Ipotesi su Maria

When Messori published his first book, Ipotesi su Gesù (Hypotheses about Jesus), which immediately became a worldwide bestseller, many urged him to also write ‘hypotheses about Mary’. The proposal was accepted almost thirty years later, in 2005, and here too have the author’s efforts been rewarded with foreign translations, numerous reprints and this new edition. Years of work have resulted in a volume on over sixty chapters that can be read on their own rather than as a unicum. The result is lively and ‘colourful’: dogma is combined with anecdote, biblical exegesis with apparitions, spirituality with history, theology with mystery. Scholars, men of letters, visionaries and mystics, pilgrims, miracle workers, saints and sinners, inquisitors and heresiarchs, emperors and peasants all come together. A surprising overview of an often secret world, which the author confronts as a self-confessed devotee, allergic however to the honeyed rhetoric of a certain devotionalism. These pages are both rigorous and informative. They are theresult – as always – of the liveliness and clarity of the great journalist combined with the solidity of the up-to-date scholar, with his implacable documentation.