It is sometimes both necessary and useful to go backwards in history, to disentangle an earlier development not by the usual method of piecing together the contemporary evidence but by approaching it through the eyes of later generations. This is certainly true of the present subject. We can say with confidence that late antiquity, especially the period from the fifth century onwards, marked the formative stage in the growth of cult and veneration offered to Mary. Yet one of the most striking experiences in any attempt to disentangle this development is the gradual recognition of exactly how much of our understanding has been shaped by later ideas, wishes, and religious agendas. Investigation of this subject entails the attempt to deal with many texts which are in themselves extremely hard to date; and indeed some of the ‘evidence’ itself, at least the written evidence, turns out to consist of a tangle of later legend passing for history - so much so in fact that I am considerably less certain about the subject now than when I originally wrote about it over twenty years ago.

The interest of this paper lies in the distinction between θεoτόкoς (‘Theotokos’), ‘God-bearer’, and words or phrases which are more precisely translated as ‘mother of God’, especially μήτηρ θεoυ̂ (‘mētēr theou’) and θεoμήτωρ (‘theomētōr’) in Greek and mater Dei in Latin. It concentrates on the usage of Greek and Latin Christian writers between the later fourth century and the eighth century. For those who believe that ‘mother of God’ is the only proper rendering in English of θεoτόкoς, it must seem a non-issue. Indeed, insofar as they have most of the tradition on their side, this enquiry may appear redundant, impertinent, or sectarian. To leave the matter there, however, would be to leave important questions unasked. Historical study is not best served by the indiscriminate translation of θεoτόкoς as ‘mother of God’, or at least by a translation that fails clearly to distinguish between θεoτόкoς and direct equivalents of ‘mother of God’.

Conventional wisdom on the Nestorian controversy has long held that the dispute was over Christ rather than Mary, that the attribution of the title Theotokos (or God-bearer) to the Virgin became a battlefield not because the status of Mary was a lively issue but because of its implications for the doctrine of the Incarnation. Associated developments in Marian piety have been seen as a consequence of the approval of the title at the ecumenical Council of Ephesus (431) rather than its cause. The confidence with which this has been repeated reflects, one may suspect, both a prejudice that Christology was a more worthy subject for debate than Mariology and a presumption that theological debate among bishops must be more important than developments in popular piety where lay women played a leading role. We may therefore be grateful to a series of recent writers who have called the conventional wisdom into question and argued that the main cause of the controversy, as it developed in Constantinople, was a development in Marian devotion during the preceding quarter century.

Scholars have long suspected that the Byzantine cult of the Virgin Mary owed its early success to the efforts of the early Byzantine empresses. Among them, it is Aelia Pulcheria, Augusta from 414 to 453 and herself a professed virgin until her politically-charged marriage in 451, who is best known for having asserted Mary’s right to be known as Theotokos - the one who gave birth to God. Many sources suggest that the Nestorian controversy debated at the Council of Ephesus in 431 arose from an altercation between Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople from 428 to 431, and Pulcheria. On this view, the debate over Christ’s human and divine natures turned on whether Mary had given birth to God the Son, or only to Jesus the man. It was with this in mind that in 1982 Kenneth Holum suggested that by refusing to support the cult of the Virgin as Theotokos, Nestorius had in effect challenged the imperial family’s religious authority in early fifth-century Constantinople.

This article presents a preliminary report on a research project which will examine the homiletic and hymnographic treatment of the Virgin Mary in eighth-century Byzantium. The texts requiring detailed study are numerous and not without their problems. Some of the surviving hymns and homilies remain unedited, while the authorship of many texts, including those which have been edited, is still disputed. The first stage of the project will therefore be concerned with identifying all eighth-century Marian homilies and hymns; only after that will it be possible to study the historical, theological, and spiritual content of this material.

Nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries toiling in the vineyard in Ottoman Armenia found the native women receptive to many of their ideas - until the subject of Mary came up. An American missionary recorded the following encounter in 1877:

In the early twelfth century, the Byzantine monk James of the monastery of Kokkinobaphou composed six sermons on the early life of the Virgin Mary. Two copies of these sermons, known collectively as the Kokkinobaphos manuscripts, have survived: BN, MS gr. 1208 and BAV, MS gr. 1162. Based on a combination of internal and external evidence, scholars have dated the manuscripts to the second quarter of the twelfth century, and furthermore suggested that their production and decoration was undertaken during the lifespan of James. Both copies bear an extensive and almost identical narrative and typological cycle of illumination, which has been securely connected to the imperial environment of the Byzantine court of the twelfth century and was linked, more tentatively, with the Sevastokratorissa Eirene, a prominent patroness of the court, widow of the Seuastokrator Andronikos, the second son of the Emperor John II Komnenos (1118-43). The miniatures illustrating the text of James are renowned for their artistic quality and their iconographical peculiarities.

In the tenth century Gandersheim was a small, proudly independent principality ruled by women. All who belonged to Gandersheim (except for the servants) were of noble birth, taking vows as canonesses - that is, free to leave the abbey, if they wanted. Hrotsvit, born around 935, was one of these canonesses. She was well aware of her talent for writing Latin and - as she confessed later in a rhyming prose-preface - ‘was not to lie sluggish in the heart’s dark cavern and be destroyed by the rust of negligence, but rather struck by the hammer of unfailing diligence, was to echo some small ringing note of divine praise.’ ‘In complete secrecy’ she began to write poems based on writings she had found in the library of Gandersheim.

Much has been written of the Marian devotions of King Louis IX of France. Louis, so we are told, would mortify his flesh on the vigils of the four principal feasts of the Virgin. Regular pilgrimages were made by the King to the great Marian shrines of France, most notably those of Chartres and Rocamadour. Day by day, in his own chapel, the King listened to matins, tierce and compline sung with the appropriate offices of Our Lady, and on Tuesdays and Saturdays the Mass itself was dedicated to the Virgin. When the King took communion, which he did on six principal feast-days each year, two of these feasts, the Assumption and the Purification, were those of the Virgin. Rather than listen to ribald or secular songs, Louis preferred the singing of the Ave Maria stella.

The story of Theophilus is one of the oldest and most widespread Marian miracles in Christian literature. Theophilus is said to have been a sixth-century priest of Adana in Cilicia, removed from office by a new bishop. Eager to regain his position, Theophilus went to a Jew known for diabolical practices and through him made a written pact with the Devil, sealed with a ring. Theophilus received back his lost status but then began to repent and, through the intercession of the Virgin Mary, finally won the document from the Devil. Three days later he died.

On 15 November 1407, in the monastic infirmary of Christ Church, Canterbury, Thomas Wykyng breathed his last with a prayer for the intercession of the Virgin Mary on his lips. The brethren in attendance, so the memoir continues, were convinced that at the moment of his departure the Blessed Virgin summoned him to herself (‘ad se evocavit’) because next to his trust in God he had always placed supreme confidence in her. He was remembered as a model monk who had served his turn in many offices including those of cellarer, sacrist, novice master, and warden of Canterbury College, Oxford. To the many young monks who owed their instruction in the celebration of mass to him he strongly recommended that this same prayer be included as part of their personal devotions as they stood at the altar.

Alma redemptoris mater is one of the four ancient antiphons or anthems in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This anthem may recall Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, and the image of a choirboy, seven years of age, who, having learnt his Alma redemptoris, sang daily the Virgin’s praises even beyond death. Primer in hand he learnt his Alma by heart, only to be murdered in a Jewish ghetto for singing the anthem that he took such pains to perfect. With the song on his lips his throat was cut; but Mary intervened, placed a precious pearl on his tongue, saying,

My litel child, nowe wol I fecche thee,
Whan that the greyn is fro thy tonge ytake.
Be not agast; I wol the nat forsake.

The development of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin has a long history. This article deals with a small but important segment of this development, by providing some account of what was at stake and of the main stages by which the contest was fought out, principally within the Dominican Order, between 1515 and 1551.

The development here considered is really sandwiched between two Councils, the Fifth Lateran on the one hand, and Trent on the other, at which the thought of settling a very contentious issue was first entertained and then dismissed. The need for a settlement became apparent in the fifteenth century when the increasing popularity of the doctrine exacerbated the longstanding rivalry between the Franciscans, its principal devotees, and the Dominicans, its traditional opponents. Pope Sixtus IV went some way towards satisfying the Immaculists by the constitution Cum praeexcelsa of 1476, but the constitution Grave nimis of 1483 gave some satisfaction to their opponents, because it explicitly stated that, in the case of this doctrine, the Church had not yet made up its mind.

Let us contemplate Thomas Cranmer, Primate of All England, sitting on an altar to preside over the trial of Anabaptist heretics. The time is May 1549; the altar, unceremoniously covered over to support the judge, is that of the Lady Chapel in St Paul’s Cathedral in London; several of the heretics on trial have denied the Catholic doctrine of the incarnation, and one will later be burned at the stake. In a compelling paradox, an archbishop tramples an altar of Our Lady in the course of defending the incarnation. One witness in the crowd of onlookers was a pious and scholarly Welsh Catholic, Sir Thomas Stradling, who later wrote down his reactions to the occasion. He interpreted it as the uncannily accurate fulfilment of an eleventh-century prophecy to be found in a manuscript in his own library: Cranmer, he pointed out, went on to be punished for his blasphemy first by the 1549 rebellions and then by his fiery death at the stake.’

The Virgin Mary provided a powerful focal point for religious identity. During the early modern period Mary-worship marked out one Christian confession from another, rather than Christian from Jew, as in the Middle Ages, or Catholic from secularist, as in more modern times. Intra-Christian disputes over Mary’s status were particularly intense in Germany, the heartland of the Reformation, where Catholic and Protestant lived side by side. This paper will consider the fate of Marian imagery and devotion in three of Germany’s key free cities: Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Cologne. Each city had a different confessional structure: Nuremberg adopted the Lutheran faith in 1525; Augsburg’s council introduced wide-ranging and radical (Zwinglian-influenced) reforms in the 1530s but the city had religious parity imposed on it in 1548; Cologne remained Catholic, despite the presence of a considerable Protestant minority within its city walls and the attempts of two archbishops to introduce a synodal Reformation. These three cities therefore illustrate the spectrum of possible responses of traditional Marian veneration to the pressures of Protestant and Catholic reform. A comparison between them allows us to assess the impact of both doctrinal debate and local circumstance on the expression of Marian piety, and reveals the various ways in which Marian devotion might be used to create confessional consciousness and define religious allegiance.