medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

The earliest known form of the story of Mary of Egypt occurs in Cyril of Scythopolis' sixth-century Bios of St. Cyriacus (BHG 463). There Mary is presented as a former singer in a church in Jerusalem who withdrew into the Judean desert to avoid being an incitement to men's lusts, who subsisted there for eighteen years on some water and some legumes that she had taken with her, who was then discovered by the monk John, to whom she told her story, and who was dead when John revisited her. John buried her in the cave in which she had lived. A similar version in which the female desert solitary is instead an unnamed former nun of Jerusalem occurs in the early seventh-century _Leimon_ of John Moschus.

The standard account (BHG 1042) also dates from the seventh century and is attributed in some witnesses to St. Sophronius, the earlier seventh-century patriarch of Jerusalem (and friend and traveling companion of John Moschus). In it Mary is presented as a former sex-crazed prostitute from Alexandria who, having traveled to Jerusalem, underwent a religious conversion. Having first taken communion at the monastery of St. John the Forerunner on the west bank of the Jordan, she became a solitary in the Judean desert. There she lived in extreme asceticism for forty-seven years, elevating while at prayer, sustained physically only by morcels of two and a half loaves of bread that she had purchased before crossing the Jordan and that soon desiccated, and not meeting anyone else until she was found by a monk named Zosimas (in Latin texts usually Zosimus) who had been wandering in the desert on a Lenten retreat. Covering Mary's nakedness with his own garment, Zosimas heard her story, prayed with her, and promised to bring her the Eucharist annually. Which he did. On his second return he found Mary dead. Zosimas buried her with the miraculous assistance of a lion who seems to many to have wandered in from St. Jerome's Vita of Paul of Thebes.

Mary has an extremely rich dossier in many languages. Sophronius' (or pseudo-Sophronius') Bios was translated into Latin by, among others, the Neapolitan Paul the Deacon (BHL 5415; later ninth-century); later highlights include a metrical Vita by Hildebert of Le Mans (BHL 5419-5420) and an account in Jacopo da Varazze's _Legenda aurea_. 1. April is her feast day in the Synaxary of Constantinople (Zosimas is celebrated in the same entry) and in the latter's modern descendants in Byzantine-rite churches (which latter, when they celebrate Zosimas as a saint, tend to do so on 4. April). It is also her day of commemoration in the Roman Martyrology.

Mary's former church in Rome (Santa Maria Egiziaca) is first recorded under this dedication in 1492. Consecrated in 872, it was previously known, after its donor, as Santa Maria Secundicerii. Deconsecrated in the 1920s, it is now better known as the Temple of Portunus or as the Temple of Fortuna Virilis. Picky classicists, the sort who like to refer to the Colosseum as the Flavian Amphitheatre (in Rome), recognize the iffiness of such identifications and prefer to call this building "the oblong temple in the Foro Boario" (there's a circular temple there as well). Herewith a page of views of this structure in different states of its modern existence, including several eighteenth-century engravings showing Santa Maria Egiziaca before modern restorations returned the building to a greater approximation of its ancient appearance:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dealvariis/sets/72157614181975945/


Some period-pertinent images of St. Mary of Egypt:

a) as depicted, seemingly, (at right; at left, perh. St. Anthony of Egypt) in a later ninth-century fresco (betw. 872 and 882) in Rome's chiesa di Santa Maria Antiqua:
http://tinyurl.com/zb255jy

b) as depicted, seemingly, (at right; at left, Zosimas?) in a later ninth-century fresco (betw. 872 and 882) in Rome's ex-chiesa di Santa Maria Egiziaca (grayscale image):
http://catalogo.fondazionezeri.unibo.it/foto/40000/6400/6152.jpg

c) as depicted (receiving the Eucharist from Zosimas) in a tenth- or eleventh-century fresco in the rupestrian eremo di Santa Maria della Stella in Pazzano (RC) in Calabria:
http://tinyurl.com/j9dmj74
http://www.eremos.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/14d7.jpg

d) as depicted (receiving from Zosimas a cloak to hide her nakedness) in the later eleventh-century Theodore Psalter (1066; of Constantinopolitan origin; London, BL, MS Add. 19352, fol. 68r):
http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=add_ms_19352_f068r

e) as depicted (receiving the Eucharist from Zosimas) in a twelfth-century copy of her Bios (Paris, BnF, ms. Supplément grec 1276, fol. 95r):
http://tinyurl.com/y8usrtc

f) as depicted in an early twelfth-century fresco (1105-1106) in the church of the Panagia Phorbiotissa at Asinou (Nicosia prefecture) in the Republic of Cyprus (grayscale image):
http://tinyurl.com/gsgvaox
Detail view (colour):
http://www.icon-art.info/masterpiece.php?lng=en&mst_id=4263

g) as depicted in a pen-and-ink drawing in an earlier twelfth-century copy of her Vita in Latin (ca. 1120; Vendôme, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 44, fol. 108v):
http://www.enluminures.culture.fr/Wave/savimage/enlumine/irht8/IRHT_147141-p.jpg

h) as portrayed in relief (several times) on an earlier twelfth-century double capital (ca. 1120-1140) in the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse:
1) Before (at right) and after (at left) crossing the Jordan:
http://tinyurl.com/jhfloja
2) Receiving the Eucharist from Zosimus; being buried by Zosimus and the lion:
https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3062/2806027223_ff21ceaf91_b.jpg
3) Further views:
http://tinyurl.com/h5m9je7

i) as portrayed in relief (very hirsute; receiving the Eucharist from Zosimus) on a mid-twelfth-century capital, from the abbey church of Alspach, in the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar:
http://tinyurl.com/hn2xjxx

j) as depicted in one of four panels of a full-page illumination in the late twelfth-century so-called Bible of Saint Bertin (ca. 1190-1200; Den Haag, KB, ms. 76 F 5, fol. 34v, sc. 2B):
http://manuscripts.kb.nl/zoom/BYVANCKB%3Amimi_76f5%3A034v_min_b2
The illumination as a whole:
http://manuscripts.kb.nl/zoom/BYVANCKB%3Amimi_76f5%3A034v

k) as depicted (at center left, flanking the doorway; at center right, Zosimas offering her the Eucharist) in the late twelfth-century frescoes (1192) in the church of the Panagia tou Arakou in Lagoudera (Nicosia prefecture), Republic of Cyprus:
http://tinyurl.com/j5ps8lj

l) as depicted (at far right, receiving the Eucharist from Zosimus) in a thirteenth(?)-century fresco in the crypt of the cattedrale di San Cataldo in Taranto:
https://euroanimationteatro.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/trittico.jpg
Detail view:
http://tinyurl.com/zf4ots7

m) as depicted (full-length portrait; scenes) in the early thirteenth-century St. Laumer and St. Mary of Egypt window in the cathédrale Notre-Dame in Chartres (Bay 142; ca. 1205-15):
http://www.medievalart.org.uk/Chartres/142_pages/Chartres_Bay142_key.htm

n) as depicted (scenes) in the early thirteenth-century St. Mary of Egypt window in the cathédrale Saint-Étienne in Bourges (Bay 21; ca. 1210-15; photographs courtesy of Gordon Plumb):
https://www.flickr.com/photos/22274117@N08/albums/72157623098426003

o) as depicted (scenes) in the earlier to mid-thirteenth-century St. Mary of Egypt window (Bay 20, panels 7-15; ca. 1235-1250) in the cathédrale Saint-Étienne in Auxerre:
http://www.medievalart.org.uk/Auxerre/bay_20/Auxerre_Bay20_Key.htm

p) as depicted (at right; at left, St. Mary Magdalene) in a bas-de-page illumination in a copy of the Office for the Dead in a later thirteenth-century psalter and book of hours from Liège (Den Haag, KB, ms. 76 G 17, fol. 187v):
http://manuscripts.kb.nl/zoom/BYVANCKB%3Amimi_76g17%3A187v_marge_onder

q) as depicted (receiving a hooded monastic cloak from Zosimas [so named in this text]) in a late thirteenth-century collection of saint's lives in French (1285; Paris, BnF, ms. Français 412, fol. 221r):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84259980/f451.item.zoom

r) as twice depicted (in the right margin: receiving from Zosimas a cloak to hide her nakedness; receiving the Eucharist from Zosimas) in a late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century marginal psalter (ca. 1300; Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, Walters Ms. W.733, fol. 99r):
http://www.thedigitalwalters.org/Data/WaltersManuscripts/W733/data/W.733/sap/W733_000201_sap.jpg

s) as depicted (in the large panel at top, receiving the Eucharist from Zosimus) in an earlier fourteenth-century pictorial menologion from Thessaloniki (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 34r):
http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/bodleian/msgrthf1/34r.jpg

t) as depicted (holding her loaves of bread) in the earlier fourteenth-century Taymouth Hours (ca. 1326-1350; Sarum Use; London, BL, MS Yates Thompson 13, fol. 191v, at foot of page):
http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=29307

u) as depicted (receiving from Zosimus a cloak to hide her nakedness) in an earlier fourteenth-century French-language legendary of Parisian origin with illuminations attributed to the Fauvel Master (ca. 1327; Paris, BnF, ms. Français 183, fol. 69r):
http://tinyurl.com/ydgs84y

v) as depicted (receiving the Eucharist from Zosimas) in an earlier fourteenth-century fresco (1330s) in the church of the Hodegetria at the Patriarchate of Peć at Peć in, depending on one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/3u9nqr6

w) as twice depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century copy of books 9-16 of Vincent of Beauvais' _Speculum historiale_ in its French-language vision by Jean de Vignay (ca. 1335; Paris, BnF, ms. Arsenal 5080):
1) levitating while in prayer, Zosimas looking on (fol. 406v):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b7100627v/f818.item.zoom
2) Recounting her story to Zosimas; the church of the Holy Sepulchre with its door closed to her (fol. 407r):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b7100627v/f819.item.zoom

x) as depicted (receiving the Eucharist from Zosimas) in an earlier fourteenth-century fresco (betw. 1335-1350) in the Visoki Dečani monastery near Peć in, depending on one's view of recent events, the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's Kosovo province:
http://tinyurl.com/j6solrx

y) as depicted (receiving from Zosimus a cloak to hide her nakedness) in a mid-fourteenth-century copy, from the workshop of Richard and Jeanne de Montbaston, of the _Legenda aurea_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (1348; Paris, BnF, ms. Français 241, fol. 96v):
http://tinyurl.com/yj6dlwb

z) as depicted (at right; at left, St. Mary Magdalene) in the Litanies section of a later fourteenth-century miscellany of mostly French-language devotional texts (betw. 1351 and 1400; Paris, BnF, Français 400 [Colbert 1432], fol. 35v):
http://tinyurl.com/jskyk8t

aa) as depicted (partly covered in a sky-blue robe; conversing with Zosimas [so named in this text]) in the later fourteenth-century Breviary of Charles V (ca. 1364-1370; Paris, BnF, ms. Latin 1052, fol. 355r):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84525491/f719.item.zoom

bb) as depicted in a later fourteenth-century copy of Vincent of Beauvais' _Speculum historiale_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (ca. 1370-1380; Paris, BnF, ms. Nouvelle acquisition française 15939-15942, at 15942 [bks. 14-16], fols. 90v. 91v):
1) Crossing the Jordan (fol. 90v):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84496928/f188.item.zoom
2) Receiving the Eucharist from Zosimas (fol. 91v):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84496928/f190.item.zoom
3) Lying dead as Zosimas gestures to the lion (instructs it to prepare her grave?; fol. 91v):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84496928/f190.item.zoom

cc) as depicted (at left, receiving the Eucharist from Zosimas) in the late fourteenth-century frescoes (1389; restored in the early 1970s) of the monastery church of St. Andrew at Matka in Skopje's municipality of Karpoš:
http://tinyurl.com/ztmmyfz

dd) as depicted (being buried by Zosimus and the lion) in a late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century copy of the _Legenda aurea_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Rennes, Bibliothèque de Rennes Métropole, ms. 266, fol. 103v):
http://tinyurl.com/hm63tuz

ee) as depicted (with Zosimas) in an early fifteenth-century copy of the _Legenda aurea_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay followed by the _Festes nouvelles_ attributed to Jean Golein (ca. 1401-1425; Paris, BnF, ms. Français 242, fol. 83v):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8426005j/f182.item.zoom

ff) as depicted (holding her loaves of bread) in an early to mid-fifteenth-century copy of the South English Legendary (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 17, fol. 85r):
http://tinyurl.com/z55g5rh

gg) Mary of Egypt (left-hand column; very hirsute) as depicted in the early fifteenth-century Hours of René of Anjou (ca. 1405-1410; London, BL, Egerton MS 1070, fol. 89v):
http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=48388

hh) as depicted in an earlier fifteenth-century fresco (1430) in the church of the Pantanassa at Mistra:
http://tinyurl.com/hgsb9sg

ii) as depicted (receiving from Zosimus a cloak to hide her nakedness), in the earlier fifteenth-century Hours of Jean Dunois (betw. 1436 and 1450; London, BL, MS Yates Thompson 3, fol. 287r):
http://tinyurl.com/38jejw

jj) as depicted (receiving from Zosimus a cloak to hide her nakedness) by Henri d'Orquevaulz in an earlier fifteenth-century book of hours for the Use of Metz (ca. 1440; Paris, BnF, ms. Latin 10533, fol. 132v):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10318624f/f270.item.zoom

kk) as portrayed (very hirsute and holding her loaves of bread) in a mid- or later fifteenth-century statue (ca. 1451-1464) in the Sainte-Chapelle of the château de Châteaudun:
http://tinyurl.com/gwd5jv9
http://www.ipernity.com/doc/philippe_28/30876135

ll) as depicted in two illuminations in a later fifteenth-century copy of Vincent of Beauvais' _Speculum historiale_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (1463; Paris, BnF, ms. Français 51, fols. 198v and 200v):
1) Receiving from Zosimus a cloak to hide her nakedness (fol. 198v):
http://tinyurl.com/yj3t7ok
2) Preparing to cross the Jordan; receiving the Eucharist from Zosimus; being found dead by Zosimus; being buried by Zosimus and the lion (fol. 200v):
http://tinyurl.com/ygr9ghh

mm) as depicted (at right, holding her loaves of bread) by Hans Memling on a closed wing of his late fifteenth-century Triptych of Adriaan Reins (1480) in the Memlingmuseum, Sint-Janshospitaal, Bruges:
http://www.wga.hu/art/m/memling/3mature1/17rein4.jpg

nn) as depicted (left margin at bottom) in a hand-colored woodcut in the Beloit College copy of Hartmann Schedel's late fifteenth-century _Weltchronik_ (_Nuremberg Chronicle_; 1493) at fol. CXXXIIIr:
https://www.beloit.edu/nuremberg/book/6th_age/right_page/37%20%28Folio%20CXXXIIIr%29.pdf

oo) as portrayed (holding her loaves of bread) in an earlier sixteenth-century statue (betw. 1501 and 1525; _aliter_, ca. 1490) in the église Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois in Paris:
http://tinyurl.com/gpb58yr
http://tinyurl.com/j97f6en

pp) as depicted (receiving the Eucharist from Zosimas; in two corresponding panels) in the early sixteenth-century frescoes (1502) by Dionisy and sons in the Virgin Nativity cathedral of the St. Ferapont Belozero (Ferapontov Belozersky) monastery at Ferapontovo in Russia's Vologda oblast:
http://www.dionisy.com/eng/museum/124/347/index.shtml
http://www.dionisy.com/eng/museum/124/348/index.shtml

qq) as depicted (praying, with her loaves before her) by Quentin Massys (Metsys) in an earlier sixteenth-century panel painting (ca. 1520-1530) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art:
http://tinyurl.com/z3v7lfu
That image is part of a matched pair with one of St. Mary Magdalene. See:
http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/browse.html?packID=20

Best,
John Dillon

**********************************************************************
To join the list, send the message: subscribe medieval-religion YOUR NAME
to: [log in to unmask]
To send a message to the list, address it to:
[log in to unmask]
To leave the list, send the message: unsubscribe medieval-religion
to: [log in to unmask]
In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to:
[log in to unmask]
For further information, visit our web site:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/medieval-religion