made this identification possible; Mary of Bethany also anoints Jesus’s feet and wipes
them with her hair when Jesus visits in her home (John 12:13).
This identification with Mary of Bethany provided Mary of Magdala with a family
closely associated with Jesus, for he visited in their home and he raised Lazarus from the
dead. The medieval vita of Mary extended this family. Mary’s rich and noble parents
possessed the castle of Magdala and its lands. Mary was betrothed to young John the
Evangelist. When he forsook her to follow Jesus, she entered a life of prostitution. Later,
cured of demonic possession by Jesus, Mary dedicated herself to his service and became
the prototype of conversion, devotion, humility, penance, and contemplative prayer (the
latter signified by Mary sitting peacefully at Jesus’s feet listening to him while Martha,
active, prepares a meal [Luke 10:39–42]).
Following Jesus’s ascension, persecution forced Mary, Martha, and Lazarus to flee in
a boat, which arrived at Marseille on the south coast of France. Lazarus became bishop of
Marseille; Mary became a renowned preacher. Later, she went to Aix-en-Provence and
embraced the life of a hermit dedicated to extreme asceticism and prayer. She was fed by
angels and allowed her hair to become the covering for her body emaciated from ascetic
discipline. (This later ascetic career may owe much to a conflation with the vita of St.
Mary the Egyptian, a reformed prostitute who went into the desert to perform radical acts
of asceticism and penance.)
Veneration of Mary Magdalene at Vézelay seems to have begun in the mid-11th
century, when an account of the 8th-century “translation” (by pious theft) of her relics
from her tomb in Aix, deserted in the wake of Muslim attacks, was drawn up. Papal
confirmation of the possession of her relics by the monks at Vézelay followed. The
famous Romanesque church was consecrated by Pope Innocent II in 1131–32; St.
Bernard preached the Second Crusade there in 1146.
The monks of Saint-Maximin in Aix retaliated in the late 13th century with the
assertion that the monks of Vézelay had taken the wrong body several centuries earlier;
Mary’s relics were in fact still in the crypt of the abbey church. The presence of these
relics, then the site of miraculous cures, was promoted with vigor, and veneration of
Mary Magdalene shifted from Vézelay to Aix.
The elaboration of the medieval vita of Mary Magdalene and the theft and veneration
of her relics at two different sites illustrate two common elements of the hagiographical
literature and devotional practice of the medieval period.
Grover A.Zinn
[See also: AIX-EN-PROVENCE; HAGIOGRAPHY; RELICS AND RELIQUARIES;
RUTEBUEF; SAINTS, CULT OF; SAINTS’ LIVES; VÉZELAY]
Rabanus Maurus. The Life of Saint Mary Magdalene and Her Sister Saint Martha: A Medieval
Biography, trans. David Mycoff. Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1989.
Garth, Helen Meredith. Saint Mary Magdalene in Medieval Tradition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1950.
Geary, Patrick. Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages. rev. ed. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990.
Saxer, Victor. Le culte de Ste. Marie Madeleine en occident: des origines a la fin du moyen âge.
Auxerre: Publications de la Société des Fouilles Archéologiques et des Monuments Historiques
de l’Yonne, 1959.
Ward, Benedicta. Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources.
Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1987.
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