Female deities on display in the British Museum’s new show reveal how women have been feared and revered throughout history, writes Laura Gascoigne

It’s 10 years since three members of Russian punk band Pussy Riot were jailed for staging a musical protest in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour against Patriarch Kirill’s support of Vladimir Putin. The charge was “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”, though one suspects the group’s gravest offence was petitioning the Virgin Mary to “be a feminist” and “throw Putin out”.

The patriarch accused them of blasphemy, but there is historical precedent for invoking Mary’s intercession in political and territorial disputes: an icon of the Virgin was paraded around the walls of Constantinople during the Arab-Byzantine wars in the seventh century, and a German sixteenth-century breastplate in the collection of the British Museum in London is embossed with a golden image of the Virgin and Child. The role of defender of the oppressed can sometimes involve coming out fighting.