Thomas Arentzen's new book, revised from his 2014 Lund University dissertation, investigates the portrayal of the Virgin Mary in the poetry of Romanos, the sixth-century Christian who wrote several dozen metered works on various topics. It joins an expanding scholarly conversation about the poet that has emerged in force in the last decade. Georgia Frank, Leena M. Peltomaa, and Sarah Gador-Whyte have contextualized and interpreted the corpus of Romanos, particularly its treatment of Mary, as has Derek Krueger, who has co-authored work with Arentzen and edits the series in which this book appears. Arentzen frames his contribution as a corrective to two other approaches he discerns among prior studies of Mary's role in Christian thought: those that emphasize Mary's special capacity to convey information about her child (which is to say, a Christological focus), and those that place depictions of the Virgin inside the framework of monastic ideology. By contrast,...
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Spring 2018
Book Review|
March 01 2018
Review: The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist, by Thomas Arentzen Available to Purchase
Thomas Arentzen,
The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist
. Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. Philadelphia
: University of Pennsylvania Press
, 2017
. xiii, 265pp, 10 black and white figures. ISBN: 9780812249071. $59.95.
Ellen Muehlberger
Ellen Muehlberger
University of Michigan—Ann Arbor
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Studies in Late Antiquity (2018) 2 (1): 129–131.
Citation
Ellen Muehlberger; Review: The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist, by Thomas Arentzen. Studies in Late Antiquity 1 March 2018; 2 (1): 129–131. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/sla.2018.2.1.129
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