It Shall Be Told In Memory of Her

‘It Shall Be Told in Memory of Her’ Commentary by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona Cite Share Show Bible Passage This thirteenth-century manuscript illumination weaves together a number of separate scriptural events in order to point up the significance of the sacraments of anointing and of penance. These two sacraments are in each case interpreted visually with the help of Mary Magdalene. This is because both of the female figures in the illumination—one standing to pour oil on Jesus’s head and one kneeling in a posture of penitence—are thought to represent the Magdalene. Her double presence also serves to highlight her special significance, as female, for the order of Cistercian nuns for whom this psalter was created. The presence of these two Mary Magdalene figures combines the various Gospel accounts of acts of anointing which came to be attributed to her in later Christian tradition (Matthew 26:6–13 and Mark 14:3–9; Luke 7:36–50; John 12:1–8). Standing behind Jesus, the first Magdalene-figure towers over all the men. Her hair is covered with a white coif below the yellow-tinged mantle that envelops her upper body. She holds the bottom of a jar with two hands. Turned upside down, and presumably made of alabaster given its off-white colour, this jar allows the nard to drip onto Jesus’s head (Matthew 26:7; Mark 14:3) accentuating the vertical of the red line on his cruciform halo. In the lowest section of the illumination—her body extended diagonally and her legs trespassing beyond the scene’s border—the second Magdalene-figure is garbed in a white underdress and blue mantle. Crouching out of sight beneath the table, her upper body reaches across the feet of several men. Her extended arms frame her flowing tresses which cover Jesus’s feet as she uses her hair to wipe the precious ointment and/or the tears with which she has anointed them (Luke 7:38; John 12:3). Before 1050, Archbishop Hugh dedicated the abbey at Besançon to Mary Magdalene and devotion to her had intensified by the thirteenth century when this psalter was produced. Whether or not identified as the archetypal ‘fallen woman’ of medieval and later tradition, she is named in Luke’s Gospel as the woman from whom seven devils were cast (Luke 8:2), and the Church recognized her as also the ‘sinful woman’ who knelt at Jesus’s feet in Luke 7:37. She was the classic penitent who symbolized the expanding teachings on the sacrament of penance as well as the virtue of hope.