Bože!

I’ve been reading Mother of God: a history of the Virgin Mary, by Miri Rubin this week. I bought it in part, based on a review in the Guardian a few weeks ago, and in part because of my ongoing battle with the PhD from Hell.

Rubin’s writing style is very readable. A good thing when you consider how challenging it is to chart the tangled history of our faith’s interest in Mary. Rubin presents her ideas in manageable vignettes focussed on particular ideas or historical elements – such as the council of Ephesus, Mary’s patronage of asceticism, etc. With her style and map of the text this ought to make a fantastic survey book for students of Mary, cult and devotion. Unfortunately it falls down on accuracy and attention to detail.

I should point out that I’m only now just over a third of the way through the text. However, I’m finding that it is not just one vignette that is academically wonky, but multiples of vignettes that just don’t carry the day (I’m therefore, not hopeful for an improved second half). Rubin’s coverage of the events surrounding Ephesus for example is thus far the lowest point. She suggests that the emergence of the devotional title Theotokos was a top down development, when in fact the evidence points to the exact opposite being true. Rubin mis-reports basic facts about the players in the controversy – Proklos was a bishop, not a priest. Her grasp on the fine points of the theology involved is equally misleading and sometimes outright wonky – her description of Nestorius’ Christology for example is way out of sync with even his own writings. To be fair to her, however, in this instance, it is easy to make the mistakes she made, and given the structure of her text (vignettes) trying to grab the essence of Nestorius’ teaching in a few short lines is a real challenge that I can’t imagine anyone doing successfully without misrepresenting him.

Reviewers described the book as “masterful”, “fascinating”, “breathtaking [. . .] scholarship”, and “intellectually exuberant”, I think that the project deserves to be recognised as a laudable attempt at chronicling 1500 years of Marian cult and devotion – but it falls far short of the dizzying heights of authority suggested by other reviewers.