ABSTRACT
The middle-class wife and the fallen woman were mirror images of one another—doppelgangers—both corrupted by unscrupulously-got wealth. Notwithstanding its association with sin, and with female sin in particular, music imagery also served the opposite purpose, functioning as a signpost of holiness in religious paintings of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. The conflation of the Mary Magdalen with the Madonna illustrates a prominent ethos in medieval thought, that of the flux of sin and grace in the soul, and is strongly associated with conversion. The Catholic Church, although it began to identify itself metaphorically with the Virgin Mary as the Bride of Christ in the twelfth century, retained remnants of an earlier tradition that looked to Mary Magdalen, the penitent sinner, as its most potent symbol. The rescue-and-reform movement directed towards the fallen drew in some ways upon the renewal of Marian spirituality, which was concurrently making its way from the Catholic into the Anglican church.
