Magdalen's skull: allegory and iconography in 'Heptameron' 32

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 1994 by Francois Rigolot

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Marguerite had been brought up by her mother in a spirit of veneration for the patron-saint of penitent sinners. Magdalen's encouraging words, as reported in the Speculum Poenitentiae and Rochefort's Vie de sainte Magdelaine, must have been of much comfort to her: "Do not despair, you who are wont to sin; through my example you will find your way back to God."(33) Yet the strange encounter with the saint's skull in the holy shrine of Saint-Maximin must have left a lasting impression on young Marguerite's memory. As a weird sign of penitence it may have inspired a profound sense of awe which, in turn, may have eventually found its way, although under a transposed form, into her literary work.

In the Heptameron story, however, the physical reality of Mary Magdalen's skull remains absent. It has been displaced both literally and figuratively. At the most immediate plot level, the lover's head has replaced the saint's relic to become an involuntary object of perverted worship. Yet, although the adulteress is being forced by her husband to use the skull as a "most remarkable drinking-cup" (331; "un esmerveillable vaisseau," 242), the basic topical figure survives.

The shift of attribution from saint to lover remains a superficial one as the traditional portrait of "a penitent sinner with a skull" is preserved. In addition, as we have already noted, the suggestive analogy between the German lady's bald head and her dead lover's skull further enhances the powerful memory traces of the famous scene. In novella 32 the reliquary at Saint-Maximin still looms in the background, but I would like to suggest that the "precious relic" has changed meaning: by shifting from divine to human love, it has lost most of its claim to exemplarity.(34)

The story takes place, we recall, when Bernage is off to his royal mission in Germany. Beyond the theoretical exigencies of truthful reference, as clearly expressed through Parlamente's words in Marguerite's Prologue, one may wonder whether there may have been other compelling reasons for the specific geographical setting of the tale. By transposing the action from a Provencal church to a German castle, Marguerite may have tried to achieve a kind of aesthetic verisimilitude. The German context may have been suggested by several fifteenth-century altarpieces representing Mary Magdalen in the penitent phase of her life at Mariastern, Riemensschneider, or in the Tiefenbronn cycle decorated by Luca Moser at Baden. (35)

In all these symbolic representations the skull has not lost its special status as a precious relic, but it no longer belongs to the saint herself; it has become a detachable attribute of the penitent sinner. Through a metonymic shift "Magdalen's skull" has taken on quite a different meaning. Grammatically the move could be described as one from a "subjective" to an "objective" genitive. In other words, the original identity of the possessor and the thing possessed has been broken. "Magdalen's skull" no longer refers to the Saint's own bony head, the one Marguerite had contemplated in the Saint-Maximin reliquary; it now designates a neutral object, reduced to its pure symbolic function. At the same time, the allegorical potentiality of the representation has been problematized. The same holds true for Marguerite's novella. One no longer knows if the Heptameron story should be read solely on the literal level as a realistic tale, removed from any brand of apologetic intentionality, or if it should retain some higher figurative meaning, some altior sensus. Ennasuite's remark alone seems to invite the reader to the possibility of an interpretive gesture. Her intervention, however, remains problematic since it is never given a privileged status over the other devisants' by an authorial voice.