The book is concerned a great deal with “bodylines”, and yet has nothing to say on how the “risen body” might be part of this discussion. Rubin speaks repeatedly of the “salvation narrative” of Christianity, but her version seems to exclude almost entirely the resurrection of Jesus, as though that narrative ends at the cross. One cannot do everything, of course, but, since theology is a human activity and part of human culture, cultural historians who write about religion need to be well informed about it. In other words, they are references to Jesus, the Son of Mary, making what is in Islamic theology an important point about Jesus’s nature.Īnd it is theology that is most lacking in this book. But most of the search “hits” on Mary are part of the construction “Jesus, Son of Mary”. Technically true and the Qur’an has some interesting things to say about Mary, including several intriguing versions of the annunciation, the significance of which Rubin does not explore.
She contrasts Mary’s low number of search hits in the New Testament with the Qur’an, where her name appears more often than in the Bible. The most annoying for me was Rubin’s repeated insistence that the New Testament says “very little” about Mary, whereas one could equally argue that it says a surprising amount about her. Mother of God contains errors and misleading assertions.
I have the sense that the book was rushed to press, and that we are presented with a draft rather than a polished product. The endnotes reveal scholarship on a vast and dazzling scale whereas the text reads at times very superficially, or at best like a good undergraduate essay. None the less, there is a significant disconnect between the learned and extensive endnotes and the actual text. Such a wide-ranging and ambitious book invites an “open hunting season” for those of a donnish and pedantic disposition, and it is easy for specialists with knowledge of only one or two of the centuries or societies under examination to pick holes. Professor Rubin’s book is not so much a history of Mary per se as an exploration of the reception and construction of “Mary” over a dizzying range of cultures, as her narrative strides over countries and centuries at a breathless pace. Its aim is to present a history of Mary from the New Testament to the late 1600s. MIRI RUBIN’s Mother of God: A history of the Virgin Mary is a big, ambitious book by a leading cultural historian of late-medieval Europe. Mother of God: A history of the Virgin Mary
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