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doi:10.1017/S0009640711000230 The Mystery of the Rosary: Marian Devotion and the Reinvention of Catholicism. By Nathan D. Mitchell. New York: New York University Press, 2009. ix + 325 pp. $37.00 cloth.
The heart of this book is to demonstrate that Catholics, even in the age of me Counter Reformation, have "maintained traditions of belief and behavior not through single-minded intransigence but by embracing flexibility and change" (4). This flexibility can further be characterized as a "prolonged oscillation" between "accommodation" and "struggles for control" (11). Nathan Mitchell uses the rosary to carry this idea because it has been able to "absorb reframings of reform, representation, ritual, religious identity, and devotions" (3). The consistent approach is to attempt to "reframe" mese categories of early modem Catholicism, as five of me six chapter titles indicate.
Mitchell uses Anne Winston-Allen's Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997) to launch his reflections, beginning with me period 1585-1610. But this book is no mere extension of Winston-Allen's work into the Reformation, for Mitchell ambitiously mobilizes art historical, standard liturgical, and several devotional texts proper to each period he examines as he brings the meanings of the rosary into the present. For example, the book sees a commonality in the use of the rosary during the Counter Reformation with how art historians have interpreted the genius of Caravaggio-both the devotion and die artist create a "simple and clear spirituality accessible to everyone" (55; quoting Giuseppe Olmi and...