A book we needed in 1950

Yesterday at a pub (watching the Texans and Colts take the day off too apparently) I took time to read the bulk of Stephen Shoemaker's first work, The Ancient Traditions Of The Virgin Mary's Dormition And Assumption. This cost $140 back in 2002 but is now on archive.org.

This book's thesis is (or isn't) "should the Virgin Mary have an Assumption Day". Her feast has always been popular among the Balkan Orthodox on account of the Leo/Virgo season - perhaps seeping over to the Hrvatska. Over the 1940s the (still-)Latin Church had inherited several strains of tradition that the Virgin was bodily assumed into Heaven upon her death. This in 1950 became the Assumption dogma which, as a result, Catholics must believe. Shoemaker is here to figure out how it all got started. These collect all the records of the end of Mary's Earthly life, together Coemesis, which is Dormitio in Latin.

A lot of Christians - we learn - approved Coemesis if only as a unifying point of Christendom: theotokos for obvious reasons, but also anti-theotokos because then they could venerate Mary without even asking about the divine-or-human nature of Christ.

So: how does the book do? Well, I learnt a lot.

If you don't want to read the whole thing, several reviews exist. Most of them are paywalled, but Bryn Mawr's is free and usually best anyway. Author Adam Becker admits not to read (in order) Ethiopic, Coptic, Armenian, or Georgian but I might suggest he give at least Coptic a crack (he's probably learnt it since penning that review).

Shoemaker made the... interesting choice, in the book's own introduction, to complain that he didn't want to write it. I have to admit - his reluctance doesn't show. This really is a fine book. It's just that it is an exercise in marshalling data rather than in arguing a thesis.

One of the book's undigested publons concerns the Virgin Mary's most important role which was birthing our Lord... at the Kathisma in Judaea. This will become a classic article - but it's not there yet, in this 2002 book. Better that this material had been sequestered.