Mary Magdalene: Apostle, Companion, and Popular British Saint

This Wednesday, 22 July, is the feast of Mary Magdalene — a saint who has been buried and resurrected almost as many times as the empty tomb she is famous for finding. Few figures in Christian history have been so thoroughly obscured, and so vigorously reclaimed, as the woman the Fourth Gospel names first at the resurrection. And few, once you start looking, have left so deep a mark on the walked landscape of Britain.

Who the Gospels actually say she was

Strip away the centuries of embellishment and the biblical Mary Magdalene is precise and unglamorous: a woman from Magdala, a fishing town on the Sea of Galilee, healed of "seven demons" (Luke 8:2), who then travelled with Jesus and helped fund his ministry alongside other women of means. She stood at the cross when the male disciples had fled, and on Easter morning she was the first to encounter the risen Christ in the garden — mistaking him, tellingly, for the gardener. He tells her noli me tangere — do not cling to me — and sends her to tell the others, who at first don't believe her: the first witness to the central claim of Christianity is a woman whose testimony the men around her initially dismiss. For this she earned the Church's oldest honorific: apostola apostolorum, the apostle to the apostles. In June 2016, Pope Francis made the honour official, raising her liturgical rank from a memorial to a full feast, the same rank held by the Twelve.

How she was buried under someone else's sins

That elevation corrected a very old mistake. In 591, Pope Gregory the Great preached a homily fusing Mary Magdalene with two other, separate women: Mary of Bethany, and the unnamed "sinful woman" who anoints Jesus's feet with her tears in Luke 7. The composite figure — reformed prostitute, weeping penitent — dominated a thousand years of Western art and devotion, from Titian to Caravaggio, even though nothing in scripture supports it. The 1969 revision of the Roman calendar quietly began undoing the conflation; the theological world took rather longer to catch up.

Cynthia Bourgeault's The Meaning of Mary Magdalene (2010) is the fullest modern attempt to catch up properly. Bourgeault, an Episcopal priest and contemplative, reads Magdalene not as a sinner needing rescue but as Jesus's closest companion in wisdom — drawing on the Gnostic Gospel of Philip, which calls her his koinonos, and describes him kissing her, to the visible jealousy of the other disciples. In Bourgeault's account, the anointing at Bethany is not a penitent's gesture but something closer to an ordination: Mary Magdalene consecrating Jesus into the path that leads through death, a "kenotic," self-emptying love that she argues is the actual, forgotten heart of the Christian path.

Meggan Watterson's Mary Magdalene Revealed (2019) tells a more personal version of the same recovery. Watterson recounts travelling to Oxford to hold, in her own hands, a papyrus fragment of the Gospel of Mary — the extraordinary non-canonical text in which Magdalene teaches the male disciples about the soul's ascent and is challenged by Peter for it. Her book reads as much as pilgrimage as scholarship: a journey toward a woman's voice that the tradition tried, repeatedly, to talk over. That the crucial fragment now sits in an Oxford library is a small reminder of how much of her story has washed up on these shores.

The most-dedicated woman after the Virgin

Britain took Mary Magdalene to heart with unusual intensity. After the Virgin herself, she is one of the most common dedications in the English church landscape — something like 180 medieval parish churches were given her name, along with countless chapels, hospitals, and holy wells that no longer stand. She arrived early and stuck: the Anglo-Saxons knew her, the Normans built for her, and the later Middle Ages made her one of the most beloved saints in the country, second in popular affection perhaps only to the Virgin and to Thomas Becket. To walk England attentively is to keep meeting her.

Part of that popularity was theological, and it is worth naming because it explains the geography. Magdalene was the patron of the penitent and, above all, of the outcast — and medieval England expressed that patronage in stone by placing her name over its leper houses. The historian Carole Rawcliffe, whose work on medieval English hospitals is the standard authority, has shown how strikingly often these charitable foundations were dedicated to her. Leper hospitals were deliberately sited on the roads into towns, at the threshold where the clean and the unclean, the settled and the travelling, necessarily met — exactly the liminal, in-between ground that pilgrimage lives on. A leper hospital of St Mary Magdalene was, in effect, a wayside station of mercy on a pilgrim road, and there were once hundreds of them.

Walking her leper chapels

Two of the finest survive, and both make satisfying destinations. Cambridge's Leper Chapel of St Mary Magdalene, on Stourbridge Common, was founded around 1125 and is the oldest complete building in the city — a small, perfect piece of Norman work that outlived the leper colony it served and then anchored the vast medieval Stourbridge Fair, once the largest in Europe. It survives in the care of Cambridge Past, Present & Future, open on occasional days, and reachable on foot along the Cam from the city centre in a walk that is itself a small pilgrimage past commons and college backs.

Ripon's Hospital of St Mary Magdalene in North Yorkshire was founded by Archbishop Thurstan around 1108, beside the River Ure on the old road north, and its chapel — with a rare surviving leper's squint, through which those barred from the nave could still glimpse the altar — stands to this day. Ripon sits on live pilgrim geography: the city is a node on modern long-distance walking routes through the Yorkshire Dales, and its own cathedral, with an Anglo-Saxon crypt among the oldest built spaces in England, makes an obvious paired destination. To walk from Magdalene's hospital to Wilfrid's crypt is to cross five centuries of English devotion in a mile.

Her name also seeped into the language on the way. "Maudlin" — meaning tearfully sentimental — is simply the medieval English pronunciation of Magdalene, coined because she was painted weeping so relentlessly, at the cross and at the tomb, that her name detached itself and became an adjective. Every time the word is used, an old pilgrim devotion is quietly invoked.

Granite, towers, and a dawn song

Grander buildings carry her too. St Mary Magdalene, Launceston, in Cornwall, is one of the most extraordinary parish churches in England — its entire granite exterior carved, block by block, with foliage, shields, and figures, a labour of devotion in the hardest stone in the country. Launceston was the ancient gateway to Cornwall, the town every pilgrim and traveller passed through entering the county from Devon, and her church still greets walkers arriving off the old west-country roads. Beneath the east window lies a carved figure of the Magdalene herself, and local custom holds that a pebble tossed to land on her back brings luck — a folk survival of pilgrim gesture.

Oxford and Cambridge each named a college for her: Magdalen at Oxford and Magdalene at Cambridge, both pronounced "maudlin," Oxford's spelling shortened, tradition says, so that undergraduates wouldn't mangle it. Magdalen's great bell tower hosts the oldest living ritual in either city: on the morning of the first of May, choristers climb to the top and sing at dawn to a crowd gathered on Magdalen Bridge below, a custom some four centuries old. It is a spring rite that has gathered folk and civic layers over time, but it is unmistakably hers by name — a saint associated with early-morning discovery honoured, fittingly, at first light.

A painting to walk to

Modern art has given her a proper English shrine of its own. Graham Sutherland's Noli Me Tangere, painted in 1961 for the Mary Magdalene chapel at Chichester Cathedral, captures precisely the garden encounter the Gospels describe — the risen Christ ascending a flight of steps, half-turned, and Mary Magdalene below, reaching toward him in the instant before he tells her not to cling. Sutherland sets it in a strange, luminous landscape, more visionary than literal, and it remains one of the great works of twentieth-century religious art in Britain. It hangs where it was made, in a working cathedral on the old pilgrim road to the south coast, free for anyone to walk in and see — which makes it the natural still point of any Magdalene pilgrimage, and the image at the head of this piece.

Chichester, like Ripon and Launceston, sits on walkable ground: the cathedral is an endpoint of routes down through the South Downs, and its Sutherland is only the most famous of a remarkable modern-art collection that turns a visit into something closer to contemplation than sightseeing.

The living feast

And today Glastonbury, England's oldest pilgrim town, has quietly taken her up again. Small gatherings now mark her feast near the Chalice Well and the Tor, layering fresh devotion onto ancient ground, much as Glastonbury has always absorbed whatever each age needed it to hold. It is exactly the kind of place where her story — buried, misread, and steadily recovered — feels most at home.

There is something fitting in all of it. Her whole story is of being walked toward, again and again, by people determined to see her properly. This Wednesday would be a good day to do just that: to walk somewhere in her name — a leper chapel on a common, a carved granite church, a cathedral chapel with a painting in it, a well at the foot of a tor — and let the rediscovering continue on foot.