This exhibition and its catalogue represent a swimming against the millennial tide, as the director of the Benaki Museum in his Foreward presents the exhibition in relation to the festivities that celebrated the turning of that new year’s clock. The exhibition is an unusual contribution to the new-epoch declarations of the last two years, and its unusual qualities lie not least in its aim to engage only the phenomenon of Marian devotion in Byzantine culture. Recent exhibitions on the Virgin Mary have been wide ranging, like Wellesley College’s Divine Mirrors, which engaged art, music, and culture. The Athens organizers concentrated their energies on an un-modern phenomenon with a highly conventional focus: the intense and defining devotion to the Virgin Mary from the Early Christian period until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The exhibition engaged a period of more than a thousand years in what Maria Vassilaki, the curator and editor of this Heraklean enterprise, rightly states to be “a comprehensive study of the Virgin in which issues of cult, theology and art are considered” (xvii). The need for such exhibitions is clear when the organizers gather objects from around the Greek-speaking world, including Mount Sinai but not Athos, and...