How did Mary assume a life outside of scripture through stories and images and address the needs of historical people in late antiquity and Byzantium? The fifteen essays in The Reception of the Virgin in Byzantium approaches this theme by placing special attention on the formation of Marian narrative in the medieval Greek world. The volume adds a rich amount of new primary source texts and original interpretations to the already substantial bibliography on Mary in Byzantium. Indeed, whereas for several decades, scholarly focus has been placed on Marian images and their formation of cultic devotion, The Reception of the Virgin in Byzantium foregrounds cultural or ecclesiastical circumstances that “favored particular ways to tell her story” (4). By drawing contributions from art historians as well as scholars of religion, theology, and medieval literature, the editors Thomas Arentzen and Mary Cunningham have succeeded in constructing an interdisciplinary scope.

Several essays in the volume examine literary and iconographic innovation in the centuries leading up to official Middle Byzantine liturgy. For example, Fr. Maximos Constas examines John Geometres's (935–1000) tenth-century Life of the Virgin, exposing the afterlife of its previously lost critical edition and the questions surrounding its model. The essay offers a preview of the forthcoming translation of Geometres's Life, which will be, undoubtedly, a critical contribution to both the history of Mary as well as issues of empathy and dramatic models in the medieval world more broadly. In another section of the volume, Francesca dell'Acqua exposes the art historical significance of the frescoes at San Vincenzo al Volturno and traces the iconographic origins of Mary as the embodied ladder to heaven. Dell'Acqua's essay offers to the volume a crucial ninth-century link between Byzantium and southern Italy in the formation of Roman rites about Mary's death. The historian of religion Stephen Shoemaker also offers to the volume the inclusion of a Coptic homily and engages the belief that Mary was of divine origin vis-à-vis the late antique Egyptian milieu in which the emerging Qur'anic tradition was competing.

Every essay in this collection is exemplary in methodological rigor and treatment of primary sources. And several of the contributions have the potential to model for students how to examine the influence of socio-political events in stimulating doctrinal or ritual changes. The volume includes compelling essays focusing on the role of war and conflict in relation to the role of Mary in public life, including events like the seventh-century siege of Constantinople (Iverites) and formative ecclesiastical proceedings like the Council of Ephesus of 431 (Lidova).

Many criteria on which to base this review are provided in the volume's eloquent afterword by Susan Ashbrook Harvey. She situates the volume within a broader scholarly shift, one that has moved away from treating doctrine and theological sanctions as the primary point of orientation when examining the relationship between medieval people and Mary. Harvey, instead, calls attention to the importance of beginning with forms of production that make Mary immanent to everyday life, phenomena such as “relics, shrines; miracles, visions, amulets; liturgical exaltation; feast days, festivals, daily services, night vigils; aesthetic expression in every kind of medium” (345–346). While this volume succeeds in offering truly compelling readings of ritual texts, sung poetry, and inventive homilies, the collection could have been more inclusive of more material forms of mediation. The collection would have benefitted from the inclusion of more contributions like Andrea Olsen Lam's. Her essay examines personal objects such as amulets and textiles and their role in mediating therapeutic expectations.

As an art historian coming to this volume, I ask, then, where are the analyses of those miracles, shrines, or relics evocative of Marian devotion? This absence reveals a larger issue with the volume. While the collection of essays is undoubtedly rich and certainly ambitious in providing contributions that reconstruct auditory (Olkinuora), affective (Krueger, Arentzen) and spatial forms of Marian ritual experience (Evangelatou, Brubaker), few of the essays offer methods for examining how objects themselves stimulated the senses. In the past decade and a half, scholars in late antique and Byzantine studies have sought to expand conceptions of religious experience from the reliance on the primacy of text in order to think about how objects themselves acted upon, stimulated, and even ordered different senses. Here, I am thinking not only of the work of Bissera Pentcheva, Roland Betancourt, and Patricia Cox-Miller but also the methodology behind initiatives like that of Jaś Elsner's “Empires of Faith” project, whose explicit goal was to present the possibility of examining late antique religious experience outside of text.

Of course, certain essays in The Reception of the Virgin in Byzantium do venture into the role of visual and spatial experience (Brubaker, Panou, Lidova). However, these essays conflate visual with verbal perception by examining how “meaning” becomes ordered in visual programs. Such focus on the visual in the service of narrative is to be expected given the volume's basic premise; but a welcome addition to the collection would have been essays beginning for most with a discussion of how a material itself could relate to Marian narrative or how scale, tactility, and other object-specific factors shaped devotional practices. For example, Constantinople in the tenth and eleventh centuries left us with numerous, brilliant miniature relief carvings of the Virgin in ivory. These objects invite sustained focus on individual scenes in her life but also reproduced cult icons such as the Hodegetria. While the connection between ivory material and Marian devotion has been examined in the contexts of Gothic France recently by Sarah Guérin, the numerous objects of the Middle Byzantine period have not received such analysis. Such a case study, however, would raise questions regarding how ivory not only framed impressions of Marian embodiment but, in privately eliciting both touch and sight, mediated devotional experiences outside of the settings of public liturgy.

These points of critique do not take away from the volume's success. This volume offers both researchers and students a wealth of poetic, homiletic, ritual, and visual examples of Marian narrative and evidence for the very early development of Christian devotion to Mary in general. Beyond its immediate relevance for scholars of late antiquity and Byzantium, the various case studies may be individually assigned within courses dealing with gender construction, storytelling, and community formation.