‘The nineteenth century’, a Victorian Catholic bishop once confidently predicted, ‘will be remembered by future generations as the century of Mary.’ Although spectacularly wrong, the bishop can hardly be blamed for having failed to guess that his times would be caricatured instead as the age of industrialisation, urbanisation, scientific revolution and secularisation. More striking to many Victorians than the spread of the factory system or the development of evolutionary theory was the dramatically increased prominence of the Virgin Mary. They had a point. It was in the nineteenth century, not the thirteenth or fourteenth, that the first miraculous medal was struck; the rosary became a widespread devotion among Catholics everywhere; the pope declared the BVM to have been conceived without sin; and Marian apparitions were reported all over Europe – from La Salette in France and Knock in Ireland to Marpingen in Germany – resulting in perhaps the most celebrated shrine to be sanctioned by the Catholic Church, the mass pilgrimage site at Lourdes. Given this upsurge of interest, it is not altogether surprising that, in the half-century which divided the Nonconformist offensive and English Catholic Revival of the 1830s from the apparently widespread secularisation of the 1880s, the Virgin Mary became almost as controversial a figure in Victorian England as the pope. In the same years the quintessentially nineteenth-century English notion that men and women ought to occupy ‘separate spheres’ came to be widely accepted, only to be challenged – and ultimately pushed aside – by the New Woman of the 1880s and 1890s. In Victorians and the Virgin Mary, a carefully researched and admirably nuanced analysis of contemporary debates surrounding the Blessed Virgin Mary, Carol Herringer argues that the timing was not coincidental; controversies surrounding the BVM and debates over the proper roles of men and women were closely linked. Herringer begins with a fascinating survey of denominational controversy, showing how Protestants and Catholics, once able to agree that the mother of Jesus offered a model of Christian humility and obedience to God's will, were from the 1830s increasingly drawn into sectarian disputes over her nature, role and theological significance. As the Catholic side began to emphasise the BVM's immaculate conception, perpetual virginity and central role as an intercessor, the Protestant retaliated by stressing her ordinariness, fallen nature and theological irrelevance. The heat generated by these debates, according to Herringer, stemmed not only from differences in doctrine and rival church traditions, but also from contemporary debates over the supposed characteristics of men and women and constructions of masculinity and femininity. In short, as Herringer concludes, Mary became ‘controversial in the Victorian era in a way that she had never been in English history because, by describing her, the Victorians described themselves’. Like all attempts to translate the preoccupations of one age into the language of another, this one can sound a trifle strained at times. But Herringer is too conscientious an historian and too good and sensitive a listener to fall into the modern trap of reductionism.