Who We Believe Her To Be : A Contextualization of Pope Gregory the Great's Statements on the Magdalene Figure 591CE-604CE
- Author
- Zuckerman, Anna
- Published
- [University Park, Pennsylvania] : Pennsylvania State University, 2021.
- Physical Description
- 1 electronic document
- Additional Creators
- Libby, Christine Marie and Schreyer Honors College
Access Online
- honors.libraries.psu.edu , Connect to this object online.
- Restrictions on Access
- Restricted (PSU Only).
- Summary
- This thesis uses an analysis of Pope Gregory the Great's written letters and homilies to contextualize his statements between 591-604CE regarding the figure of Mary Magdalene. Pope Gregory is known to be the catalyst for the Composite Mary theory, and is cited as the first to imply that Mary Magdalene was synonymous with the anonymous prostitute from the Gospel of Luke. This project uses the pontiff's written work to understand why these statements were made, and how they fit in with Gregory's wider perceptions of gender and piety. This paper uses narrowing lenses to reach this understanding, beginning with materials written to men about women, and ending with references to biblical women. After these lenses reveal an ideological framework which the pontiff employed to perceive and understand women, this project moves to analyze Gregory's statements on the Magdalene herself. It finds that, as a result of this inflexible mental framework, the pope could not interpret Mary's canonical appearances as he found them naturally. His anxiety about the gendering of spaces was so great that he could not understand the ease with which Mary navigated her largely-male community. To understand the holy woman, Gregory turned to the gospel of Luke, where he believed he found the solution to his mental block: he decided that the anonymous prostitute was the same person as Mary Magdalene, thus giving Mary a sinful past to repent. This addition to Mary's dossier allowed the pontiff to fit her into his framework for understanding women, which included contradictory beliefs and anxieties about the role of women in the church. He believed women to be helpless victims of their sex, while simultaneously seeing them as agents of male fallibility. By conflating Mary Magdalene with the anonymous prostitute, Pope Gregory unintentionally smeared the holy lady's legacy for the next fifteen hundred years.
- Other Subject(s)
- Genre(s)
- Dissertation Note
- B.A. Pennsylvania State University 2021.
- Technical Details
- The full text of the dissertation is available as an Adobe Acrobat .pdf file ; Adobe Acrobat Reader required to view the file.
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