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Article: Empress and Handmaid: On Nature and Gender in the Cult of the Virgin Mary.(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Commonweal
- Article date:
- January 11, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Commonweal Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Empress and Handmaid:
On Nature and Gender in the
Cult of the Virgin Mary
Sarah Jane Boss
Continuum, $27.95, 264 pp.
One of the characteristics of Catholicism is a lively devotion to Our Lady. (Calvin, to put it mildly, had little tolerance for such devotion, and Cottret has some good pages in which Genevans are hauled before the Council charged with speaking of Mary as a "saintly woman" or praying the Ave Maria.) Recently, there has been a spate of books studying everything from Marian apparitions to the cult of Mary as seen by feminists. In Empress and Handmaiden, Sarah Boss looks at the varying ways in which Mary has been depicted and venerated in the ...