The past two decades at least have witnessed a remarkable rise in scholarly interest in the reception history of the biblical writings. Many have explored patristic, medieval, and Reformation homilies and treatises, for example, to gain deeper insight into the relationship between text and history. It is certainly the case that most biblical scholars are, unsurprisingly, most comfortable with and trained in reading and interpreting texts, but it should not be lost sight of that there is an abundance of images and visual depictions of the stories and figures described in the biblical texts—images that the biblical scholar can use and enjoy to understand the reception history of the biblical texts.
Diane Apostolos-Cappadona’s Mary Magdalene is an excellent example of a work that makes the visual reception history of this biblical character widely accessible. Mary, of course, is mentioned fairly infrequently in the Gospel texts and she is a shadowy...
