Ondřej Homolka defended his thesis and got a PhD

Congratulations to Ondřej. You can find the abstract of his thesis as well as the link to the thesis' archive below.

The Christian cult of Saint Mary, Mother of Christ, experienced a large boom in the 5th and 6th centuries. Written and material sources from late antiquity point to quantitative and qualitative changes in its character. This work examines the spread of the cult of Mary between the 4th and 7th centuries through spatial analysis. It contrasts two traditional explanations for this phenomenon: 1) the rise of the cult of Mary in response to the Nestorian controversy and the Council of Ephesus in 431, and 2) the rise of the cult of Mary as a result of the conversion of pagan populations to Christianity and the search for a substitution for the cults of female goddesses – this hypothesis is examined on the case of Isis, a popular Graeco-Roman goddess of Egyptian origin, who shares with St. Mary the iconographic motif of a woman holding her son in her arms or breastfeeding him. This work includes several proportional analyses focused on the spread of Marian cult in comparison with other cults of saints and on the spread of the main epithets of Mary and Isis. In addition, evidence of the cult of Mary from the 4th to 7th centuries and evidence of the cult of Isis (and associated Isiac deities) from the 2nd to 5th centuries are analyzed using Spearman's correlation coefficient. The null hypotheses used here are the late antique cults of St. Peter and St. Paul and Latin inscriptions attesting the cults of Jupiter and Minerva from the Roman period. This approach ultimately supports the "Nestorian" hypothesis, especially for the territory of Syria, and the "Isiac" hypothesis, especially for the Aegean islands.