Book Review: Mary Magdalene in Medieval Franciscan Spirituality

Vicki-Marie Petrick, review of Steven J. McMichael, OFM, Mary Magdalene in Medieval Franciscan Spirituality: Beloved Disciple and Apostle of the Apostles (St. Bonaventure 2021).

Along with his work as Managing Editor of Brill’s Medieval Franciscans series, as well as his role as his role as a general editor of several of those volumes, Steven J. McMichael, OFM, associate professor of Theology at the University of Saint Thomas has now penned an entire tome dedicated to the study of the Apostola Apostolorum in Mary Magdalene in Medieval Franciscan Spirituality: Beloved Disciple and Apostle of the Apostles, (Saint Bonaventure, New York: Franciscan Institute, 2021). It comes as one volume among many others in an ever widening field of Magdalene scholarship that spans the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Italy.[1]

Fr. McMichael brings another viewpoint to the table, particularly valuable insofar as, parallel to the professor’s research and teaching, he has also had a role guide at Assisi. His voice is thus both vestige and witness to the long line of foreign brothers who accompanied pilgrims (or their modern incarnation as tourists) through the images of Assisi and their import, translating them for the eyes of the uninitiated. This is particularly important for the penultimate part of this book which focuses on the images in Assisi’s Magdalene chapel as well as other Italian paintings of that saint from the period.

The work is divided into seven chapters. The first forms a base for the reader to get their bearings among the various biographical takes on the medieval Mary Magdalene, starting with the twelfth century. This is starting in mezzo cammino: the slow sedimentation of this figure begins in fact with the biblical Song of Songs mixed with several figures or facets of one figure appearing in the Gospel. The author could have profitably consulted Elisabeth Pinto-Mathieu[2] for the fundamentals of the medieval Magdalenian biography, or Dominique Iogna-Prat’s seminal article on the Sermon of the Pseudo-Odo of Cluny.[3]

Yet for a work not intended to be encyclopedic, he gives his reader a good introduction. Starting with Rule for a Recluse from the Cistercian Aelred of Reivaulx, he thereby establishes this personage as imbued with the sensual emotivity-- all desire and tactility-- that has and will typify the Magdalene for the medieval reader and viewer. The Life of Saint Mary Magdalene and her Sister Martha, attributed in the past to Rabanus Maurus and today to an anonymous Cistercian – further establishes the motif of a tearful figure with more biographical detail but entirely in line with Aelred’s vision.

The author breaks here to observe that early on there is a relationship – not of opposites, but of complements – between the Magdalene and the Virgin Mary. The texts seem to respond to a need to associate them through the symbolism of a shared name – that is to say a nature, an essence – and thus establish a theological connection between Annunciation of the birth of Christ to the Mother and announcing his resurrection to the Magdalene.

He then returns to medieval texts, now to the thirteenth century with that 1260 bestseller The Golden Legend by the Dominican Jacobus of Voragine, which well supports the author’s ultimate argument that the Virgin and the Magdalene are not in opposition but cooperation with each other, theologically speaking. Hence his placement of his commentary on the two women as a sort of aside before addressing Jacobus, whose theology pursues this line of thinking, is puzzling.

His second chapter addresses specifically Franciscan texts that recuperate this tradition to give it their own imprint, their own accents, focusing on the Magdalene as first witness to the resurrection in the typically Franciscan Passion narratives. The texts seem disparate. We review Bonaventure’s 1260s Tree of Life, then jump to the writings of a latter fifteenth-century Poor Clare from Spain, Isabelle de Villena Vita Christi written towards1485. Then we go backwards again to examine the writings of aa thirteenth-century ¨Poor Clare from Pisa” in another Vita Christi called the Testo Breve Latin Meditationes Vita Christi. This is finally grouped together with Ludolph of of Saxony’s Vita Christi of the latter fourteenth century.

Although not quite as analytically coherent as we might hope, still we discover lesser known voices of the Vita Christi tradition within a typically Franciscan framework that gives us a good sense of how a period spectator instilled with this strain of piety, and informed by the emotivity of the preceding texts, might approach or understand the figure of the Magdalene.

Chapter three looks more closely at the Noli Me Tangere in the Vita Christi tradition the “scene of scenes” as Father McMichael justly calls it, in a nod to the Song of Songs, a theological turning point and the climax of what he rightly posits are “the three archetypal scenes of Mary Magdalene in the medieval Franciscan tradition,” along with the Anointing in the House of the Pharisee and the Raising of Lazarus.

The author here turns to the biblical bases of the composite facets of the Magdalene figure. An exploration of these aggregates might have more usefully been placed in a chapter preceding that of the first medieval texts addressed.

Different aspects of the Noli Me Tangere are examined, such the meanings of the garden setting, or whether Jesus first appeared to his mother. Above all, howeever, this chapter grapples with the ambiguity of the Latin phrase uttered by Christ to the Magdalene, and whether or not in the various texts explored, the saint did or did not in fact touch the resurrected body of Jesus. His analysis is sophisticated and sensitive reading of the texts set forth in Chapter One and Two.

In Chapter Four, through Bonaventure, the author addresses a more formally theological understanding of the Triduum and Mary Magdalene the key witness figure - more specifically under the aegis of role as model lover of Christ: faithful follower at the Crucifixion, the mourner at the tomb, and then – because of this – witness to the resurrection. As such, according to sources used by Fr. McMichael and many others, the Magdalene reverses Eve’s actions in Eden. The saint becomes not only Apostola Apostolorum, a title familiar to those versed in Magdalene studies, but, further to that, Mediator of the Mediator, a more glorious title still.

Given the fascinating interpretation of Bonaventure, we might regret that the author did not do the same for what he considers to be the other two fundamentally Franciscan scenes of the Magdalene’s, “The Anointing in the House of the Pharisee” and “The Raising of Lazarus.”

In Chapter Five, Fr. McMichael leaves text as his primary source material and turns to the image as interpreted by medieval Italian artists. Just as the twelfth century texts lay the framework for those analyzed from the following centuries, the author looks at art that directly precedes the imagery of Assisi’s lower basilica. And it is in this chapter that we see an analysis of the two other scenes he describes as “the three archetypal scenes of Mary Magdalene in the medieval Franciscan tradition.” He chooses his images well: His fifteen pages on Duccio’s Maestà of 1308-1311 in Siena brings insight into how that master envisaged the role of Mary Magdalene in the altarpiece. Another ten pages are devoted to Giotto’s 1305 Scrovegni chapel in Padua. The author then addresses lesser known images out of Angevin Naples with their foundational devotion to the saint. From there, he turns to the earlier 1280-1285 dossal of the eponymous Master of the Magdalene before analyzing the 1370 Guidalotti - Rinuccini Chapel in the sacristy of Florence’s Franciscan church Santa Croce. Then, unusually, but usefully, he concludes this section with a few examples of illuminated manuscripts and their representation of the saint in question.

His chronological jumps might puzzle the reader, as does the switch from text to image, but from both of these sources emerges a vision of the Magdalene that is truer to the medieval vision. She is not presented exclusively as a penitent but in her primary role as she who announced the Resurrection. While the images, as Fr. McMichael reads them, do closely parallel the textual bases he has set forth, but we can only regret that he follows the written word so closely. As sensitive as he is to how images work, his association of images as dependent on text does not completely allow them to function autonomously of theological discourse. The images are thus treated as a kind of post-hoc illustration of the points the texts make.

In Chapter Six we come finally to Assisi and the Basilica of San Francesco, specifically, both upper and lower churches. The chapter title tells us that this concerns now not only the role of the Magdalene there but also of the Virgin and how the two Marys integrate the function of Francis within the Christological framework of the Basilica’s art.

We are privileged to hear a friar and docent propound on the meanings of the San Francesco’s frescoes, as his voice is imbued with echoes of centuries of immersive Magdalene theology that informs his readings informed by a sensitivity to the reality of the Basilica at Assisi as an experienced space.

Though somewhat timid, given that more than one of the frescoes of the Magdalene chapel that take the ardent expression of the texts quite nearly to their visual conclusion, we admire how he views the Magdalene through a specifically Franciscan lens, as is only correct. Her visual tradition is primarily a product of the Friars Minor and the artists they chose as her interpreters, as opposed to the claim that the Dominican order as the primary motor in Magdalene devotion in the later Middle Ages

With the final chapter, the book culminates in an examination of the twin roles of the two Marys, Virgin and Magdalene. A modern mind reflexively tends to use the old Freudian framework, understanding them according to the “virgin/whore” complex. That model proves to be unsatisfying to anyone critically approaching an understanding of the two figures within the context that this book attempts to capture. Mother and Lover appear more as a binary stars bound to gravitate one around the other. His ultimate argument is for understanding the figures as co-operational and not as parallel poles that repel each other.

While my own research confirms this, one wonders at the structure of the book that leads us to that final point. This trap runs through Magdalene studies and is the primary challenge to any scholar that approaches the composite figure of multiple aspects that does not easily obey a scholarly gridlike framework of approach. The question of how to organize an exploration of Mary Magdalene and her multiple facets runs into this challenge. Any solution I have seen to a large scale study of the figure has run aground of this problem and I have not found an entirely satisfactory approach.

One might also question the decision to approach the images as an illustrative footnote to the texts, although this was likely not Fr. McMichael’s intention. He fully admits he is not attempting a fully art history study.

Yet images must be allowed to act as the bearers of independent meaning in and of themselves that they are, and not as a transcription of theological imperatives. Daniel Arasse used to say that the visual document ineluctably escaped the discursive, and could not be contained by any written or verbal directives. For Father McMichael, however the written takes precedence over the visual, which does not allow the imagery of the Magdalene in the Basilica or elsewhere their full sway of meaning.

For all that the book is rich and insightful. It approaches the Magdalene in her guise lover as much as penitent, or, better still, lover because penitent, and satisfactorily argues that point. The author’s reading of the Apostola Apostolorum, Mediatrix of the Mediator, is a long overdue restitution of a rich and plural figure. By recontextualizing her more truly in the late medieval mindset, if he does not entirely restore to her her « blessed polysemy, » at least a good part of that richness is given back to the modern viewer. In resituating the images in their natural habitat of devotion and pilgrimage by way of an intuitive sensitivity to the visual document, Father McMichael’s work serves as as a healthy corrective to many larger-scale Magdalenian studies that would deny the figure her multiplicity of roles and interpretations.

Vicki-Marie Petrick

(The author wrote her doctoral dissertation on medieval and Renaissance images of Mary Magdalene in Italian art. Le Corps de Marie-Madeleine et ses représentations en Italie du Duecento à Titien was begun under the direction of Daniel Arasse until his 2003 death and finished under Sylvain Piron. She defended in June of 2012 at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales with mention très honorable avec les félicitations unanimes du jury.  Since then she has published three more articles on representations of the Apostola with others forthcoming).