Hilary Mantel writes:

Miri Rubin’s excellent and learned book explores how the meaning of Mary was constructed and directed, how its possibilities blossomed out through two millennia and were negotiated between clergy and faithful, between one culture and another, between Christians, Muslims and Jews. She shows how a symbol is fleshed out, and layers of meaning are accreted. She surveys Mary’s story roughly as it unfolded, whereas Marina Warner’s book, Alone of All Her Sex (1976), is organised thematically; the two books share a fascinating readability and cross-cultural ease. There is little about Mary in the gospels – she is mentioned more often in the Koran. Giving substance to the Mother of God therefore became a great exercise in Christian creativity. Rubin traces how the specifics of Mary’s life were sorted out, with confidence but not without fierce argument, by centuries of theologians and teachers, drawing on folklore and the gospel apocrypha. She describes Syriac Mary and Byzantine Mary as well as Rome’s Mary. She shows how Mary became part of the court ceremonial of the Eastern Empire, no longer just a young Jewish girl but a queen, the patron of Constantinople, her milk-stained dress serving as the city’s protective relic.

(LRB 9 April 2009)

Allen Lane | hardback 533 pp. |ISBN: 9780713998184