Stephen Shoemaker, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oregon, begins his survey of devotion to the Virgin Mary across the early Christian world, with striking words: ‘It is rather remarkable, I think, that even at this date there is still no satisfactory study of the development of Marian piety in ancient Christianity.’ It is indeed a strange fact, considering the great significance that the person and lore of the Blessed Virgin played (and still plays) in the Christian religion, as well as in Islam. Fortunately these words are true no longer: Shoemaker's present study more than repairs that great deficiency. This is a balanced, careful, scholarly and immensely readable monograph addressing a world of studies where the effuse, the mawkish and the frankly lunatic have had more than their rightful share of the literary space. It is still a very worrying thing to type ‘Virgin Mary’ into an internet search engine, and see what turns up in the referenced sources. Shoemaker finally places the story of the rising tradition of Marian devotion (cultus) and theology into a serious and non-partisan historical narrative based upon the highest quality of scholarly methods. This is a fine book that will immediately establish itself as the classic work on the subject for decades to come.

Shoemaker rightly turns over some apple carts. He sets aside the loose claims that the Virgin's cultus derives from Hellenistic goddess traditions, but also demurs from Averil Cameron's more reasoned thesis that devotion to the Virgin grew as an offshoot of the larger devotion to the saints that sprang up after the age of martyrs. Shoemaker notes how primitive that Marian cultus is; in a sense how archetypal and foundational for the Christian movement as a whole. The evidence for this is everywhere one looks in the foundational scriptural sources whether lauding her (the Gospels of John and Luke) or discreetly lamenting her influence (the Pauline Epistles and the Gospel of Mark). It is prevalent in the apocryphal sources and especially in the earliest forms of liturgy and Christian hymnography. This centrality of the Virgin, however, was a fact that did not sit easily with Reformation era divines who felt in their bones the necessity to strive against prevalent forms of late medieval Marian devotion, and who regarded ‘apocryphal’ and liturgical evidences as no evidence at all.

Shoemaker begins with a good review of Mary in the New Testament. Other chapters follow on the theme of Mary as teacher of mysteries in Gnostic literature. In chapter iii he returns to the theme of Marian death traditions, a field in which he has already shown himself to be the preeminent commentator. The Mary who emerges from this early literature was a figure of high veneration in populist and often heterodox circles, and Shoemaker suggests that it is this taint of suspicion by association that might account for her slow appearance (third century) in the works of the Christian orthodox intelligentsia. When she does make her showing as the Virgin Mother of the virginal Christ, however, she becomes the protectress of all Christian ascetics, as well as the patron of women. Shoemaker ends his study with the formal entrance of Marian devotion into the conciliar dogmatic tradition of the Church: the manner in which her title Theotokos (Birth-giver of God) became a storm centre of Christological dispute in the interface between Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius of Constantinople at the Council of Ephesus in 431. He notes how this stage, significant insofar as each subsequent ecumenical council adds to her formal liturgical titles, is as much a beginning of the story of her cultus as an end to it.

The bibliography is a fine asset to the book, the scholarly apparatus of notes always pertinent and useful.

All in all this is a magisterial book that is a delight to read. It will be compulsory reading for all who are interested in the history of Christian doctrine and liturgy, and for the origins of the Jesus movement. It will be appreciated also by all those whose own religious traditions continue to venerate the Mother of the Lord. It unquestionably demonstrates how Mary of Nazareth needs to be moved out of the domain of myth and reinstated for our consideration as the disciple of Jesus who dynamically seized the attention of the earliest Christians, as the one who most formed and was formed by the Christ, and who came mysteriously to share in his intercessory heavenly power across the ages, by virtue of being physically lifted up from the grave. In these anabasis and analepsis traditions, which so many commentators before Shoemaker have dismissed as ‘mythical and late’ sideshows, we see intimations of the most profound scriptural apocalypticism enduring intact through the ongoing many hellenisations of the patristic age.