Stabat Mater (original French title "Hérethique de l'amour") is an essay by philosopher and critic

Julia Kristeva Julia Kristeva (; born Yuliya Stoyanova Krasteva, bg, Юлия Стоянова Кръстева; on 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has ...

. First published in French in ''

Tel Quel ''Tel Quel'' (translated into English as, variously: "as is," "as such," or "unchanged") was a French avant-garde literary magazine published between 1960 and 1982. History and profile ''Tel Quel'' was founded in 1960 in Paris by Philippe Soll ...

'' (1977), it was translated into English by Arthur Goldhammer and published in '' Poetics Today'' (1985), and translated again by Leon S. Roudiez for ''The Kristeva Reader'' (ed. Toril Moi, Columbia UP, 1986). The essay's title derives from ''

Stabat Mater The Stabat Mater is a 13th-century Christian hymn to Mary, which portrays her suffering as Jesus Christ's mother during his crucifixion. Its author may be either the Franciscan friar Jacopone da Todi or Pope Innocent III.Sabatier, Paul ''Life o ...

'', the 13th-century Catholic

hymn to Mary Marian hymns are Christian songs focused on Mary, mother of Jesus. They are used in both devotional and liturgical services, particularly by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran churches. They are often used in the mont ...

; Kristeva's childhood, she said, was "bathed" in the liturgy of the Orthodox Church. The essay is experimental, and (in two columns) combines a scholarly investigation of the cult of the

Virgin Mary Mary; arc, ܡܪܝܡ, translit=Mariam; ar, مريم, translit=Maryam; grc, Μαρία, translit=María; la, Maria; cop, Ⲙⲁⲣⲓⲁ, translit=Maria was a first-century Jewish woman of Nazareth, the wife of Joseph and the mother o ...

and of "the maternal" symbolized by the Virgin with a personal account of Kristeva's "bodily and psychic experiences surrounding and including the birth of her son".

References

{{Reflist 1977 documents French essays