The Book of Mary

Sacred Scripture offers little detailed revelation about Mary, the Mother of God: just a few paragraphs to the beginnings of Luke’s and Matthew’s Gospels, some passing allusions in the course of Jesus’ public life, and a brief appearance, almost in silhouette, in John’s account of Calvary. Yet from this apparently insignificant foundation has arisen a universal devotion to Mary, a devotion exemplified over the centuries by prayers, poems, theological studies, and sacred music. To show how this came to be, Henri Daniel-Rops lays out all that is known from the testimony of contemporaries, ancient texts and later interpretations, about the humble maiden of Nazareth who was chosen to bear God’s only-begotten Son. With clarity and reverence, Daniel-Rops presents the recorded details of Mary: from Scripture and the early post-Biblical literature, the fascinating apocryphal and pseudo-epigraphical texts, and the writings of the early Church Fathers.

First appearing in English translation in 1960, The Book of Mary is a treasure-trove of the original testimonies to the glories of Mary—and these, in the words of St. John Henry Newman, “are for the sake of Jesus; and that we praise and bless her as the first of creatures, that we may confess Him as our sole Creator.