The Life of Saint Mary Magdalene and of Her Sister Saint Martha


Book Description

The cult of the penitent Magdalene grew rapidly in western Europe in the Middle Ages, as a number of shrines and church dedications attest. This medieval narration, tracing in imaginative detail the lives of the two sisters after the Resurrection of Christ, provides a model for christian women.




Saint Mary Magdalene


Book Description

Adoration is love, and eucharistic adoration is love of Christ present in the Blessed Sacrament. In the Gospels there are few people who understand love for Jesus as well as Mary Magdalene, which is the reason she is a prophetess of eucharistic love. This work is an extended meditation on the life of Saint Mary Magdalene, known as the "Apostle to the Apostles" because the Risen Christ appeared to her first and then sent her to announce the Resurrection to the apostles. Based on the biblical texts traditionally associated with Mary Magdalene, this book helps readers to learn from her inspiring example and to enter more deeply into adoration of Jesus Christ truly present in the Blessed Sacrament. In telling the story of Mary Magdalene's profound conversion after a life so steeped in sin that the Lord had to expel seven demons from her soul, this book shows how she is a shining witness to the transforming power of an encounter with Jesus Christ. Mary Magdalene is the perfect model for those who have experienced the redeeming love of Christ and who seek to deepen their devotion to him and to the Eucharist.







Beyond Mary or Martha


Book Description

Explore a tale of two sisters Beyond Mary or Martha: Reclaiming Ancient Models of Discipleship dives into the complicated reception history of Mary and Martha of Bethany, who have been at the center of many debates for almost two thousand years. Jennifer S. Wyant begins her study with a close reading of the sisters’ first encounter with Jesus in Luke 10:38-42, then moves on to patristic, medieval, and modern interpretations of that narrative. Wyant tracks how Mary and Martha both became paradigms of discipleship, revealing the inherent tension within Christianity between contemplative practices and acts of service. By placing ancient debates alongside more modern ones, she argues that, contrary to discussions today within academic and religious circles, gender is not the most important aspect of their story. Features: A thorough examination of the textual variants in the passage to show how variants affected interpretation throughout history Interpretations from medieval women and their contributions to interpretation of Mary and Martha A visual exegesis of the art representing the passage throughout history




Mary Magdalene


Book Description

Tells the story of Mary Magdalene from its beginnings in the New Testament up to the present time. This book is the first major work on Mary Magdalene in thirty years. It explores the many different Mary Magdalenes created for each age.




Mary Magdalene


Book Description

The figure of Mary Magdalen has fascinated and perplexed people for centuries. She is portrayed in the Gospels as a neurotic woman, possibly with a past, yet she is the first to encounter the risen Christ and he charges her with the responsibility of proclaiming the resurrection. She is therefore Christianity's first evangelist - a difficult concept for churches with exclusively male hierarchies who prefer to think of her as just a reformed prostitute. The belief that Mary Magdalen was married to Jesus and that the Church has tried to suppress this truth was not invented in recent years but is almost as old as Christianity itself. This gives a grand tour through 2000 years history, art and tradition with surprises and discoveries all the way.




Mary Magdalene, La Malinche, and the Ethics of Interpretation


Book Description

By comparing the intersecting histories of interpretation of Mary Magdalene, a first-century disciple of Jesus, and La Malinche, a sixteenth-century Mesoamerican woman enslaved by the Spanish conquistadores, Jennifer Vija Pietz critically evaluates the use of past lives to address contemporaneous concerns. She demonstrates how the earliest sources portray each woman as an agent in the foundation of a new community: Magdalene’s proclamation of Jesus’s resurrection helped form the first Christian community, while La Malinche’s role as interpreter between Spanish and native people during the Conquest helped establish modern Mexico. Pietz then argues that over time, various interpreters turn these real women into malleable icons that they use to negotiate changing conceptions of communal identity and norms. Strikingly, popular portraits develop of both women as archetypal whores who represent transgression—portraits that some women have experienced as harmful. Although other interpreters present contrary portraits of Magdalene and La Malinche as admirable emblems of female empowerment, Pietz argues that the tendency to turn real people into icons risks producing stereotypes that can obscure past lives and negatively affect people in the present. In response, she posits strategies for developing historically plausible and ethically responsible interpretations of people of the past.




The Saint's Life and the Senses of Scripture


Book Description

Through close examination of ancient, medieval, and modern Lives of the saints, Ann W. Astell demonstrates how the historical transformation of hagiography as a genre correlates with similar changes in biblical studies. Christian hagiography flourished from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, illuminating the gospel through the overlapping forms of exempla and vita. Originally, the Lives of the saints were understood as hermeneutical extensions of the Bible—God authors the saint, just as God authors the divinely inspired scriptures. During the medieval period, a sense of dual authorship between God and the cooperating saint developed, paralleling the Scholastic impulse to assign greater agency to the human writers of scripture. Then, in the sixteenth century, powerful new anxieties about historical truth pushed hagiography aside for biography, its successor. Drawing on her expertise in the history of Christianity and biblical exegesis, Astell convincingly shows how this radical shift in hagiography’s status—the loss of the literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical senses of the Lives—serves as a bellwether for modern biblical reception.




Mary Magdalene


Book Description

After 2,000 years of flawed history, here at last is a magnificent new biography of Mary Magdalene that draws her out of the shadows of history and restores her to her rightful place of importance in Christianity. Throughout history, Mary Magdalene has been both revered and reviled, a woman who has taken on many forms—witch, whore, the incarnation of the eternal feminine, the devoted companion (and perhaps even the wife) of Jesus. In this brilliant new biography, Bruce Chilton, a renowned biblical scholar, offers the first complete and authoritative portrait of this fascinating woman. Through groundbreaking interpretations of ancient texts, Chilton shows that Mary played a central role in Jesus’ ministry and was a seminal figure in the creation of Christianity. Chilton traces the evolving images of Mary Magdalene and the legends surrounding her. He explains why, despite her prominence, the Gospels actually say so little about her and why the Catholic Church for thousands of years has sought to marginalize her importance. In a probing look at the Church’s attitudes toward women, he investigates Christian misogyny in the ancient world, including the suppression of women priests who patterned their activities on Mary’s; explores the impact of Gnostic ambivalence toward women on its depictions of Mary; and shows that these traditions still influence modern portrayals of her. Chilton’s descriptions of who Mary Magdalene was and what she did challenge the male-dominated history of Christianity familiar to most readers. Placing Mary within the traditions of Jewish female savants, Chilton presents a visionary figure who was fully immersed in the mystical teachings that shaped Jesus’ own teachings and a woman who was a religious master in her own right.




Mary Magdalene


Book Description

Rediscover the crucial roles held by women within the heart of Christianity. Favourite disciple, influential woman, true believer and follower of Jesus: how do we see Mary Magdalene today? Witness to Jesus' crucifixion and his burial, the first to announce the resurrection, she is without a doubt the most recognizable of the gospels' female figures, a central character in Christianity's foundational story. But centuries of alteration and resizing, of merging several female figures into one, have erased Mary Madgalene's apostolic role and left us with a misrepresentation. They delivered the figure of a quintessential repentant sinner, one in whom sensual beauty and mortification of the body are combined. When we reflect on the "Magdalene case", delving into the folds of history and the arts, and removing misunderstandings and manipulations, we rediscover the crucial roles women have always held within the heart of Christianity, despite their stories often going untold. Adriana Valerio's engrossing retelling of Magdalene's story, founded as it is in historical fact, is an unmissable opportunity to reclaim such roles in a church that remains largely patriarchal to the present day.