Like other female writers who were brought up in a (probably single sex) Catholic school (another writer who comes to mind is Karen Armstrong who had also been a nun) Marina Warner was brought up in a saccharin environment where the Blessed Virgin was concerned. Until, with the onset of puberty, the truths of childhood came tumbling down.

Other people probably take it in their stride and grow into unbelieving adults. Not so Marina Warner. In this book she analyses and dissects the Blessed Virgin teaching and explains how the various strands came into being and how they successively wove with and corrected each other to make up the complex body of belief that Catholics hold today.

She takes a generally historic approach, beginning with the Gospels with their slight allusions to Mary and the curious confusions between the two women of that name.

The book is not a historical investigation of Mary, the woman from Nazareth, but rather an investigation on the different aspects the Virgin assumes at different times.

Four dogmas have been defined and must be believed by Catholics as articles of faith: her divine motherhood and her virginity, both defined by councils of the early Church and therefore accepted by most of the reformed Christian groups; the immaculate conception, sparing her all stain of original sin, which was proclaimed in 1854, and her assumption, body and soul, into heaven which Pope Pius XII defined in 1950.

Just as Aeneas provided Roman citizens with historical roots in the noble past of Troy and descent from the goddess Venus, his mother, and at the same time furnished a standard of conduct that they regarded as exemplary - Virgil's "pius Aeneas" - so the Virgin Mary, an ordinary woman who gave birth to Christ, in whom all found new life, became the symbolic mother of the Church, giving each of its members a part in God's plan and also standing as a model of perfect humanity.

More than the Gospels, the legends about Mary were boosted by the Apocrypha, the fanciful writings which blossomed in the second century such as the Book of James that was accepted as truth by many Fathers such as Clement of Alexandria.

As time went by the belief in Mary's virginity, while becoming stronger, hit more and more difficulties forcing theologians to come up with more convoluted arguments. The new faith also had to face up to the classical mythology with its many virgin births.

From virgin birth it was a short distance to focus on virginity. By that time, for the Fathers of the Church, woman is the cause of the Fall, the wicked temptress, the accomplice of Satan. Hence, the need to exempt the mother of Christ from tainted sexuality and to proclaim her virginal purity.

Until the peace of the Church in 313AD, the young Church had to face the massive crisis of persecution. But persecution strengthened the Church. It provided it with innumerable examples of those who conquered death through martyrdom. After 313AD, accepting the Virgin as the ideal of purity implicitly demanded rejecting the ordinary female condition as impure.

After the Fall, God did not only curse womankind to suffer childbirth in sorrow; he also sentenced all mankind to corruption in the grave. From the second century onwards, the Virgin was held to have died and her passing was celebrated throughout the Roman Empire. But there were no contemporary records of her death, no knowledge of her grave, no body to venerate, no relics to touch. Hence, the tradition of the Assumption of Mary, dating from as far back as the third century.

At the Assumption Mary becomes Queen of Heaven, Regina Coeli. The first image of Maria Regina on a wall of the church S. Maria Antiqua, the oldest Christian building in the Roman Forum, was painted in the first half of the sixth century. Hence too the Salve Regina, the Catholic Church's best-loved hymn.

At around the turn of the new millennium a new myth entered the Latin Church - nuptial imagery from the Song of Songs which was first interpreted as the love of Christ for his Church. But soon, through St Bernard, the Song of Songs was applied to the Virgin. This was the time of the troubadours, courtly love, and even this came to be applied to the Madonna, my woman, an image of sexual chastity and female submission. It is this ideal of womanhood that is sung and celebrated by Dante in the Paradise - En la sua volontade e' nostra pace (In his will is our peace).

There is more to the Mary stream. In the 13th and early 14th centuries the Franciscan Order wrought a revolution in Christian thinking praising Mary's silence, modesty and self-effacement. Hence the new and tender attention that was paid from the 15th century onwards to the details of the Holy Family's daily domestic life.

But on the other hand the 15th century saw a widespread devotion to the Mater Dolorosa, the Woman of Sorrows, which spread like wildfire among those peoples untouched by the Lutheran revolution which removed all vestiges of Marian devotion. When people, struck by famine, war, plague etc., prayed to the Woman of Sorrows they identified her with them.

Warner's last two sections deal with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and the Hail Mary and the hour of our death.

As can perhaps be gleaned from this short presentation the book comes with an abundance of references to history and culture. It is not a pietist book and disagrees at times with the Catholic doctrine. The book is full of interesting and riveting information about art, literature and history in general. It debates about contraception on the one hand and women priests on the other, which come mixed with claims about maternity and the conflicting claims on women's energies of men, children and work.