Rebekah Lamb looks back to the days when the Virgin Mary would chastise bishops
Mary and the Art of Prayer
By Rachel Fulton Brown, Columbia, 656pp, £55
Steeped in scriptural, liturgical and mystical accounts of the life of the Virgin Mary, medieval devotions and writings particularly meditated on the role of Mary as persuasive intercessor, as advocate and consoler. In The Divine Comedy, for instance, Dante attributes the grace of his journey through hell, purgatory and heaven to the intercessory powers of a “gentle lady” who “weeps” over human “distress”.
