IN a country such as Scotland, which is still basically protestant, the Virgin Mary is rarely the object of worship. But before the Reformation in 1560, before her statue in the Chapel Royal on the top of Stirling Castle rock was torn down by the reformist mob, along with that of St Michael, just to keep her company – before all of that, the Virgin Mary was the object of the deepest devotion. And before she was the Mother of God, she was the Moon Goddess and represented the feminine principle in the universe, without which there can be no birth and no growth.

The Reformation got rid of the feminine principle in terms of worship: but it is beautifully ironic that nowadays it’s the reformed churches (which did away with all the statues of Mary), that are more ready to accept women priests before whom a man might kneel and receive a blessing.

But in those parts of Scotland where Roman Catholicism prevails, the Virgin is still venerated (orthodoxy does not permit her worship) – perhaps nowhere more beautifully than in the little stained-glass window on Sanday Island, in the heart of what used to be a Roman Catholic community.

Before the Reformation, it was not just in stained glass that the Virgin was honoured, but also in poetry and music. It is to give you a context for the beautiful music dedicated to the Virgin by Robert Johnson, Robert Carver, and the anonymous composer of the Ave Gloriosa that I am starting with poetry – first William Dunbar with “Hale, Sterne Superne, hale, in eterne.”

Dunbar’s poem is in seven stanzas to represent the Virgin’s seven joys: the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, the Presentation in the Temple, Christ Disputing Among the Doctors, and the Assumption. But you can forget the list in favour of the sensuality of Dunbar’s poem, so full of assonance and alliteration that it is really a piece of music in its own right:

Empryce of prys, imperatrice, Bricht polist precious stane, Victrice of vyce, hie genitrice Of Jhesu, lord soverayne, . . .

Ave, Maria, gracia plena.

Haile, sterne meridian, Spyce, flour delice of paradys, That bair the gloryus grayne.

Carver’s five-part motet Gaude Flore Virginali also symbolises the Virgin’s seven joys in its seven verses. It is a subtle, well-balanced piece of great purity. Feminine in principle, Carver’s restrained modesty uses the full five parts only in the outer verses. The fifth verse reduces the texture down to three and then two voices, using dark harmonies that few contemporaries tried. But within this smaller ensemble Carver uses much variety – the higher voices, plaintive for the Mother of Sorrows and, in a beautiful and joyful passage with the parts weaving in and out, he depicts the blissful throne of heaven. The final section uses all the voices to the end – ‘durabunt et florescent per aeterna saecula’ – lasting and flourishing for ever. Such great gestures will have appealed to King James IV whose Book of Hours contained a copy of the text of Gaude Flore Virginali.

If Dunbar seems sensual in his depiction of the Virgin, then have a read of some of the Gaelic poetry preserved at the time in the Book of the Dean of Lismore. These poems portray Christ and his mother Mary as intimately as might a lover, describing Christ with ‘grooved yellow hair’ as “Mac malachdhubh dóigheal donn,” a dark-browed, bright-handed Son, twisting and curling Mary’s hair, with her fair pap in his palm, suckling her smooth white breast, and she kissing his soft foot and hand. Mary’s pregnancy is described in terms of animal beauty:

Do bhrú aníos ba lomlán leat, mar bhíos a bhronnlár ’san bhrioc, An Coimdhe ’s gan loighe lat, Mac Moire do-roighne riot.

Your belly rises up full like the belly of the trout; Without ever lying with you the Lord made Mary’s Son.”

The immediacy of the imagery in no way displaces the mystery of Christ’s conception. Rather it echoes the imagery of the great illuminated gospels such as the Book of Kells (made on Iona) with their interactions between humans and creatures. Mary’s humanity is not diminished by comparison with a trout, but rather her beauty and place in the natural world is extolled. She is described as a golden apple-tree new grown, her hair luxuriant, rippling like grain in a field, and her fecundity is as chaste as that of nature:

Munab ionnraic do bhrú, a Bhean, Ni headh cnú ar fionnshlait i bhfiodh.

If your womb, Lady, is not chaste No nut on bright branch grows in the wood.

In the Gaelic world, the pre-Christian goddess, Brigid, was so powerful that she had to be incorporated into Christianity, being credited, however implausibly, with suckling Christ.

Brigid’d totemic bird, Gille-Bhrighde, the oyster-catcher or Servant of Brigid, is said to have covered the infant Jesus with seaweed to conceal him from Herod’s soldiers.

Brigid or Mary – in this next example Mary – is seen as wholly kin to the poet, and humanity in general, and can therefore put an obligation on her Son and call upon His mercy, because that is how Gaelic society operated as reflected in the laws relating to kinship and obligation. Indeed, Mary’s power is such that she is almost set against her own Son, as though she had inherited the characteristics of a female divinity more powerful than that of the male and as though the old laws relating to mutual obligation should set aside the Christian law of Judgement and Doom:

Ná léig ceart do chor fána anmain, Abair nach cóir is cóir leat Ó tá fearg Dhé ris gach duine, Na hearb mé, a Mhuire, réd Mhac.

Do not let my soul be brought to justice, say that in your opinion the law is not fair; since every man evokes God’s anger, do not entrust me, Mary, to your Son.

She is described as ‘the fortress of Eve’s children against the anger of Jesus at Doom ... a woman who makes bold with God.’ Another woman of whom it might be said ‘she makes bold with God’ is the poet Anna Nic Ealair. Writing around 1800, she describes Christ as though he were her lover:

’S ann a thug thu dhomh do ghaol Fo dhubhar craobh an aíteil; As comh-chomunn do ruin Ann an gàradh nan ubhall.

You gave me your love in the juniper’s shadow And the company of your regard in the garden of apples.

She even has to call out “Cum air do làmh a charaid” – “friend, stop your caresses.”

This sort of religious intimacy is naturally less overt in music, but the years from the 1520s to the 1560s were dangerous times even for apparently innocuous people such as composers.

The court had been deprived of one composer, Patrick Hamilton, burnt at the stake, and another, Robert Johnson, who had fled to England. In 1531 his fellow Scot and namesake – Robert Richardson – published in Paris a criticism of the Augustinian order to which they both belonged: “At vespers, when they enter the choir, they are noisy, get in each other’s way, disturb the singing, and make an exhibition of themselves to all men, . . . . one man, with the service already begun, asks his neighbour what has been prepared in the kitchen? what kinds of fish, cooked in what manner? He says the wine has been heavily watered and the ale is too frothy.”

If this was indeed priestly behaviour in the choir, then Richardson was fully justified in his criticism; but he reveals his agenda more clearly when he goes on to object to: “Those who introduce new masses of their own, formed after their own fancies.

“It is so prevalent that some would wish a different mass to be sung: and so confusions and arguments arise in the service of the Lord, when one reviles the work of another, always finding fault either with the mass, or the sound, the voices or the notes ...

“Good God! how much valuable time is inanely wasted in sung masses in England and Scotland!”

Robert Carver was probably one of those criticised, and in 1546 he composed a setting of the Mass far simpler than anything he had done before.

There were compelling reasons for conforming. That same year Cardinal Beaton was murdered in St Andrews in revenge for the burning of the protestant George Wishart for heresy.

The Council of Trent, at which the reform of music was much discussed, was also set up that year. It was a sensible time to compromise. Carver left out a lot of the text so it could be sung more simply and rapidly as plainsong, and in many sections he set words a note to a syllable in a style he must have thought of as one of puerile simplicity. He may have written this work for Stirling Parish Church when, in 1546, it became a collegiate church. The choir there was probably small and less accomplished and without choirboys, so Carver’s mass has no treble voices.

As for Robert Johnson, a Scottish priest from Duns, he had to escape to England to avoid a charge of heresy because he was himself a reformist. But that hadn’t stopped him from composing rich and beautiful music in honour of the Virgin.

Johnson gives each invocation a different vocal scoring, (as Carver did for his Gaude Flore) starting with the upper voices, contrasting them with the lower ones and then bringing all five parts together in smooth-flowing counterpoint of great purity. Ave Dei Patris expresses the mystery inherent in the Virgin’s almost pantheistic power.

Hail, fruitful virgin as pre-eminent as the sun, Mother unsullied and beautiful as the moon, Health be with you, famous parent, willing childbearer.

Shining star of the sea, blessed entrance to heaven, Be, for us, the straight passage to eternal joys.

ROBERT Johnson lived into the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and it is an oddity of English history that they replaced the cult of the Virgin Mary with the cult of the virgin queen, with innumerable poems raising her to the status of a goddess. Today she is a darling of film and television.

But in her time there was still scope for performances of works such as Gaude Maria Virgo, in praise of the true Virgin. It’s smooth and refined and has something of the quality of a carol – the one form in which the cult of Mary has survived in the Protestant world.

One could not travel much further away from the great early extravagances of Carver, but this simple music speaks straight to the heart; joyous, refined, worthy of its subject, the imitations turning what could sometimes be a mechanical exercise into a beautiful folding and refolding of a kindly paean of praise.

Most impressive of all is an astonishing, though incomplete, piece in praise of the Virgin Mary. It’s an anonymous setting of the Ave Gloriosa like a jubilant Christmas carol gone crazy with celebration and delight. In each new section the music becomes more elaborate, the tune is presented at different speeds in different parts and, in the final section that survives, the altos and tenors are sent off on a florid line of joyous virtuosity, dancing and weaving through the texture.

One might ask why it was never finished. Perhaps the cold winds of the Reformation took the joy from its composer’s heart. Such things happen. Whatever our beliefs or lack of them, let us hope (if not pray!) that we may never kill such joy at its source.