Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary. By Miri Rubin. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. xxvi + 535 pp. $35.00 cloth.

摘要

This latest ambitious project of distinguished medieval historian Miri Rubin ofnQueen Mary, University of London, which builds on the earlier work ofnscholars such as Hilda Graef, Marina Warner, and Jaroslav Pelikan, proves,nin the words of a Hollywood film released some years ago, that there truly isn“Something about Mary.” In just over four hundred pages, Rubin attempts tontrace the “ideas, practices and images” (xxi) that developed around the cultnof Mary and the socio-political worlds in which her image was shaped fromnearly Christianity until about 1600, with a concluding section which bringsnthe story up to the twenty-first century. What sets Rubin’s work apart fromnprevious studies is the breadth of source material covered—art, literature,nmusic, preaching material, with a special emphasis on miracle tales—butnespecially non-Christian source material regarding Mary, most notablynexamples which highlight how the figure of Mary often became a flashpointnin Jewish/Christian polemic of the Middle Ages, a fascinating subject onnwhich Rubin is very well placed to expound given her previous work in thisnarea.