Volume 23, Number 18 · November 11, 1976
The Virgin in History
By Keith Thomas
Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary
by Marina Warner
Knopf, 400 pp., $15.00
The Virgin
by Geoffrey Ashe
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 262 pp., $11.25
The worship of the Virgin Mary is central to the life of the modern Catholic Church. In its dogmatic teachings she is held to have been the Mother of God, a perpetual virgin, conceived without sin and transported to heaven without bodily dissolution. She has her own prayers: the Ave Maria, the Salve Regina, and the devotion of the Rosary. Her feasts are dotted through the Church's calendar. Her relics and shrines are to be found from Walsingham to Guadalupe. Her image adorns the walls of countless pious households and, although the aesthetic poverty of today's saccharine and tinselly Catholicism makes it easy to forget the fact, she has been the inspiration of some of the finest achievements of the human spirit: the cathedrals of Chartres and Strasbourg; the paintings of Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, and Velasquez; the poetry of Dante, Petrarch, and Yeats; the music of Palestrina.
Review, 3436 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |