Review: The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist, by Thomas Arentzen

Abstract

Thomas Arentzen, The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist . Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. xiii, 265pp, 10 black and white figures. ISBN: 9780812249071. $59.95. Thomas Arentzen's new book, revised from his 2014 Lund University dissertation, investigates the portrayal of the Virgin Mary in the poetry of Romanos, the sixth-century Christian who wrote several dozen metered works on various topics. It joins an expanding scholarly conversation about the poet that has emerged in force in the last decade. Georgia Frank, Leena M. Peltomaa, and Sarah Gador-Whyte have contextualized and interpreted the corpus of Romanos, particularly its treatment of Mary, as has Derek Krueger, who has co-authored work with Arentzen and edits the series in which this book appears. Arentzen frames his contribution as a corrective to two other approaches he discerns among prior studies of Mary's role in Christian thought: those that emphasize Mary's special capacity to convey information about her child (which is to say, a Christological focus), and those that place depictions of the Virgin inside the framework of monastic ideology. By contrast, Arentzen proposes to see Mary as a “separate sacred persona,” irreducible to the limited domains of theology or asceticism (164). There was, he argues, a “geographically and temporally specific” figure of Mary, given a voice by Romanos, that is distinctive to sixth-century Constantinople (32). A long first chapter introduces several issues that are meant as general background to observations made later in the book, then culminates in a plan of the chapters to follow and an explanation of Arentzen's approach. Orienting the reader to the style of his work, Arentzen notes that, in place of a logically-progressing analysis that …