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, living there in extreme asceticism for forty-seven years, sustained physically only by morcels of two and a half loaves of bread that she had brought with her and that soon desiccated, and not meeting anyone else until she was found by her narrator, a monk named Zosimas (in Latin texts, 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_. Today 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) was dedicated in 872. Deconsecrated in the 1920s, it is now better known as the Temple of Portunus or 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 (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
b) 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
c) 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
d) 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 Z. and the lion:
https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3062/2806027223_ff21ceaf91_b.jpg
3) Further views:
http://tinyurl.com/h5m9je7
e) as portrayed in relief (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
f) 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
h) as depicted (at far right, receiving the Eucharist from Zosimus) in a thirteenth(?)-century fresco in the crypt of the cattedrale di San Catalfo in Taranto:
https://euroanimationteatro.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/trittico.jpg
Detail view:
http://tinyurl.com/zf4ots7
i) 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
j) as twice depicted (in the right margin: receiving from Zosimas a cloak to hide her nakedness; receiving the Eucharist from Z.) 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
k) as depicted (receiving from Zosimus a cloak to hide her nakedness) by Giotto di Bondone in an earlier fourteenth-century fresco (1320) in the cappella della Maddalena in the lower church of basilica di San Francesco in Assisi:
http://dick.wursten.be/images/images_Magdalena/Giotto_hermit-mantel-gr.jpg
l) as depicted (in the large panel at top, receiving the Eucharist from Z.) 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
m) as depicted (receiving from Z. 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
n) 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
o) 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
p) 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
q) 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
r) as depicted 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
s) as depicted (receiving from a seemingly Cistercian 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
t) 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
u) 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
v) 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
w) as depicted (receiving the Eucharist from Zosimas) in two facing 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
Best,
John Dillon
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