The International Early Mariology Project is the brainchild of Dr Leena Mari Peltomaa, Institut für Byzantinistik und Neogräzistik, Universität Wien, and has been developed in collaboration with Professor Pauline Allen, Director, Centre for Early Christian Studies, Australian Catholic University.
The idea of the project emerged during Peltomaa’s research on the image of the Virgin Mary in the Akathistos Hymn, composed, according to her hypothesis, after the Council of Ephesus (431), but before the Council of Chalcedon (451). On account of this early dating, she examined the patristic notions of Mary and the stage of the Mary cult in Constantinople prior to the Theotokos schism, which began in 428. That reading made it clear that not all of the conceptual elements, of which the image of Mary in the hymn consists, are to be explained by the christological term Theotokos, but a considerable part of the image either presents older patristic reflections of Mary or suggests an ascetical framework involved in devotion to Mary. In the process of her research it became clear that the field of Mariology abounds with investigations which supply detailed information on specific themes, but a basic study, which organises the data from the first four centuries CE is missing. This gap in scientific study was noted by Stefano De Fiores, Handbuch der Marienkunde, 2nd ed., Regensburg 1996, p.99:
Allerdings sind die vorhanden Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Mariologie mit dem Mangel behaftet, daß sie entweder unvollständig sind oder daß ihnen eine wissenschaftliche Anlage fehlt.
At the same time it became evident that topics which one might have expected to have been discussed due to their significance, such as the influence of Irenaeus’ theory of recapitulation on Mariology, the Old Testament typologies of Mary, or the fifth-century Mary cult in Constantinople, had not been the subject of systematic scholarly investigation. What is missing is a compedium: a chronological inventory of all reliably dated patristic texts with references to Mary up till the Council of Chalcedon, and an alphabetical list of all Marian epithets which appear in those texts. An encyclopedia, written not according to modern (Roman Catholic) mariological understanding, but from the early fifth-century theological and ideological perspective is also urgently needed.