Prostitute, saint, penitent, woman taken in adultery, the Magdalen—a Venus in sackcloth——has evolved through two thousand years of iconography and literature little understood, this original and provocative study shows.
The complex intermingling of the Magdalen myth in religion and culture provides a fascinating chapter in the history of ideas. This important new book therefore not only fills a gap in religious and humanistic studies but also deepens our understanding of how the ideas implanted in the Magdalen figure were sustained over the years—from her origins in Scripture and Apocrypha to rock opera in our time.
Among Malvern’s perceptive findings is evidence that it is primarily the Mary Magdalene of the Gospel of John who evokes the fictionalization and early metamorphoses of the Magdalen figure. In Gnostic writings, used as a vessel embodying ambivalent attitudes toward life, sex, and women, the Magdalen metamorphosed into the “pure spiritual Mariham” in the Pistis Sophia—from Venus to Mary.
And in tracing the further transformation of, and complex attitudes toward, the Magdalen from the Crusades to the twentieth century Ms. Malvern adds significantly to our understanding of the consequent shaping and transmission of the figure. The enigmatic Magdalen, according to the evidence presented, has carried, sometimes covertly, the old radically dualistic religious and secular concepts into modern times.
