Empress and Handmaid: On Nature and Gender in the Cult of the Virgin Mary.

Empress and Handmaid:
On Nature and Gender in the
Cult of the Virgin Mary
Sarah Jane Boss
Continuum, $27.95, 264 pp.

One of the characteristics of Catholicism is a lively devotion to Our Lady. (Calvin, to put it mildly, had little tolerance for such devotion, and Cottret has some good pages in which Genevans are hauled before the Council charged with speaking of Mary as a "saintly woman" or praying the Ave Maria.) Recently, there has been a spate of books studying everything from Marian apparitions to the cult of Mary as seen by feminists. In Empress and Handmaiden, Sarah Boss looks at the varying ways in which Mary has been depicted and venerated in the Christian tradition. A sociologist, Boss approaches Mariology through the lens of the sociology of knowledge.

Boss is at pains to show--and argues with some persuasion--that Mary has been understood in quite different ways over the centuries. An older focus on Mary as mother, for example, recently has given way to an understanding of Mary as the perfect disciple or, among those who have an interest in liberation theology, to a Mary who, in the Magnificat, represents the poor and overthrows the pretensions of the rich and powerful. Boss shows that the varying ways Mary has been understood can be traced in the evolution of Christian art over the centuries.

Particulars of Boss's analysis are very telling. She considers, for instance, the old topos of Mary's virginity in partu (often pictured as light coming through a window in late medieval and Northern Renaissance painting) to argue that popular interest in that theme might have some link to both the pain of childbirth and the high maternal rate of death. I was also much taken with her discussion of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, in which she points out that its acceptance within the Franciscan tradition (the doctrine was denied by such worthies as Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas) might be linked to the Franciscan insight that even the most minute parts of creation were occasions of grace and wholeness. Those insights help free Mary's conception from the old persuasion about the "contamination" of natural procreation.

A basic effort of Boss's book is to demonstrate that various images of Mary express relationships based on domination and repression. To make that case the author depends on the philosophical work of the critical theory associated with the Frankfort School--a theory based on a lumpy blend of Freudian analysis and Marxist philosophy and articulated in unreadable prose. The result, alas, is a worldview less than persuasive when looked at closely or stated more directly. Apart from some tedious pages of such analysis, Boss argues well that certain kinds of Marian devotion contribute to patterns of domination and repression. I was surprised that, in making her case, she did not mention the rococo Mariology of Grignion de Montfort and his devotees--a form of devotionalism alive today and somewhat favored by the pope and others on the Marian right.

On the positive side, Boss sees the nexus between Mary and Christ as an opportunity to articulate a different model of humanity, free from domination and oppression. "For in Christ, the unseen God has been made tangibly present in this world through Mary, and in Christ and Mary is the promise that this world can be fully restored to a condition worthy of its origins in God." In making that case Boss uses not only sociological theory but a good reading of the theological sources and a keen eye for art.

What I most liked about the book is its resistance to reductionism. Her analysis does not turn the doctrines and devotions about Mary into a psychoanalytic case study (as does the work of Michael Carroll) or a somewhat simplistic feminist screed (Marina Warner). Boss locates theological truth in the person and place of Mary; a truth not yet fully appreciated or sufficiently articulated.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.