Venus in Sackcloth: The Magdalen's Origins and Metamorphoses

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.