On the Road with the Mater Dolorosa: An Exploration of Mother-Son Discourse Performance

Abstract

Romanos's Mary at the Cross isolates mother and son alone together on the rhetorical set, and gives maternal panic full-throated voice-it is not simply Christ's passion, but his mother's.25 The memre on the binding of Isaac by Pseudo-Ephrem, in turn, further broaden the dynamic possibilities by introducing far more explicitly narrative elements into the story and establishing Sarah as another figure of heroic maternal resilience.26 As distant as these works are from the Hebrew and Aramaic texts by linguistic and confessional measures, thematic and formal concerns-poetic responses to the demands of a lectionary and to the pressures and expectations of a shared cultural framework-permit a comparative reading of these works.27 Romanos's kontakion on Mary at the Cross seems to have, as a biblical background, the passage in Luke 23.27-29 that states: [...]I would like to thank the two anonymous readers for their insightful and constructive comments. 1. [...]ibn Ezra synthesizes earlier rabbinical traditions recorded in the Babylonian Talmud, Baba Batra 119b-120a and midrash Tanhuma Ve'etchanan 6 (Midrash tanhumah, vol. 2 [ Jerusalem: Eshkol, 1972], 855). [...]a classic work in the field remains Alexiou, Ritual Lament.