4 - Mary Divided
Sacred and Profane
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2022
Summary
The Italian Dominican friar Silvester Mazzolini, better known as Prierias (1456–1527), is most remembered as the theologian of the Catholic Church officially designated to respond to Martin Luther’s (1483–1546) ninety-five theses – that list of propositions critical of the Church that fanned the flames of the Reformation. He was also, along with his inquisitorial interests in witchcraft and demonology, an ardent devotee of Mary Magdalene and an avid supporter of the Provencal tradition.1 In order to fulfil a vow made to the saint, he had made the pilgrimage to Saint-Maximin in the summer of 1497. He visited the usual sites and he read the manuscript version of ‘The Dominican Legend of Mary Magdalene’. Subsequently, in his popular commentary on the Gospels, the Aurea Rosa, he gave a complete description of what a pilgrim might have hoped to see there at the end of the fifteenth century. ‘There was shown to me several times’, he wrote,
[H]er sacred and venerable skull, which was large, and completely bare to the bone all around, except on the forehead, where we claim that the Saviour of us all touched her. For there the skin is clearly visible, looking like the skin of an Ethiopian woman, or of a corpse killed long ago: and in the skin two hollows [made by] the tips of two fingers, one of which is much more obvious and much deeper than the other, and under the skin, the flesh, whitish in colour. There was also shown to me some of her hair in a glass vessel, not all of it, but the part which wiped the feet of Christ. And in addition a glass vessel full of earth, in colour between red and black, which Saint Magdalen gathered under the Cross on Good Friday. They all declared to me without hesitation that every year on Good Friday when the Passion is read it bubbles up clearly and visibly, as though blood were bubbling in it. I will leave to others what is to be made of this. I also saw her arm, which was large, and the colour of wax, but I was unable to see her bones, which were locked up in a silver case.2
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- Mary MagdaleneA Cultural History, pp. 169 - 214Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022