If anyone doubts the antiquity of Christian devotion to Christ’s mother, those doubts will be dismissed by the evidence provided in Stephen Shoemaker’s new book on Marian practice in the Early Church. Conversely, if anyone thinks that the cult of Our Lady is passé and therefore something modern Catholicism can ignore, then that misapprehension will be similarly dispelled by Chris Maunder’s analysis of nineteenth-  and twentieth-century apparitions and their surrounding cults.

Maunder gives an overview of European Marian apparitions, from the most famous such as Fátima in Portugal to much less well-known events. For example, in a chapter on Nazi Germany he sets out brief accounts of a number of apparitions, with a table indicating the places, dates and names of the visionaries involved. All of the latter were critical of the Nazi Government, explicitly or implicitly, and some were imprisoned.