This study will examine Chapter 10 of Mary Condren's The Serpent and the Goddess, entitled "The Politics of Virginity: The Cult of the Virgin Mary and the Consolidation of Patriarchal Theology." In this chapter, the author argues that beginning in the twelfth century, the male powers controlling the church and society of Ireland took a new approach to the image of woman in worship. This image centered on Mary in her opposition to the image of Eve, but Condren effectively argues that men were still in charge---of society, of the church, and of the definition of what it meant to be a woman.
As in many historical, religious and socio-legal efforts by powerful men to protect, expand or consolidate their power and wealth, women are the first targets, and the issue at hand is usually related to women's sexuality. Accordingly, Condren notes that the structure existing (before the church/state powers established the cult of the Virgin Mary) had developed into a threat to those powers' desire to centralize both the state and the church:
By keeping marriage within limited degrees of kinship, the power of certain families had increased, and their accumulated wealth had not been dissipated by women marrying outside their structures. Now these powerful families posed a serious problem to the efforts to centralize the powers of both church and state. For this reason the marital practices of the Irish were destined to come under fire (155).
In other words, the church and state wanted to get for themselves more of the money of the richest and most powerful families in Ireland. But in order to do this, the church and state had to re-define the legal standards for marriage. The aim was to loosen these families' hold on their money by making it harder to keep women within the narrow marital bounds which had existed prior to the establishment of the cult of the Virgin Mary.
The result were the so-called laws of incest, which simply forced...