Stephen Shoemaker: The Compassionate Mother: The Earliest Life of the Virgin and Affective Piety in Late Antiquity

For more than half of a century now, scholarship on the history of medieval spirituality has drawn attention to a profound shift in the patterns of devotion that took place in northwestern Europe around the middle of the eleventh century.  In this age, pious reflection suddenly turned to contemplate, with increasing fervor, the excruciating pains endured by Christ in the Crucifixion, inviting the faithful to share mentally in the torment and sorrow.  The art and literature of this era encourage an emotional, sympathetic response to Christ’s suffering, eliciting the name “affective piety” or “affective devotion” for this movement in modern scholarship.  Very much at the center of this new mentality stood the Virgin Mary, whose unique witness to the events of the Passion provided medieval writers with a compelling perspective from which to relate the horrors of the crucifixion.  Thus, as this mode of piety flourished across the High Middle Ages, Mary’s lamentations at the cross emerged as one of the primary vehicles of affective devotion to the sufferings of Christ.

It has become practically a dogma of Medieval Studies that such affective spirituality first emerged only during the middle of the eleventh century, when this new style of piety rather abruptly burst onto the scene.  Nevertheless, it is now apparent that the tradition of Mary’s compassionate sorrows at the foot of the cross first emerged in its mature medieval form already at the end of late antiquity in the earliest Life of the Virgin.  This seventh-century Marian biography, which is attributed to Maximos the Confessor, includes an extended account of the Virgin’s involvement in the events of the Crucifixion, including three formal lamentations of her son’s death.  It is a surprisingly early appearance of what had been thought to be a much more recent development in Marian devotion, preceding even the homilies of George of Nicomedia and the Lives of the Virgin by John the Geometer and Symeon the Metaphrast, all three of which depend heavily on this earlier Marian biography.