Mary Magdalen, by Susan Haskins (HarperCollins, £12.99 in UK)

Mary Magdalen as a more appropriate role model for contemporary women than the Virgin of the same name? It sounds like one of Madonna's pranks, but in this intelligent and scholarly book Susan Haskins traces the ways in which society has adapted, distorted and ruthlessly exploited the combination of eroticism and religious ecstasy to be found in the person of this female icon, about whose life we know practically nothing. Haskins ranges across the Gospels, the teachings of the early Church, the most recently deciphered manuscripts, the narratives of medieval passion plays and Victorian photographic pornography in a book which is part art history, part sociological analysis, part feminist tract and always wholly absorbing.