MOTHER OF GOD: A History of the Virgin Mary, by Miri Rubin, is reviewed by Christopher Howse in the Daily Telegraph. Excerpt:

Miri Rubin, a professor of medieval history at Queen Mary, University of London, does not adopt a devotional tone in her learned book. In 500 pages she teases out strands of opinion and conviction about Mary’s place in Christianity – and beyond. In a section on Mary in Islam, she examines the teaching of the Koran, where Jesus, a prophet, is born to Mary, a virgin, whose pregnancy is announced by an angel.

[...]

Miri Rubin deals with anti-Semitic statements among early Christians too. These are less often to do with supposed deicide as with Jewish rejection of the idea that Jesus could be God. Her discussion of this thread of polemical exchange gains force from its calm objectivity.

Jews who “derided” the Christian idea of Mary did so because they knew the greatness – or enormity – of their claims: that almighty God, the transcendent creator, had been born as a little baby. Pagans, by contrast, on first hearing of Christianity might have mistaken Jesus for just another god, perhaps as godly as Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae. That, no doubt, is why, in her early chapters Rubin, annoyingly for some readers, consistently refers to Jesus as “a god”.

Background here.