A talk with Miri Rubin

How a woman described so sparingly in the Bible became Mary, the global icon

MARY IS THE most famous woman in human history - the mother of Jesus, the object of intense popular devotion and rich artistic exploration. This week, at Christmas, billions of Christians around the world will be reminded of Mary's role through prayers and postage stamps, creches and carols.

But the Gospels offer little detail about her life. Much of Mary's story has been constructed by religion and culture in the centuries since, and there has been enormous variety in the way Mary is described and depicted in different places and at different times. That variety caught the eye of Miri Rubin, a professor of medieval and early modern history at Queen Mary, a college of the University of London.

Rubin was researching a book about Jews in the Middle Ages when she stumbled across a series of stories about miracles attributed to Mary, featuring Jews as the protagonists, and began to wonder about the way Mary has been perceived over the course of history. Her research resulted in a new book, "Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary," to be published by Yale University Press in April.

Rubin spoke to Ideas by phone from London.

IDEAS: How did you begin to tackle such a sprawling subject?

RUBIN: Well I started in the patches that were familiar, thinking it would be really nice to write a book about Mary in the Middle Ages, which wasn't particularly taxing, just a question of reading and thinking and organizing. But very quickly it became clear that there was this tremendous question to be answered, which is Mary is relatively discussed very little in the Gospels and the authoritative early scriptural bases of Christianity, and indeed isn't very present in the first millennium of European life, but then she becomes utterly ubiquitous and becomes global by the 16th century. So I decided that I really had to leave my comfort zone and go backwards in time.

IDEAS: What does the Bible have to say about Mary?

RUBIN: Very little. There is of course the ample provision of Luke and Matthew, which is mostly to do, really, with genealogy . . . so that a claim can be made, and a truth can be presented, about Jesus really being of the house of David and the fulfillment of prophesy. And then there are the stories that are totally just so important and beautiful, the stories of the annunciation, the visitation . . . and then of course there is the nativity itself and the flight to Egypt. But the most cherished aspects of Mary's life - that is, her life as a little girl, her birth to Anne and Joachim . . . all that is really not in Scripture, but on the other hand it belongs to the absolutely earliest narrative creativity of Christianity . . . so by 150 we have papyri with versions of Mary's early life.

IDEAS: And what about her life after Jesus' crucifixion?

RUBIN: By the year 500, there are tens and tens of versions of exactly what happened to Mary . . . because Mary, being the mother of God, it was just unthinkable that she just ended like everyone, sort of putrefying in the ground. . . . And we find in all the languages of the Near East - you know in Armenian, Coptic, Syriac, and so on - by the fifth century there are very evolved versions of Mary living after the crucifixion, for a number of years, continuing the ministry. In some cases the claim is she continued to work miracles like her son, being harassed by the Jews of the city who had harassed her son and now continued to harass her. There was one version that claimed that she had to decamp to Bethlehem. Ultimately, she really wanted an end to come, and her son gave her a very special end, which looks like a death, but it's not, it's a falling asleep. . . . She fell asleep and ultimately rose to heaven to sit beside her son, and that's absolutely crucial, because that means that Mary is there, and she can be active in the world, she's a great intercessor, she is there sitting with her son in heaven, utterly involved in the happenings of the world, in the happenings of every Christian's life.

IDEAS: You've been interested in how she's depicted in Islam.

RUBIN: Word for word, there's more about her in the Koran, or at least more mentions of the name{hellip}The Koran, as you know, does not doubt the previous revelations - Moses, Jesus - it's just that Mohammed is the last. . . . And what's also very important is that it means wherever you have cultural meetings of Christianity and Islam, like in Spain, like in the Near East during the Crusader period . . . you do have shrines that attract Muslims and Christians.

IDEAS: How does she move to become a global figure?

RUBIN: After the year 1000 we see this really important process that some have rather grandiloquently called the birth of Europe. . . . What happens over the next few centuries is a very intimate relationship to Mary within the monasteries. After all, these are boys who've been taken away from their families. This is an attempt within the monastery to create, in a way, a sort of a fictive family, a family of the monastery, to fight sin, to fight the struggle with temptation, and Mary is the absolute companion of those particular struggles. [Mary] is consoler, is above all a mother figure, and she's still quite a sort of ladylike figure, quite a grand figure in representation. But we begin to see around the 12th century, this softening of Mary . . . not the sort of hieratic, frontal, priestly figure, but someone who is more playful, in relationship with her son. . . . And then in the 13th century, with the coming of the big preaching orders that aim to educate not just the elite but people in towns and in their vernacular . . . the material becomes extremely vivid, extremely lively, and Mary becomes like the woman next door.

IDEAS: Were there ways Mary was thought about that were later abandoned?

RUBIN: Absolutely. There developed a representation of Mary, a little statue, that when the statue was opened up, almost like a Russian doll, you found inside a representation of the Trinity, and this is to say that within Mary was everything, and it's all englobed and so on. And theologians say this is absolutely abhorrent, this is not historical, this is totally ridiculous.

IDEAS: What happens to Mary with the Reformation?

RUBIN: Luther is happy with the annunciation, with the nativity, he's happy with every word of Scripture about Mary and about her role and her place. . . . She's an example of piety, but she's not more than that, she's not a saint, she's not an intercessor, she has no powers over death. . . . Later reformers who were more radical than him considered him to be a sort of old-fashioned fuddy duddy who never quite cut his links to the sort of abhorred medieval Catholicism. . . . Mary is very much devalued in later Protestant imaginings.

IDEAS: So what's the situation today?

RUBIN: What's really interesting in recent years is, and partly I think this is the influence of women within the church, that actually there is much more of an openness than you would have gotten in the 16th and indeed in some parts of the 19th century amongst Protestants to actually engage with this female figure. . . . On the other hand there is also a feminist critique that is very hard on the impact of the figure of Mary, seeing it as something that creates a subservience, that is quiescent, that does not encourage self-fulfillment, and that does not actually offer women something that is empowering. But I mean, these are still really open debates.

IDEAS: And what is her role in the way Christmas has been observed?

RUBIN: Our traditions really go back to the Franciscans. . . . St. Francis was all about . . . let's relive, let's imagine, literally in a grotto, let's imagine what it was like to be humble and to be overawed at the first Christmas at the nativity, and this idea that you then re-create it and relive it, and that you offer it also as a didactic tool. . . . So that simplicity, so that vulnerability in the setting is very much owed to the medieval imagination. That is not something that comes from Byzantium, from the Syrians - that is medieval popular devotion as imagined in the fertile and brilliant genius mind of St. Francis and developed by his followers.

Michael Paulson covers religion for the Globe