Reimaging the Magdalene: Feminism, Art, and the Counter-Reformation

(Hardback)

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This book offers a new, intersectional feminist approach to utilising and interpreting the visual reception of Mary Magdalene. Through employment of Liberative Reception Criticism, which develops traditional reception theory in line with liberative hermeneutics, via the insights of intersectionality as critical theory, Siobhan Jolley provides a novel means of analysing how women, and particularly the Magdalene, are imaged in Christian tradition. Knowledge of both the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene and her cultural reception continue to be dominated by long-discredited ideas about her life and sexuality, which bear the hallmarks of their development under patriarchy. Through close study of relevant biblical texts and extracanonical accounts, and a comprehensive survey of the Magdalenes presentation in the Italian art of the Counter-Reformation, Jolley demonstrates that the patriarchal portrayal of the Magdalene as a sexualised penitent and mournful witness to the resurrection is sustained by its mythic attachment to biblical text. Rather than adopting the same tropes uncritically, we are invited to look again at artworks and related texts in order to explore what happens when the influence of patriarchy is actively and intersectionally resisted. Ultimately, the Magdalene is transformed from a reductive and patriarchally mythologised figure to a multidimensional character, who is relatable and liberative as an exemplar.

Author Bio

Siobhn Jolley is Howard and Roberta Ahmanson Research Fellow in Art and Religion at the National Gallery, Visiting Lecturer at Kings College, London, and Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Biblical Studies, University of Manchester, UK.