Content area
Full Text
JAROSLAV PELIKAN. Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. x+269 pp. $25.00.
Jaroslav Pelikan, an ordained minister in the Lutheran church and Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University, has received more than thirty-five honorary degrees and innumerable other honors from academic institutions around the world. The author of many books, beginning with From Luther to Kierkegaard, published in 1950, Pelikan has through the decades focused his scholarly efforts on doctrinal history. Mary Through the Centuries is Pelikan's thirty-fourth book and, as the author acknowledges, a companion volume to his 1985 Jesus Through the Centuries, hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "a rich and expansive description of Jesus's impact on the general history of culture" and by the New York Review of Books as "brilliantly successful." In both volumes, the author's declared aim is "to present, in roughly chronological order, a series of distinct but related vignettes . . . both in their continuity and in their development across various cultures and `through the centuries'" (ix).
The Virgin Mary has arguably been the most significant source of inspiration to women in all of history. Though occupying a position of supreme importance within the context of Roman Catholicism, Mary also epitomizes many virtues for Protestants, Jews, and Muslims. Accordingly, in this book Pelikan considers Mary in her various personifications and symbolisms: as the young Jewish Miriam of Nazareth, as the Second Eve, as the Mother of God (Theotokos), as the Heroine of the Muslim Qur'an, as the Black Madonna, as the Handmaiden of the Lord, as the Queen of Heaven, as the epitome of chastity, as the archetypal mother, as the Mater Dolorosa, as the Eternal Feminine, as the mediatrix, among others. Mary Through the Centuries appears in print at a time when interest in spiritual matters in general, and in Mary in particular, is running high. For example, the fact that Mary is featured on the cover of the August 25, 1997, edition of Newsweek documents...