Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume

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Administration
Commune of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume Conservative 13th century Gothic in Provence: Basilica of Mary Magdalene in Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume.
Location
Longitude	05° 51' 43" E
Latitude	43° 27' 12" N
Country	France
Region	Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur
Department	Var
Arrondissement	Brignoles
Canton	Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume (chief town)
Mayor	Gabriel Rinaudo (2001-2008)
Statistics
Altitude	261 m–778 m (avg. 520 m)
Land area¹	64.13 km²
Population² (1999)	12,402
- Density (1999)	193/km²
Miscellaneous
INSEE/Postal code	83116/ 83470
¹ French Land Register data, which excludes lakes, ponds, glaciers > 1 km² (0.386 mi² or 247 acres) and river estuaries.
² Population sans doubles comptes: single count of residents of multiple communes (e.g. students and military personnel).

Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume is a commune of southeastern France, 40 km east of Aix-en-Provence, in the westernmost point of Var département. It is located at the foot of the Sainte-Baume mountains: baume is the Provençal equivalent of "cave". The town's basilica dedicated to Mary Magdalene was the site where Mary Magdalene was rehabilitated in the 13th century and remade as the sinning figure of perfect penitence and the co-patron, with the Virgin Mary, of the Dominican Order.

St.Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume is not to be confused with Sainte-Maxime further east on the Côte d'Azur.

1 History
2 The cultus of Mary Magdalene
3 Notes
4 Further reading
5 External links

[edit] History

The Roman Villa Lata, remains of which have been identified beneath Place Malherbe in the center of the town, was one among numerous agricultural working Roman villas in the plain that was traversed by the via Aurelia. The Abbey of Saint Victor at Marseille had dependencies in the neighborhood: Saint-Maximin, Saint-Jean, Saint-Mitre, Sainte-Marie. The Romanesque parish church dedicated to Saint Maximin of Trier was demolished in the final stages of constructing the basilica. In the twelfth century, Berenguer Ramon I, Count of Provence, established Saint-Maximin as a town uniquely under his care. In 1246, following the death of Raymond IV Berenger, Provence passed through his younger daughter to Charles d'Anjou, brother of Louis IX of France and sometime king of Sicily. The tenuous Anjou presence at Saint-Maximin was fiercely contested by the seigneurs of Baux among other local leaders.

[edit] The cultus of Mary Magdalene

The little town was transformed by the well-published discovery, 12 December 1279, in the crypt of Saint-Maximin, of a sarcophagus that was proclaimed to be the tomb of Mary Magdalene, signalled by miracles,^[1] and by the ensuing pilgrim-drawing cult of Mary Magdalene and Saint Maximin, assiduously cultivated by Charles II of Anjou, King of Naples, the patron who founded the massive Gothic Basilique Ste. Marie-Madeleine in 1295, with the blessing of Boniface VIII, who placed the basilica under the new teaching order of Dominicans.

The founding tradition held that relics of Mary Magdalene were preserved here, and not at Vézelay, ^[2] and that she, her brother Lazarus, and Maximin, one of the Seventy Disciples, fled the Holy Land by a miraculous boat with neither rudder nor sail^[3] and landed at Saintes Maries-de-la-Mer, in the Camargue near Arles. She then came to Marseille and converted the local people. Later in life, according to the founding legend, she retired to a cave in the Sainte-Baume mountains. She was buried in Saint-Maximin, which was not a place of pilgrimage in early times, though there is a Gallo-Roman crypt under the basilica. Sarcophagi are shown, of St Maximin, Ste. Marcelle, Ste. Suzanne and St. Sidoine (Sidonius) as well as the reliquary, which is said to hold the remains of Mary Magdalene.

Construction of the basilica, begun in 1295, was complete as to the crypt when it was consecrated in 1316. In it were installed a Gallo-Roman funerary monument—of the fourth century in fact—and four marble sarcophagi, whose bas-reliefs permit a Christian identification. The Black Death in 1348, which carried away half the local population, interrupted the building campaign, which was not taken up again until 1404, but found the sixth bay of the nave complete by 1412. Work continued until 1532, when it was decided to leave the basilica just as it was, without a finished west front or portal or belltowers, features that it lacks to this day. The plan has a main apse flanked by two subsidiary apses. Its great aisled nave is without transept. The nave is flanked by sixteen chapels in the aisles.

[edit] Notes

^ The Dominican Bernard Gui, claimed in his chronicle, written early in the following century, that a sweet spicy fragrance emanated from the sarcophagus' contents, and that a green shoot was found to be growing from the Magdalen's tongue. (Jansen 2000)
^ Other alleged burial places are at Ephesus (now in Turkey) and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, whence, it is said, her remains were later removed to Europe.
^ For the literary topos in hagiography of the miraculous boat, compare the legends of Mac Cuill and the voyages of Hui-Corra and of Mael Duin, and in religious legend Brendan of Clonfert, Saint Tathan who was carried to Britain in a rudderless boat, the three Irishmen carried to King Alfred in an oarless boat (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, year 891), the birth of Saint Kentigern, all instanced by Hares-Stryker, 1993. Celidoine is swet adrift in a rudderless boat in the Estoire de Saint Graal. The translation of Saint James the Great in a rudderless boat to Hispania might be added.

[edit] Further reading

Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton University Press) 2000.
Hares-Stryker, Carolyn, 1993. "Adrift on the seven seas: the medieval topos of exile at sea", Florilegium 12 (on-line text; pdf file)