Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin MaryMother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary by Miri Rubin, Review by: Margaret R. MilesThe Journal of Religion, Vol. 90, No. 2 (April 2010), pp. 252-253Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/652122 .

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The Journal of Religion

252

the role of the church in black civil society to fulfill the promise of this book’snoble attempt to understand the African American encounter with Americandemocracy.DAVID HACKETT, University of Florida.

RUBIN, MIRI. Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary. New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press, 2009. xxiv�531 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

The first question this reviewer brought to reading Mother of God, Miri Rubin’stour de force history of the Virgin Mary, was, Why another history of Mary? In1963–65, Hilda Graef published her two-volume Mary: A History of Doctrine andDevotion, tracing the evolving status of the Blessed Virgin Mary from antiquityto the present; in 1978, Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and theCult of the Virgin Mary organized the figure of Mary according to her attributes:virgin, queen, bride, mother, and intercessor. And there are many other morecircumscribed treatments of Mary. Why another history of the Virgin?

The answer to my question lies in the question Rubin seeks to answer: “Howdid Mary, about whom so little is said in the gospels, become [a] familiar globalfigure?” (xxii). Rubin uses a wide range of sources to answer her question—“music, poetry, theology, art, scripture, [and] miracle tales”—painting a muchmore detailed and vivid picture of the figure of Mary than has been availableuntil now. Rubin also sets the Marian figures she discusses in cultural contextmore adequately than we have formerly seen.

Rubin’s history of Mary proceeds from earliest times to about 1600, with ashort concluding section on the Virgin’s transformations in the contemporaryworld. The most prominent feature of the figure of Mary is its flexibility ac-cording to the devotional, institutional, and political needs of the poets, in-tellectuals, preachers, painters, sculptors, and architects who designed it. Apublic and polemical, as well as intimate and private figure, Mary had manyroles—from virgin, to dignified queen, to model of “chaste conjugality,” toswooning sufferer. From the Virgin of Guadeloupe to the Black Madonna andAsian images of Mary, Christian Marian images took on the skin color, racialcharacteristics, and clothing of the countries in which Christianity found con-verts.

Organized both chronologically and geographically, Rubin discusses not onlyChristianity’s Mary, but also Islam’s “Maryam;” in fact, the Koran mentionsMary more than the Gospels do, with thirty-four mentions in the Koran andonly nineteen in the Gospels. Jewish reactions to the Christian Mary are alsodiscussed, and it will not surprise most readers to learn that, as Mary’s prom-inence grew in medieval Christian societies, her alleged opposition to the Jewsalso escalated: “Jews were cast as Mary’s particular enemies and imagined asthe only people in Europe who openly injured her in word, thought, andgesture” (168). A contemporary chronicler describes the destruction of theJewish community of Prague in 1389 as “just punishment for an offense againstMary.” To ensure that the point was made, a Marian chapel was constructedon the site of the razed synagogue (301).

Medieval theologians argued about what bodily fluids the Virgin possessed.Tears and milk were commonly agreed upon, but Dominicans and Franciscanssharply disagreed about menstrual blood. A small wooden statue of Mary in amuseum in Naples shows a Vierge Ouvrante that features a slot in the base into

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Book Reviews

253

which the viewer can put a coin, whereupon a double door in the Virgin’sbelly creaks open and a tiny homunculus pops forward, making the sign of thecross. He then retreats, and the doors slam shut. These are minor examplesof the many theological and artistic indignities suffered by the figure of Mary.

Rubin acknowledges that Marian images and literature were largely createdby men, though both women and men were devotees of the Virgin. There islittle record of the reception of verbal and visual depictions of the Virgin, sothe different perspectives and interpretation of men and women can only bespeculative. Rubin doesn’t go there, but her chapter “Mary and Women, Maryand Men” examines the different emphases and practices in Marian devotionoccasioned by women’s and men’s different social roles: “Women related toMary as mothers and virgins. . . . Men explored Mary in the privacy of pen-ance and prayer, through their duties as priests and preachers, as heads offamily in charge of instruction and discipline, and as artists and makers ofpublic works” (268). Rubin does not point to the ambiguity of the figure ofMary for women until the very end of the book when she mentions that RomanCatholic “scholars and activists” associate the figure of the Virgin with “a his-tory of subjugation and subordination,” making it unusable as a liberating sym-bol (422).

Occasionally there are minor theological mistakes. For example, the title ofthe book escalates Mary’s role as “Mother of God Incarnate” to Mother of God.Also, Rubin’s statement that “Mary gave her son life” misunderstands the theo-logical insistence that God is the giver of life; what Mary gave her son washuman flesh. Theological meanings are not explored in depth. It would havebeen interesting, for example, to examine further the medieval juxtaposing ofcrucifixion scenes with mother and child images. I suggest that these scenesoffer alternative interpretations of God’s love for humanity. The crucifixionscene is based on a theology of sacrifice as the ultimate display of love, whilethe mother and child scene presents the ultimate demonstration of God’s lovefor humanity as the provision of life, love, and nourishment.

Mother of God is a highly readable and informative book. With a topic so vast,Rubin has organized her copious material in a way that assists the reader incomprehending the enormously varied—even contradictory—roles and mean-ings ascribed to this figure. The figure of the Virgin Mother of God is appar-ently as obedient as its prototype in its willingness to take on a wide range ofcharacteristics as decreed by its male creators.MARGARET R. MILES, Graduate Theological Union.

HARKRIDER, MELISSA FRANKLIN. Women, Reform and Community in Early ModernEngland: Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, and Lincolnshire’s Godly Aris-tocracy, 1519–1580. Studies in Modern British Religious History 19. Wood-bridge: Boydell Press, 2008. 188 pp. $90.00 (cloth).

The fact is not explicitly acknowledged, but Women, Reform and Community hasits origins in the author’s doctoral thesis. Certainly, Harkrider has made acapable contribution to the history of post-Reformation English society andthe religious change experienced by it; her research is thorough, and she hasamassed and collated a prodigious amount of information. It is a shame, how-ever, that the book has such a thesis-like character, with an awkward structureand analysis that is not fully developed. The material is fascinating and has a

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