The Provençal Legend

The medieval West grew a rival account of Mary Magdalene’s later life: that she, with Lazarus, Martha, and others, was set adrift in a rudderless boat, landed in Gaul, evangelized Provence, and spent her last years as a hermit in the grotto of La Sainte-Baume, her relics later venerated at the abbey of Vézelay in Burgundy and at Saint-Maximin in Provence. This file presents the Provençal legend with its sources and dates it as a medieval development — one resting on the conflated “penitent” Magdalene and not attested before about the ninth to eleventh centuries.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Equal-to-the-Apostles, Myrrh-bearer)

The Legend

In its developed medieval form, the Provençal legend runs as follows. After the Resurrection, a persecution drove the friends of Christ from Judea, and Mary Magdalene — together with Lazarus, his sisters Martha and Mary (here merged with the Magdalene), Maximinus, and others — was placed by enemies in a boat without oars, sail, or rudder, and set adrift on the open sea. Borne by Providence across the Mediterranean, the boat came ashore in Gaul, at the place later called Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. The company evangelized Provence: Lazarus became bishop of Marseilles, Maximinus bishop of Aix, Martha tamed a dragon at Tarascon, and Mary Magdalene preached at Marseilles and then withdrew to a mountain grotto — La Sainte-Baume (“the holy cave”) — where she spent thirty years in penitential solitude, fed by angels, before dying and being buried by St. Maximinus (Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, “Saint Mary Magdalene,” c. 1260, trans. Ryan, 1993).

The whole legend presupposes the Western conflation: the Mary it carries to Gaul is the composite figure — Mary Magdalene fused with Mary of Bethany (hence Lazarus and Martha as her siblings) and with the penitent sinner (hence the thirty years of penance in the cave). It is the conflated Magdalene of Gregory the Great (see The Three Marys) given a biography in France.

Dating the Legend

The legend is a medieval development and must be reported as such. The earliest Christian centuries know nothing of a journey to Gaul; the Eastern tradition, by contrast, places Mary’s repose at Ephesus and the translation of her relics to Constantinople in 886 (see The Relics at Constantinople).

[Disputed: the Provençal legend of Mary Magdalene's voyage to Gaul and her hermitage at La Sainte-Baume is not attested before roughly the ninth to eleventh centuries and reaches its full form only in the later Middle Ages. The claim of the abbey of Vézelay (Burgundy) to possess her relics emerges in the eleventh century — Vézelay's possession was confirmed by papal bulls in the mid-eleventh century (commonly dated 1058 under Pope Stephen IX) and the abbey became a major pilgrimage center; the rival Provençal claim at Saint-Maximin rests on the "discovery" of relics there in 1279 under Charles of Anjou, which was held to expose Vézelay's relics as inauthentic. Neither claim has first-millennium documentation, and both are inconsistent with the older Eastern tradition of the Ephesus burial and the 886 translation to Constantinople. The Provençal legend is therefore presented as a medieval Western development, not as historical fact.]

The two great French centers competed. Vézelay, the Burgundian abbey, claimed Mary Magdalene’s relics from the eleventh century, drew vast pilgrimages, and became one of the starting-points of the road to Compostela; its claim was bolstered by a story that a monk had brought the relics from Provence. Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in Provence countered in 1279, when Charles of Anjou, count of Provence, oversaw an excavation that “discovered” a sarcophagus held to contain the saint’s body, with documents conveniently attesting its authenticity; the Provençal claim thereafter eclipsed Vézelay’s, and the Dominican basilica of Saint-Maximin and the grotto of La Sainte-Baume became the principal Western shrines of the Magdalene (Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor, 1994, on Vézelay, Saint-Maximin, and their rivalry). That two French sites should each claim the entire body — and that the Eastern tradition placed it at Ephesus and then Constantinople — is itself a sign that the relic-claims belong to the history of medieval devotion rather than to the history of the first century.

The Cultural Power of the Legend

However late and however dependent on the conflation, the Provençal legend was immensely influential. It made Mary Magdalene the apostle of Provence and the patroness of an entire region; it shaped the iconography of the penitent in the wilderness — the long-haired Magdalene in the cave, borne aloft by angels — that fills late-medieval and Baroque art; and it furnished, through the Golden Legend, one of the most widely read saints’ lives of the Middle Ages. The legend’s afterlife reached into the modern myth-making about Mary Magdalene, which seized on the southern-French setting to construct fantasies of her descendants in Gaul (see The Gospel of Mary and Modern Myths). Understanding the legend as a medieval growth is therefore important not only for the history of the saint but for disarming the modern fictions built upon it.

How an Orthodox Reader Holds It

The Orthodox tradition does not receive the Provençal legend. It venerates Mary Magdalene’s repose at Ephesus and the translation of her relics to Constantinople, and it keeps her distinct from Mary of Bethany and from the penitent sinner — the very distinctions the Provençal legend collapses. An Orthodox account can nonetheless treat the legend with charity and without polemic (METHODOLOGY §4): it is a medieval flowering of devotion to a great saint, carrying genuine love and genuine theology (the apostolic mission, the call to penance), even as its historical claims rest on the conflation and lack first-millennium attestation. The legend is part of the West’s history with Mary Magdalene; the Ephesus–Constantinople tradition is the East’s, and it is the older.

See Also

References

  • Jacobus de Voragine. The Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea), “Saint Mary Magdalene.” Trans. William Granger Ryan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
  • Haskins, Susan. Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. (On Vézelay, the 1058 papal confirmation, the 1279 Saint-Maximin discovery, and the Provençal cult.)
  • Saxer, Victor. Le culte de Marie Madeleine en Occident des origines à la fin du moyen âge. Paris: Clavreuil, 1959. (The standard study of the Western cult and its medieval origins.)
  • Gregory the Great. Homily 33 on the Gospels [PL 76:1238–1246]. Trans. David Hurst, Forty Gospel Homilies. Kalamazoo, 1990. (The conflation underlying the legend.)