Hetmanka and Mother: Representing the Virgin Mary in Modern Poland BRIAN PORTER When Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II in 1978, he proclaimed that the slogan for his papacy would be ‘Totus Tuus’ (totally yours). The “you” to whom he was addressing this commitment was the Virgin Mary, Blessed Mother, Queen of Heaven, Handmaiden of the Lord, Mater Dolorosa, Woman of Valour, Paragon of Chastity, Supreme Mediatrix and (certainly not least) Queen of Poland. As suggested by this list of her titles (and there are many more – the popular Litany of Loreto includes forty-nine invocations), Mary is what we might today call “multivalent”. Over the centuries of Roman Catholic history, she has been made to carry a wide variety of meanings and serve a multitude of purposes. Nonetheless, she isn’t quite all things to all people: when one invokes the Virgin, one must contend with a conceptual legacy that both constrains what one may say and grants (sometimes unintended) significance to what one does say. This legacy is heavily determined by an officially sanctioned Catholic theology that provides a great deal of continuity across time and space, but culturally distinctive metaphors and local shifts in emphasis nonetheless allow Mary to assume a variety of forms. Just as, for example, Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe has been configured to play an important role in that country’s discussion of indigenous rights and just as the Virgin of Lourdes has been deployed in debates about rationalism and secularisation in France, so has Poland’s Virgin developed alongside that country’s ongoing preoccupation with “the national question”. 1 I would like to thank Barbara Anderson, Elena Campbell, Bogdana Carpenter, John Connelly, Herb Eagle, Halina Filipowicz, Robert Greene, Val Kivelson, Olga Maiorova, Kristin McGuire, Bill Rosenberg, Jindrich Toman, Katherine Verdery and the two anonymous reviewers for Contemporary European History for their useful comments on earlier drafts of this article. 1 On Mary and Marianism, see Michael Carroll, The Cult of the Virgin Mary: Psychological Origins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Eamon Duffy, What Catholics Believe about Mary (London: CTS Publications, 1989); Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion (London: Sheed & Ward, 1985); Michael O’Carroll, Theotokos: A Theological Encyclopedia of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1982); Joseph Paredes, Mary and the Kingdom of God: A Synthesis of Mariology (Slough: St Paul Publications, 1991); Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Quartet Books, 1978). On Guadalupe, see D. A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ana Castillo, ed., Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Am´ ericas: Writings on the Contemporary European History, 14, 2 (2005), pp. 151–170 C  2005 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0960777305002298 Printed in the United Kingdom