Agostino Paravicini-Baglioni, The Pope's Body & Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages.

Agostino Paravicini-Baglioni, The Pope's Body

Trans. David S. Peterson. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. Xxii + 16 pls. + 396 pp. $28. ISBN: 0-226-03437-2.

Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. xiii + 389 pp. incl. 50 illus. $39.50. ISBN: 0-691-05850-4.

In his late seventies and again in his eighties, Pope Pius XII (1939-1958), apparently hoping to prolong his already longish tenure, underwent treatments by a Swiss specialist in rejuvenation. Pius was not the first pope to fret about dying, as Alessandro Paravicini-Baglioni demonstrates in The Pope's Body. Asked by Alexander II(1061-1073) to explain why popes did not live long after taking office, Peter Damian observed that few had equalled St. Peter's twenty-five years and reasoned that God willed it so to set popes apart from other sovereigns and to teach Christians humility and contempt for earthly life. But even popes found it hard to die for their own or others' spiritual edification. Roger Bacon's theories about the possibility of prolonging life were very popular at the curia. Arnald of Villanova complained that the hypochondriacal Boniface VIII (1294-1303) worried less about "the zeal for Christ and health of souls than about bodies."

Concern for the nature and destiny of the pope's body was due to more than ordinary human frailty, however. The great reform movement had enhanced the stature of the institutional papacy; and theorists were coming to regard the sitting pope as the incarnation of the universal Church whose death created a frightening vacuum. Papal theorists could not adopt the formula available to kings, for, as Baldus and other jurists pointed out, a king, being part of a dynasty, survives his physical death; a pope, who is elected to the office, does not. The king has two bodies; the pope only one.

With the work of Kantorowicz and Giesey as reference point and methodological model, Paravicini-Baglioni analyzes theory; visual imagery, ceremony and ritual to follow the interplay between the symbolic figure of the pope as vicar of Christ, whose early death served an edifying purpose, and popes in the flesh who, like most humans, preferred to postpone their demise as long as possible. In the course of the thirteenth century the contradiction was resolved by bringing the institutional into line with the private: while an early death exemplified world-renunciation, a pope who lived a long healthy life could do much for the welfare of Christendom. David S. Peterson's translation of Il corpo del Papa, first published in 1994, is competent and readable, although I was annoyed to see the noun "privilege" used as a verb (136) and startled to read that Thomas Aquinas was "master general of the Dominicans" (141).

Katherine Ludwig Jansen's book is about a very different matter. Unlike that of the pope's body, devotion to Mary Magdalen has attracted considerable scholarly literature, and in recent years gender studies have provided new and on the whole fruitful perspectives. Jansen builds upon this past work, especially for the early phases of the cult, but she contributes her own independent readings of the early sources. She describes the conflation of several New Testament Marys, with accretions from the gnostic gospels and patristic writings, into the persona of the Magdalen and notes that it was Pope Gregory the Great who, in a sermon of 591, created the composite figure of the saint: a repentant and forgiven sinner, exemplar of hope, and contemplative. Gregory's construct "ordained the agenda of Magdalen veneration for the entire Middle Ages and well beyond" (35).The legend grew along with the expansion of the cult. In the ninth century vita eremitica the Magdalen's biography was assimilated to that of Mary of Egy pt, a repentant prostitute and ascetic. The story goes that after the ascension she fled to the desert where she survived without food and with no covering but her long hair for thirty years. In the eleventh century the monks at Vezelay in Burgundy claimed to possess Mary Magdalen's relics and an elaborate story unfolded. Adrift at sea with some of Christ's disciples she had been shipwrecked at Marseilles, preached to the pagan Gauls, converted the city of Aix-en-Provence, and retired to a cave to live out her life in contemplation. Seven hundred years later the monk Badilus was supposed to have rescued her body from its grave at Saint-Maximin in Provence and brought it to Vezelay where it worked miracles, enhancing the reputation of the monastery and consolidating its importance as a stop on the pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela. Both Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux hailed the Magdalen as "the apostle of the apostles" because she spread the good news of the Resurrection to the other apostles. In 1279 Charles of Salerno, the future king of Naples, somehow "rediscovered" her relics in St. Maximin where, suitably encased, they were received with great pomp by their Dominican caretakers. Thus the house of Anjou acquired an apostolic patron, St. Maximin a great miracle worker and the Dominicans a saintly model. When Jacobus de Voragine combined the various components of the Magdalen story into a single vita and inserted it in the immensely popular Golden Legend the renown of the Mary Magdalen cult in the entire West was assured.

For the next three centuries mendicant preachers publicized and shaped the Magdalen cult. Jansen makes a significant contribution by analyzing the printed and manuscript sermons, devotional works, and visual images they generated, especially in Italy. She shows how the friars celebrated the Magdalen as having combined the contemplative (at the feet of the Lord, listening to his words; retiring into the wilderness) with the active life (preaching the good news to the apostles; converting pagans). Not only did this advance the ideal of the vita mixta cherished by their founders, Francis and Dominic, but it also promoted Innocent III's radical new vision of the Church in which clerical and lay activism replaced monkish contemplation as the perfection of the Christian life. While these "faithful Magdalens" shaped their own ethos under the aegis of the Saint, they also gave legitimacy to lay culture, teaching that men and women in every walk of life could, like her, do penance and perform acts of charity while re maining in the world.

Jansen shows that the issue of gender was close to the surface in every phase of the Magdalen cult, bound up with the continuing debate over women as preachers and with questions of authority. On the whole she employs gender analysis convincingly to clarify some puzzling texts. Thus she elucidates Peter's angry outbursts against the Magdalen in the gnostic Pistis Sophia and Gospel of Mary as the expression of the common bias against women taking public roles, and she plausibly interprets the kiss Jesus gives the Magdalen in The Gospel of Philip as the symbolically sexual medium by which he instills in her the gift of prophecy. A shakier proposition is her contention that in embracing such "female" virtues as poverty, humility, and obedience the mendicants were employing "narrative strategies of symbolic gender reversal" to highlight their distance from the older orders and the hierarchy. Those virtues, somewhat the worse for wear to be sure, were handed down to the friars by the older monastic orders, while St. Francis's embrace of Lady Poverty may owe as much to the highly masculine chivalric romances he had imbibed as a youth as to the notion that poverty was gendered feminine. More convincingly, Jensen effectively relates gender to audience response, showing that men and women might "read" the Magdalen's story differently. Male preachers, discussing the Saint's life of vanitas and luxuria before she met Jesus, worried that these sins led to a whole range of social evils, most especially the downfall of innocent men. Women, on the other hand, connected vanity with pride, an impediment to humility and therefore to their personal lives of penance.

Although these books differ in subject matter, authorial perspective and method, they inhabit the same historical milieu. With Italy leading the way, a quickening urban society demanded ecclesiastical reform, a responsive clergy, and devotional possibilities suitable for lay people committed to secular living. The papacy of Innocent III was emblematic: like all great leaders, Innocent III was in tune with his time and addressed its needs with a magisterial vision of papal leadership and support for new secular forms of clerical and lay piety. Paravicini-Baglioni, by analyzing the developing theories of the pope's body, and Jansen, by charting the permutations of the Magdalen cult, together show how the same forces of social change drove creative interactions of religion and culture in different but overlapping parts of the late medieval world.