This splendid volume provides a fine translation and expert discussion of the earliest extant complete life of the Virgin Mary. The base text is the eleventh-century Old Georgian of the prolific translator Euthymios the Hagiorite. The seventh-century Greek original no longer survives, despite its apparent authorship by St Maximus. Shoemaker is excellent on the ‘silent quarantine’ of this work from Maximus' wider corpus, notwithstanding the absence of any substantial argument against its authenticity and the seal of approval of the venerable Clavis Patrum Graecorum. With some humility, he submits the question of authorship to Maximus scholars and we must hope that this call will be heeded. One might note, for instance, the presence of a distinctive model of the transmission of original sin through carnal passion in this text as elsewhere in Maximus. This quasi-Augustinian understanding is unusual within the Eastern Christian tradition, serving as another reminder that easy dichotomies between East and West are to be treated with extreme caution, if not altogether eschewed. This Life also undermines the perceived dichotomy between the affective crucifixion-centred theology and piety of the Western Middle Ages and the sunnier narratives of the East, centred on incarnation and deification. The Life furnishes an image of the mater dolorosa quite as evocative as anything produced in the medieval West, even asserting that the Mother of God's sorrows at the Cross were in some sense more intense than those of her son, since she was ‘still ignorant of the mystery of the Passion’. Shoemaker stops short, however, of allowing any support in this text for later Catholic notions of Mary as coredemptrix or mediatrix. The Life shows us a Mary intimately involved in the life and ministry of her son and the first witness of the Resurrection (a fact the Gospel writers were obliged to pass over in silence, to preclude any doubts orbiting around the partiality of her witness). She is presented as ‘a leader and a teacher’ of the Apostles and charged, along with James as bishop, with the direction of the Church in Jerusalem. The Life is a rich text, full of nourishment both theological and devotional. It is also self-confessedly long:

Shoemaker, who has worked indefatigably on the biography of the Virgin for some years, deserves congratulation for making this long, rich and early Life of the Virgin available in such an accomplished and accessible fashion.