6. The Blessed Virgin Mary

The Blessed Virgin Mary is pre-eminent among Christian saints. Her giving birth to Jesus the God-man distinguishes her from other women, even as it draws attention to that experience uniquely distinguishing women from men: childbirth. ‘The Blessed Virgin Mary’ shows how this delicate partitioning of empathetic possibilities in the veneration of Mary, intimately grounded in biology and played out through ideas of gender difference, has stimulated profound and sometimes conflicted religious emotions in men and women. St Mary presents a conundrum to Christian theology: a virgin mother, a Jew who became a Christian, a redeemer of humanity from Eve’s sins, a human who gave birth to God, and the Queen of Heaven.