She guides us through the many contradictory and hotly contested elements of devotion to the mother of Jesus, when the Eastern Church in all its variety held much deeper reverence for her than did the Latin-speaking Roman Church.Īs the royalty in Constantinople began to identify themselves with Mary, she took on imperial clothing and queenly stature. The first covers the period from the earliest mention of Mary in the Gospels and Apo-crypha to her designation as Theotokos or God-Bearer (Mother of God in the West) at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Rubin divides her search into six sections. It is astonishing how many still exist despite the wholesale sacking of such images during the Reformation. Written for a wide audience, Mother of God is rich and readable, with clear explanations, poems and prayers, and is illustrated with many lesser-known images of Mary, particularly from the British Isles. A professor at Queen Mary’s College, London University, whom Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams considers “one of the most interesting and original of British medieval historians,” Rubin approaches her task with zest and formidable credentials both as scholar and writer. To answer it, she draws on extensive global research of recent years. The question that interests the author is how a poor, Jewish, little-known woman became a global icon. In some 500 pages she unrolls the diversity as well as the continuity of meanings that different ethnic, national and religious groups have continued to find in the Jewish mother of Jesus. As a 13th-century French poet once said, Mary is “the sea that no one exhausts.” Yet the remarkable cultural history that the medieval historian Miri Rubin has assembled from worldwide resources seems to challenge that claim.

Miri rubin mother of god