Fencing Bear at Prayer

Back in October 2019, I imagined that I would be spending this week in March writing a paper on Mary as “Queen of Angels” which I was planning to present at the 95th Annual Meeting of Medieval Academy of America as part of a panel on “Heaven.” My theme was to be the way in which Mary’s role as Queen of Angels defined medieval Christians’ understanding of heaven, its court, and its relationship to God, as per the abstract I submitted when I was invited to participate in the panel by one of my junior colleagues in the field. The conference was to be held at the University of California, Berkeley, in conjunction with annual meetings of certain other medieval associations, to one of which our panel had been submitted and accepted in the usual course of conference planning last spring. I was, of course, delighted to be invited to participate in the panel, given the pariah status I had been accorded over the past few years , but I was even more excited by the theme: Heaven . I was going to b...