The Magdalene in the Reformation

Abstract

In the late sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great fashioned a single, polymorphous character out of Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany (Martha's sister who sat listening to Jesus's teachings instead of cooking for him), and the unnamed sinner of the Gospels who used her long locks to clean Jesus's feet with unguent. Medieval thinkers quickly identified the sin of this composite Magdalene as sexual, thus developing a paradoxical figure who was at the same time a revirginized prostitute, a contemplative, and the first witness to the Resurrection. They also gave her a history, with dramatic hagiographical descriptions of a Mary Magdalene who had spread the Gospel throughout Gaul and ended her days as a hermit in a cave outside Marseilles. This virgin/whore/apostle had been among the most popular medieval saints, but her legacy was challenged by Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples in the same year that Luther published the Ninety-Five Theses. Heated discussion of the “Three Maries” continued for several years, and Erasmus was a key figure in the debate, by the end of which only the Mary specifically called “the Magdalene” in the Gospels remained, shorn of her sexual history, her mission to Gaul, and her life as a hermit.Arnold's contribution to the intellectual history of Christianity traces how, although the composite Magdalene unraveled just as the Reformation began, the three women continued to provide food for thought for the most famous Protestant and Catholic reformers. Instead of three figures sharing a history ranging from the depths of sin to the height of apostolic fervor, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations produced a multiplicity of Magdalenes, Maries of Bethany, and unnamed female sinners who served a wide range of exegetical purposes. The ambiguity inherent to the medieval Magdalene, while rejected in almost every detail, returned as a result of sola Scriptura, with figures as wide-ranging as Luther, Calvin, Theodore Beza, Katharina Schütz Zell, Marie Dentière, Teresa of Avila, Marguerite de Navarre, Margaret Fell, and George Fox offering intensive readings of the individual episodes about the three women that, surprisingly, supported mutually exclusive expectations for female comportment, female devotion, and female power.Although Arnold asserts in closing that the early modern rendition of the three women “loses some of its flexibility” in comparison with the medieval Magdalene, the thoroughness of Arnold's research suggests otherwise. The difference may be that the flexibility no longer was available to an individual devotee, as each author's or preacher's theological predilections forced each of the three women into a static role. But on a broad scale, since none of the interpretations definitively foreclosed any other, the Magdalene retained her status as the premier “woman good to think with” in Christian devotion, despite Reformation polemics and the early modern querelle des femmes.