted only briefly in the Gospel of Matthew, medieval devotees in England extensively dramatized the story—along with the rest of the Bible—in so-called “mystery plays” that were performed by common folk across the country. The plays usually portrayed the doomed children’s mothers as resisting Herod’s soldiers, and scholar Katharine Goodland argues that “[t]hese significant deviations from scripture suggest that the women’s cries and curses have a dramatic coherence that requires further investigation.”

The outspoken characters serve as foils to the Virgin Mary, who also grieves for her crucified son. Their actions stand out because “[t]here appears to be an expectation that female sorrow, and especially the Virgin’s, should be dramatized as restrained, picturesque, and lyrical rather than angry and vengeful,” Goodland reflects.

She opposes the dichotomy that other academics have drawn between these mothers, who are seen as more “active” than Mary, a “passive” mourner. Instead, Goodland writes that “the affinity between Mary and the mothers is meaningful in its own right.” As they voice their sorrow, the women collectively demand justice for the losses they suffer.

In various plays, the distressed mothers attack the troops sent to murder their children, calling them “false lurdayns [wretches],” “ffals thefe,” “coward,” “javelle [knave],” and other insults. More colorfully, one mother beats a soldier with a distaff—a rod used for spinning flax or wool—and promises not to stop until he “both shyte and pisse!”

Goodland suggests that their anger parallels Mary’s expression of outrage at Herod, her child’s would-be assassin. In one scene, Mary refers to the tyrant as a “feende” who “dois grette synne”—phrasing eerily similar to the accusations lobbed by the mothers at the soldiers. Indeed, Mary’s lines prove prophetic in the mystery plays, which take significant liberties with their source material.

“At the end of the Massacre death comes for Herod,” Goodland writes, “and the devil ferries him to Hell where he finds himself lost and torn—fitting punishment for the tyrant whose orders ripped the tender flesh of babes and tore them from their mothers’ breasts.”

After all, the condemnation of the Virgin Mary held special power for medieval Christians, who gave her the title “Empress of Hell.”

The fifteenth-century preacher Mirk saw this role as one in which Mary could wield “power oure all yow fyndys” with evil designs on the souls of the dead. Another of Mirk’s sermons tells a lurid story about the Virgin appearing to a judge known for his blasphemy. In this tale, Mary approaches the judge in court and presents him a “fayre child” that is “blody and all tomarturd”—a tortured baby who resembles Herod’s victims.

“When the judge and his mimics ‘swere by Godys passion, and armes, and sydys, and blody wondys’ their words reenact the Crucifixion,” Goodland explains. The aggrieved Mary

appears before the community, convicting the judge and his followers with the evidence of her wounded, bleeding babe, an image that conflates Christ’s nativity with his Crucifixion, the “child-host” motif that was common in late medieval miracles of the Mass.

Goodland connects this tableau with the way mystery plays depicted Candlemas, or the Feast of the Purification, which celebrated Mary’s ritual cleansing after giving birth to Jesus. The Purification marked the highlight of the Christmas stories in all the mystery plays. But in the “N-Town plays”—a cycle that gets its name from references to an unspecified town; the “N” was swapped for the name of a real town when the cycle was performed—Goodland spots

a poignant detail that highlights the human quality of Mary’s motherhood. Instead of giving her son to [the holy man] Symeon, as in the Bible, Mary places him on the altar in a clear iconographical reference to Jesus as the Child-Host, the sacrificial victim of the Mass.

Goodland notes that participating in the mystery plays could offer oppressed medieval townspeople “a plebeian triumph” and “a vehicle for communal catharsis” through ritual. The audience might have been deeply moved by scenes of the mothers’ protests during the massacre of the Holy Innocents because “Herod’s tyranny, like the tyranny of many a medieval warlord, subjects women and children, the lowest citizens of the town, to abhorrent treatment.”

Mary’s motherhood may have been associated with a “profound sense of protection” for medieval devotees.

“During life, she protected them from the violence of nature as well as human evil; after death, as Empress of Hell, she commanded fiends to unhand their souls,” Goodland writes. The emphasis on her “maternal outrage,” she adds, “suggests how closely her mourning was associated with the forces of good that fought against evil in the universe.”

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