Meeting the Challenges of Mary

The Virgin Mary presents considerable challenges to anyone writing her history. For the men and women who have loved her over the centuries, she has been mother, virgin, bride, apocalyptic messenger, inimitable paragon, model of femininity, punisher of sin, fountain of consolation, queen of heaven, and more. It is not easy to capture the essence of this shape-shifter who turns such diverse and even divergent faces toward her devotees.¹ Efforts to portray all of Mary’s traits risk becoming encyclopedic, while decisions to highlight only certain of her features may produce a flattened, partial portrait. Finding the right balance is not the only challenge of doing the Virgin’s history justice. She now commands such a large domain in Catholicism that it can be hard to see that she did not always occupy this much devotional territory —that she in fact has a history.

Judging from the spate of studies about the Virgin that began in the 1990s, her history seems to have special importance to female scholars: significantly more women than men have contributed to this flow.² Now three more titles, all authored by women, swell the tide. These books rise to the challenges of writing about Mary in different ways and with rather different degrees of success. In part, their analytic differences reflect the authors’ disciplinary perspectives: history (Miri Rubin); religious studies (Mary F. Thurlkill); and modern literature and languages (Malgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba). Different chronologies and geographies also shape each study. Equally distinctive are the authors’ choices about how to approach the history of Mary as a female figure. Each writes from a feminist perspective, though only Thurlkill explicitly embraces this stance; for each, Mary’s gender and her relationship to women are central questions. Yet for Rubin and Thurlkill Mary’s gender is a capacious category, while for Oleszkiewicz-Peralba it is not.

Despite their differences, these books all point to Mary’s continuing relevance for women’s studies and gender studies. Yet writing her history also poses a special challenge to feminist scholars, for the Virgin has often been a lightning rod for the politics of religion and gender. As the most important female figure associated with Christianity, she can symbolize women’s oppression by the patriarchal Church or serve as the locus for liberative re-imaginings of the Christian feminine and women’s relationship to the divine.³ Yet a true feminist history of Mary would neither excoriate nor over-idealize this female icon of a patriarchal institution but instead carefully contextualize her to unravel her meanings, positive and negative. It would also avoid removing her from history altogether and reducing her to the sacred feminine, the trap into which Oleszkiewicz-Peralba unfortunately falls.

The Black Madonna is a bold book that takes many risks. It is also a visual treat, lavishly illustrated and beautifully produced. Its sweeping chronological and geographic horizons are as impressive as its diversity of sources: from prehistory to the present, from Poland to the Americas, from Gnostic theology to the author’s own ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil. Yet whether Oleszkiewicz-Peralba has written the rigorous cross-cultural analysis of the cult of Black Madonnas (Virgins depicted with dark skin) that she intends is another question altogether. This book is perhaps best read as a Jungian-influenced meditation on the goddess.

Oleszkiewicz-Peralba asserts that Black Madonnas visually manifest processes of religious syncretism produced by situations of cultural hybridization. They also, she argues, function as symbols of national identity and resistance to oppression, often especially for women. Yet she is interested above all in showing that these Madonnas possess traits inherited from the African and pre...