Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (review)

Abstract

210 Biography 21.2 (Spring 1998) Schutte wisely refrains from imposing her own interpretations on the texts. Although they virtually beckon interpreters, I also will refrain. I would like to suggest a couple of questions, however. Why was Ferrazzi so sensitively attuned to the possibility of sexual violation? Schutte rightly deflects use of the word "paranoid" to describe Ferrazzi's fears, which were not unfounded. The texts are cryptic and indirect on matters such as motive, but an analysis of the associational logic probably would yield some hypotheses beyond the more obvious explanations. Also, why did Ferrazzi believe that this particular narrative would exonerate her, and why did it fail to do so? In 1665 Ferrazzi was convicted "as lightly suspect of heresy, that is, of holding and believing that it is licit for a Catholic Christian to make herself considered a saint." She spent two years of a seven year sentence in prison, two more years in house arrest, and then was released. After 1669 she disappears, presumably behind some massive Venetian shutters, until brief notices of her death on 17 January 1684 and her burial in the churchyard of San Lio. Thanks to Schutte's accomplished archival and editorial work, those who love Venice, and even those who don't, will not be able to think of the Grand Canal again without imagining the scene of Cecilia Ferrazzi's arrest on her gondola and remembering her courageous narrative of self-defense. Carole Slade Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. 269 pp. $25.00; ISBN 0-300-06951-0. In this book Jaroslav Pelikan, the distinguished historian of Christian doctrine, offers a companion volume to his well-known Jesus Through the Centuries (Yale UP, 1985). Like the earlier work, this one aims "to present, in roughly chronological order, a series of distinct but related vignettes of the Virgin both in their continuity and in their development across various cultures and 'through the centuries'" (ix). Thus, the chapters of the book explore such themes as "The Second Eve and the Guarantee of Christ's True Humanity" (the early church), "The Mater Dolorosa and the Mediatrix" (the high middle ages), and "The Model of Faith in the Word of God" (the Reformation). Each chapter opens with a quotation from the Bible, illustrating how Marian themes have been elaborations of scriptural motifs. The promise of such a project is exciting in today's intellectual climate. Recent scholarship has devoted considerable energy and imagination to the topic of "culture," resulting in an entire field known as "culture studies." Mary is a prime candidate for such work, for her presence in western culture runs the gamut from her brief and often Reviews 211 ambivalent appearances in the New Testament to her glorious apotheosis in Dante's Divine Comedy, from the solemn creedal formulations of her identity as Theotokos ("Mother of God") in ancient Christian councils to the use of her as a symbol of revolutionary change in modern liberation theologies, from the luminous images of her life in medieval art (including numerous paintings of her with one breast exposed) to the revisionary images in such modern films as Jean-Luc Godard's Hail, Mary!, from the detailed literary depictions of her as a silent, submissive, and reclusive virgin in the Church Fathers to the multimedia phenomenon of a pop star named Madonna, who writhes ecstatically on stage singing "Like a Virgin." The volume of material is enormous, and the issues that it raises, such as the construction of gender and the interaction of elites and masses in "popular piety," are subtle and fascinating. Pelikan is aware of such issues, but has little use for them. In the Introduction he observes that Mary has served as an image for the "feminine" in a way that Jesus has not served for the "masculine" (1) (Pelikan must be unaware of the "muscular Christianity" movement or of the Promisekeepers of today), and that the effects of Mary on gender construction are debated by feminists (3^4). But the book's exposition remains undisturbed by such complicating, or rather, enriching perspectives, with the exception of the chapter...