medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Tuesday, July 22, 2008, at 12:56 pm, John Wickstrom wrote:
> The church of St. Maximin at La Sainte Baume was rebuilt by Charles of
> Anjou and given to the Dominicans; the latter had already established
> a cult of MM within the Order; she eventually became one of its major
> patrons...embodying the OP ideal of "contemplation in action".
> Charles of Anjou attempted to dedicate many churches to MM, esp. in
> Italy usually with the Dominicans as he tried to establish a
> religiously based power center in the peninsula.
>
The church of St. Maximin at La Sainte Baume was the predecessor of the Basilique Ste.-Madeleine at today's Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume (Var). According to this page from the Diocese of Fréjus-Toulon, the latter was consecrated in 1776:
http://www.diocese-frejus-toulon.com/stmaximin.html
That seems a bit late, and I have read elsewhere that this church was consecrated in 1316, when the crypt had been completed. Possibly the dedication then was both to St. Maximinus and to Mary Magdalene. In 1295, when the new church was still in its initial stages of construction, Charles II referred to it as that "of Saint-Maximin and the Blessed Mary Magdalene" (see the first of the translated "Letters of Charles II, King of Naples [_sic_; correctly, "of Sicily"], concerning the Church and Monastery of Saint-Maximin in Provence, 1295" at: http://tinyurl.com/5h7vvf\).
I have also read (relatively recently but still I might not be able to lay my hands easily on a pertinent reference) that the crypt has been shown archeologically to have been an originally above-ground structure. It is presumed to be a remnant of the previous church of St. Maximin in which Mary Magdalene's Inventio took place in 1279. Charles of Anjou's death in 1285 plus the start of today's Ste.-Madeleine in 1289, shortly after Charles II's release from his Aragonese captivity, suggest to me that whatever rebuilding of St.-Maximin the Charles of Anjou to whom we often refer without number may have accomplished was not major; certainly it was not lasting. The church's donation to the Dominicans occurred in 1295, when that Charles had been dead for a decade.
Was Charles of Anjou successful in his attempts to get the Dominicans to dedicate churches to M.? Katherine Ludwig Jansen, "Mary Magdalen and the Contemplative Life", in Constance Hoffman Berman, ed., _Medieval Religion: New Approaches_ (Routledge: 2005), p. 253 with notes 19-22 on pp. 265-66, doesn't name him at all in her survey of the numerous thirteenth- and fourteenth-century monastic and mendicant dedications to M. in today's Italy. In his own capital of Naples, the church of the Maddalena was a foundation not of either Charles but rather of Robert's queen Sancia of Majorca in the early fourteenth century.
Best,
John Dillon
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