Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Faculty Publications and Other Works by History: Faculty Publications and Other Works Department 10-17-2019 The Cult of Mary Magdalen in the Medieval West Theresa J. Gross-Diaz Loyola University Chicago,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/history_facpubs Part of the History Commons Author Manuscript This is a pre-publication author manuscript of the final, published article. Recommended Citation Gross-Diaz, Theresa. "Chapter 8 The Cult of Mary Magdalene in the Medieval West". In Mary Magdalene from the New Testament to the New Age and Beyond, (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2019) This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications and Other Works by Department at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in History: Faculty Publications and Other Works by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. © Brill, 2019. Gross-Diaz 1 The Cult of Mary Magdalene in the Medieval West* Theresa Gross-Diaz Introduction Throughout the European Middle Ages, Christians widely accepted Gregory the Great’s conflation of various named and unnamed Gospel women into a single Mary.1 Our examination of this “blessedly polysemous”2 Mary Magdalene’s place in Western medieval culture assumes this conflation. Who Mary was - an unproblematic aggregate of various persons - makes the specific who of Mary to theologians, to preachers, to artists, to religious and to lay men and women, the best possible Mary for each of their distinct purposes.