Moving with the Magdalen: Late Medieval Art and Devotion in the Alps

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Moving with the Magdalen is the first art-historical book dedicated to the cult of Mary Magdalen in the late medieval Alps. Its seven case study chapters focus on the artworks commissioned for key churches that belonged to both parish and pilgrimage networks in order to explore the role of artistic workshops, commissioning patrons and diverse devotees in the development and transfer of the saints iconography across the mountain range. Together they underscore how the Magdalens cult and contingent imagery interacted with the environmental conditions and landscape of the Alps along late medieval routes.

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Anderson has moved beyond a conventional art historical analysis to widen the boundaries of the study of religious art into the realms of visual culture, material culture, gender studies, and rural devotions She has widened the study of Mary Magdalen into new geographic and iconographic territories. * Reading Religion *
Moving with the Magdalen is a welcome addition to the scholarly study of the visual culture inspired by devotion to St. Mary Magdalen in the later Middle Ages. Its salutary innovation is to train our sights on relatively unknown terrain: the mountainous territories of the Maritime and Swiss Alps and the South Tyrol. Through a close examination of the visual material produced for what seems at first glance to be a group of unrelated religious sanctuaries in this landscape, Joanne W. Anderson convincingly demonstrates how the many pilgrimage, patronage, and artistic networks that criss-crossed these European mountain ranges served to connect vibrant local devotion to the flourishing universal cult of St. Mary Magdalen in the later medieval period. The book also showcases a wealth of unfamiliar visual evidence produced to honor the saint that no doubt will inspire a new generation of pilgrimsboth scholarly and spiritualto lace up their hiking books, strap on their backpacks, and make the physical ascent to see these marvelous images and artifacts in situ. * Dr. Katherine Ludwig Jansen, Professor of History, Catholic University of America, USA *

Author Bio

Joanne Anderson (PhD 2010, Warwick) is Lecturer in 13th-17th Century History of Art at the Warburg Institute in London, UK.