Reviews

Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures by Miri Rubin

siria's review against another edition

3.0

This brief book brings together three talks which Miri Rubin gave at Central European University as part of their Natalie Zemon Davis lecture series (hence the several references to both institution and scholar). The first chapter looks at the Mary of the "global" Middle Ages, and how Mary is a figure of eastern Mediterranean origins and influences whose medieval forms were then carried overseas in the late medieval period as part of the great European wave of conquest and colonisation. Rubin sees the study of Mary as providing medievalists with a challenge to move beyond our linguistic and chronological comfort zones. The second chapter looks at how devotion to Mary had strong links to anti-Semitism—the more you emphasise Mary's compassion, the more you need an Other against which to contrast that. Last, Rubin uses Barbara Rosenwein's idea of the "emotional community" to argue that Mary was central to the development of a "European language of affect" through the widespread dissemination of image types like the grieving mother in the Pietà.

While there aren't necessarily many very new ideas here, Rubin's writing is clear and accessible, and I could see these essays as being good choices to assign in the undergraduate classroom.