The Making of the Magdalen.

The Making of the Magdalen
Katherine Ludwig Jansen
Princeton University Press, $19.95, 389 pp.

In the year 591, Pope Gregory the Great preached a sermon in the church of San Clemente in Rome in which he argued that the one and same Mary who washed the feet of Christ with her tears in the Gospel of Luke was the sister of Martha in the Gospel of John, and was Mary of Magdala whom Jesus exorcised of seven demons and who later became his devoted disciple, according to the Gospel of Mark. So great was Gregory's authority that the Roman church accepted his Magdalen for almost fourteen hundred years, until the liturgical calendar reform of 1969.

In this revision of her exhaustively researched Princeton dissertation, Katherine Jansen documents how this composite Mary figure became a source for medieval commentators and preachers. Mary was a symbol of, among other things, the repentant sinner (the presumption was, without evidence, that she had been a prostitute), the contemplative life (since she sat at the Lord's feet while her sister Martha busied herself in active service), and, the "apostle to the apostles" (apostola apostolorum), a title she merited as witness to the Resurrection of Jesus.

More crucially, there was the almost universally accepted story that Mary Magdalen, along with her brother Lazarus and her sister Martha, had evangelized all of Provence until she took up the eremitic life in the Maritime Alps. Her putative relics were housed at Vezelay, a primary spot on the Compostela pilgrimage road of the Middle Ages. The tradition that she evangelized in France created a sticky problem for the medieval preachers: how to account for a woman preaching when women were not supposed to preach, according to Saint Paul's stipulation that women keep silent in the church? Jansen's ample documentation about this issue raises interesting questions about lay preaching in general and female preaching in particular.

The polysemous Magdalen image provided rich resources. It allowed medieval preachers to inveigh against sumptuous fashion consumption. Her converted life gave inspiration to the recuperation of "fallen women" by the establishment of hostels and asylums for that purpose. Her conversion also tied nicely into the importance that the church (after the Lateran Council IV) put on confession of sins to preachers, especially mendicants, who were not slow to use her as an example of the penitent life. Since, according to the legend, she retired as a hermit, her example could be employed to sing the praises of the contemplative life. The varied aspects of the Magdalen's life enhanced the reforming movement of the medieval church which began under Pope Gregory VII and Saint Peter Damian and culminated in the reforming legislation of Lateran IV. A vast number of medieval churches are named for her and there are widespread depictions of her life in the period's art.

As Jansen's bibliography demonstrates, much scholarship has been devoted to the place of Mary Magdalen in Christian piety. Years ago [November 4, 1994] I reviewed in these pages Susan Haskins's Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor. What does this present volume add which has not been said already? First, Jansen limits herself to a discrete period in church history (she ends her story on the eve of the Reformation, during which the cult of the saints underwent an understandable metamorphosis), and focuses on medieval preaching. Second, Jansen has a genuine gift for relating the story of the Magdalen to the larger religious and social history of the period without the usually tendentious "gender studies" palaver that many such works feel a need to include. Nonetheless, it must be said that when Jansen wants to make a point she does it with some sharpness. Consider the last sentence of her book: "We must not forget that it is our own age that officially memorializes Saint Mary Magdalene as a disciple; it was the 'Dark Ages' that honored her as a preacher and apostle of the apostles." Lastly, she is exhaustive in her search for materials. Indeed, if there is a criticism of this work it is that in its transformation from dissertation to book it might have benefited from some judicious pruning but, to be fair, not much. I read this while traveling and found it a welcome companion. It is highly readable, learned, full of interesting material gleaned from primary archival research, and amply illustrated.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.