Moving with the Magdalen

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 pilgrims—both scholarly and spiritual—to 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 *