Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture.

I am not certain whether this book was given its title to match Pelikan's earlier work Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (Yale, 1985), or in the hope of attracting a wider readership, but either way it was unfortunate. I spent the first half of my reading fretting irritably at Pelikan's extremely narrow understanding of culture. It was only when I realized that the author was intending something altogether different from what this title implies that I began to relax. It should have been called Mary through the Centuries: Her Role in the Development of Doctrine, but that is altogether less appealing!

In fact Pelikan has written an accessible defense of two genuinely interesting themes. The first is that Marian doctrine was always developed as a test-case (or consequence) of other more primary doctrines, usually Christological. He does not cite two ancient Marian slogans - "He who is not Marian is Arian" and "What we believe of Our Lady, we hope for ourselves" - but these do in fact underpin his general position. To give a true account of the "double nature" (the true humanity and full divinity) of Jesus it is necessary to define rather precisely the ontology of his mother.

The second theme - more interesting to me, but less detailed here - is that the development of Mariology was "imagination-led." It arose in the work of artists and in popular devotion, so that academic theology was justifying a preexisting faith, rather than worked out by abstract theory and "fed down" to the devout. It is not clear whether Pelikan thinks this is particular to Mariology, or whether it is the case with all doctrine and he is using Mary as an example. Given the extent that this flies in the face of what so many of "the faithful" (especially perhaps Roman Catholics) now feel - that our theology is predominantly handed down from on high - a book directed at the lay reader, as this one is, could have helpfully clarified and illustrated this point further.

Within his context Pelikan proceeds in a business-like and systematic way. He begins with a useful explanation of typological biblical interpretation which so expanded the available texts on Mary from the measly few in the Gospels to large swaths of the Old Testament. After that there are fifteen chapters, organized chronologically, which treat some of the major Marian "titles" - from Second Eve to Queen of Heaven - and explain their development within the theological context of their time.

Mary through the Centuries is business-like but it is not objective. Pelikan is a Marian apologist. Since I see nothing shameful in this (I'm heavily Marian Christian myself), I wish he could have brought himself to say so more explicitly and earlier. His fifth chapter, for instance, is on Mary as "the Heroine of the Qur'an." Since I am one of the many whom he rightly criticizes for abysmal ignorance of this holy text, I was surprised and fascinated by his account of the positive and central view of Mary within it. However, when I reached chapter 11 on Mary within the reformed traditions - of which I know slightly more I realized that he was very specifically extracting from Protestant theologies the "best case" for Mary, rather than a broad overview of their understanding of her role. This rather undermined my confidence in her importance in Islam!

However, the real problem with this hidden bias is that it leads Pelikan to "cheat." Although he allows himself a whole chapter on the Assumption and its dogmatization in 1950, he still claims that he is not going to address twentieth-century thinking about Mary. What this means of course is that he can dodge all post-Freudian, modern biblical, post-modernist, psycholinguistic, and most significantly all feminist critiques of Mariology.

This means not needing to admit to any patriarchal bias in Marian thinking, and not having to address historical research which links Mary with the pagan goddess rites. I am uncertain why a Marian apologist has so much difficultly with the idea that images of Mary might be drawn from wider sources than the councils of the church while simultaneously trying to argue that Marianism was generated from popular devotion, but Pelikan clearly wants to dismiss the idea out of hand.

Although annoying, and limiting, this is inevitable. An odd thing about this book is that in 260 pages about someone who is known primarily as a mother, there is a peculiar absence of gender, of any sense that women have any particular relationship to "culture"; or that Mary's female-ness had any relevance. Pelikan seems sublimely unaware of gender as an issue. For example, on page 178 he lists officially approved apparitions of the Virgin. In all of them except Guadalupe at least some of the visionaries were women. Even if feminist theology has not proven its ubiquitous significance yet (I believe it has), surely Marian studies is one place where, on Pelikan's own principle of bottom-up doctrinal development, it should be most eagerly welcomed.

To conclude, for those who want a sympathetic technical summary of the history of "official" Marian theology (and more of us need this than we would admit) this is a handy guide. Those inspired by the title and looking for a wide-ranging cultural reading of Mary would probably do better with, for example, Marina Warner's Alone of All Her Sex.

Pelikan has written an interesting book, but severely limited and in a depressing way rather old fashioned. Mary's Place in the History of Culture published in 1996 and no mention of Christmas cards, Mothers' Day, the abortion-rights debate, or even Madonna - I ask you!

Sara Maitland is a novelist and theologian. Her Angel Maker: The Collected Short Stories has just been published by Henry Holt.