The sins of the flesh and the mortification of the flesh characterize the biography of the saint known as Mary Magdalen. The polychrome wooden sculpture by Donatello from c.1455 was described by Vasari as: “wasted away by her fastings and abstinence." The extreme emaciation of the figure contrasts with the image of the beautiful and mournful Magdalen frequently seen at the foot of the cross in medieval crucifixion scenes. With virtually no documentation concerning its commission, much of the scholarship on this particular piece focuses on dating and the intended installation site. This thesis aims to examine the relationship between the emaciated style and the manner of polychromy in Donatello’s Penitent Magdalen as an example of the redeeming power of penance. On a figure known for a life of sin and prostitution but also redemption, the gilding juxtaposed with a haggard and ugly body creates a dynamic relationship between sanctity and beauty (or the lack thereof) and demonstrates the effect of penance on the sinner. The extreme emaciation and rough finish of the piece, in tandem with the gilding of the hair, created an effect of light that was significant to the Renaissance understanding of the saint’s character but also to a larger discourse on female sexuality and spirituality. The multifaceted character of Mary Magdalen and Donatello’s depiction of her was understood by Quattrocento Florentines on a variety of levels. Higher social classes would readily grasp the sculpture’s affinity with Petrarchan tropes and philosophical ideas, particularly in terms of light imagery and descriptions of love. But the average viewer would also make more prosaic associations between the figure of the Magdalen and popular preaching and prostitution. Through an examination of the cultural climate of fifteenth century Florence, this investigation will situate Donatello’s uniquely emaciated and gilded sculpture in the visual tradition of Magdalen imagery, motifs of female spirituality in Donatello’s career, the literary tradition of describing female beauty, and societal concerns about prostitution and female sexuality. / Thesis (Master, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-26 21:24:46.128

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The Cork Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum opened in the summer of 1872, and was abandoned in 1994. The number of women who passed through its walls remains unknown. Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, a system of religious-run female penitentiaries founded to incarcerate society’s so called ‘fallen’ women, is a part of the country’s past traditionally met with reticent silence. For the atonement of their perceived sins, the inmates worked in the Magdalen laundries for no pay. The arduous labour was symbolic; the washing of soiled linen, for the purging of one’s soul. The inmates were held under no legal authority, had committed no crime, and were assigned no sentence; many women, unaware of their rights, were held in the laundries until they died. These institutions existed in Ireland over the span of three centuries, the last closing in 1996. Though a dialogue has begun to surround this chapter of Irish history, the issue remains far from resolved. The government has made no official acknowledgment or apology for their role in perpetuating such a shocking stance on social policy, while the Catholic orders responsible will not recognize the suffering caused at their hands. The Church refuses to release archival records that document the identities and numbers of the Magdalen women who worked in the laundries during the twentieth century. It is estimated that 30 000 ‘fallen’ women were put through this system - women who, with no records of their lives available, remain erased by anonymity. This lack of archival information has rendered the laundries, in Ireland’s collective consciousness, more in story than in history. The architecture that witnessed this past has since fallen victim to time. Whitewashed over with redevelopments, or left to fall into decay, the laundries, and their stories, are disappearing. Their place in the collective memory hangs in the balance, dwindling in the walls of their ruins. The sense of place, or memory, that is recorded in architecture, lingers in the folds of the ruin. Hovering like a ghost over its ashes, it becomes orphaned. As such, the preservation of place becomes laden with a sense of urgency. It becomes a problem of representation. Taking what remains of the Cork Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum as a point of entry, I have endeavoured to decipher the fragments of the ruin as a reference to the whole, to, as Victor Hugo writes in Notre-Dame de Paris, turn the mountain of architecture into the imperishable flock of birds – the petrified memory into the narrative one. This is done in three parts. The first introduces the site’s historical and social context, composing a portrait of the building through the ephemera of its past. The second addresses the presence of absence in the return to the ruin, focusing its investigation on the imaginary space that stretches out between the shadow of the past-self, embodied in the built world, and the return of the present-self to this embodiment once it has fallen into ruin. This is followed by a series of meditative narratives constructed from the historical, latent, and projected memories contained within the ruin of the Magdalen Asylum in Cork. Part three is a rumination on the ruin, speculating on its role within human consciousness. The ruin of the Cork Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum testifies to a dark history - one that remains largely unresolved, one that many would rather forget. This history has yet to find its place in Ireland’s collective memory and, with the vestiges of its past rapidly dissolving, it is in danger of erasure.

The Cork Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum opened in the summer of 1872, and was abandoned in 1994. The number of women who passed through its walls remains unknown. Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, a system of religious-run female penitentiaries founded to incarcerate society’s so called ‘fallen’ women, is a part of the country’s past traditionally met with reticent silence. For the atonement of their perceived sins, the inmates worked in the Magdalen laundries for no pay. The arduous labour was symbolic; the washing of soiled linen, for the purging of one’s soul. The inmates were held under no legal authority, had committed no crime, and were assigned no sentence; many women, unaware of their rights, were held in the laundries until they died. These institutions existed in Ireland over the span of three centuries, the last closing in 1996. Though a dialogue has begun to surround this chapter of Irish history, the issue remains far from resolved. The government has made no official acknowledgment or apology for their role in perpetuating such a shocking stance on social policy, while the Catholic orders responsible will not recognize the suffering caused at their hands. The Church refuses to release archival records that document the identities and numbers of the Magdalen women who worked in the laundries during the twentieth century. It is estimated that 30 000 ‘fallen’ women were put through this system - women who, with no records of their lives available, remain erased by anonymity. This lack of archival information has rendered the laundries, in Ireland’s collective consciousness, more in story than in history. The architecture that witnessed this past has since fallen victim to time. Whitewashed over with redevelopments, or left to fall into decay, the laundries, and their stories, are disappearing. Their place in the collective memory hangs in the balance, dwindling in the walls of their ruins. The sense of place, or memory, that is recorded in architecture, lingers in the folds of the ruin. Hovering like a ghost over its ashes, it becomes orphaned. As such, the preservation of place becomes laden with a sense of urgency. It becomes a problem of representation. Taking what remains of the Cork Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum as a point of entry, I have endeavoured to decipher the fragments of the ruin as a reference to the whole, to, as Victor Hugo writes in Notre-Dame de Paris, turn the mountain of architecture into the imperishable flock of birds – the petrified memory into the narrative one. This is done in three parts. The first introduces the site’s historical and social context, composing a portrait of the building through the ephemera of its past. The second addresses the presence of absence in the return to the ruin, focusing its investigation on the imaginary space that stretches out between the shadow of the past-self, embodied in the built world, and the return of the present-self to this embodiment once it has fallen into ruin. This is followed by a series of meditative narratives constructed from the historical, latent, and projected memories contained within the ruin of the Magdalen Asylum in Cork. Part three is a rumination on the ruin, speculating on its role within human consciousness. The ruin of the Cork Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum testifies to a dark history - one that remains largely unresolved, one that many would rather forget. This history has yet to find its place in Ireland’s collective memory and, with the vestiges of its past rapidly dissolving, it is in danger of erasure.

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Mary Magdalene has fulfilled many roles since she was first mentioned in the New Testament. Some of the most popular characters she has played are as First Witness to Christ's resurrection, follower and companion of Christ, Apostle to the Apostles, penitential whore, and exemplar for Christian women. This thesis was researched and written to explore some of these personae as they appear in Renaissance images of the Noli Me Tangere scene. The Noli Me Tangere story, which describes Christ's post-resurrection appearance to Mary Magdalene, comes from the Gospel of John Chapter 20:12-15. Until the fourteenth century the Noli Me Tangere scene was depicted as a part of pictorial cycles concerning the life and death of Christ, or on rare occasions the life and death of the Magdalene herself. However, with an increasing interest in humanism, artists began to explore the Noli Me Tangere scene as an opportunity to analyze Christ's humanity and sexuality. The Noli Me Tangere as a backdrop is ideal since Mary Magdalene already suffers a reputation as a wanton woman. Renaissance images of Mary Magdalene often depict the Magdalene as a Heavenly Venus. While the sensuality of Mary Magdalene as a licentious saint and the iconography of Venus as the representation of sexuality have been previously examined by scholars, the "love" aspect of Venus iconology as evident in the Noli Me Tangere images of the Magdalene has received little, if any, attention. As the foremost icon of reformed sinner, Mary Magdalene is representative of both lust and love, much like the goddess Venus, and several Renaissance images illustrate this dichotomy. The image of the Magdalene as both a symbol of lust and love relates to her dual nature as an ideal woman and a wanton woman. In Renaissance culture, two fundamental types of women existed, the good and the bad. Each type of woman was assigned a set of traits which would indicate her social standing. The ideal woman should be beautiful, chaste, and obedient while the wanton woman was promiscuous and independent. Due to her mistaken identity as a fallen woman, Mary Magdalene was on the one hand assumed to be a prostitute and is often portrayed with the attributes of a temptress; in addition, the Gospels describe the Magdalene as a woman with independent means. On the other hand, Mary Magdalene repented her "evil" ways and found faith in Jesus Christ. She was already a renowned beauty, and after her conversion, she became the model of chastity and obedience. Analyses of Mary Magdalene's image in several Renaissance Noli Me Tangere paintings reflect both actual Renaissance women's lives and the perception of Renaissance women. Thus, Mary Magdalene represents the dichotomy of woman as ideal and wanton; loving and lustful; forgiven and fallen; exemplary and immoral; chaste and seductive; obedient and willful; and lastly, saint and sinner.

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This thesis examines the uses and implications of historical and self-imposed asylums in several of Samuel Beckett's works, most notably Murphy, Malone Dies, and "First Love." The first half of this study compares several historical Irish and British asylums to Beckett's frictional institutions in order to illuminate the recurring motifs of sanity, asylums as retreats for the wealthy, and the links between prisons and asylums. I also examine Michel Foucault's theory of the Panopticon guards as an alternate reading of Beckett's views on sanity. In Murphy and Malone Dies, for example, Beckett questions what it means to be sane through his role reversals of nurses and patients. His often under qualified and sadistic nurses are depicted as the real lunatics while their patients seem quite sane in comparison. In the second portion of this study, I suggest that the self-imposed asylums in Murphy and "First Love" are in fact the protagonists' attempts at both erasing society and becoming physically invisible. Through and extended analysis of each text, I explore the various "cells" created by each hero as well as their social implications. By ostracizing themselves, for instance, I argue that the protagonists of Murphy and "First Love" gain a form of power that the protagonists of Molly and Malone Dies lack. Murphy's and "First Love"'s demands for "imprisonment" under their own terms once again reverse the roles of helpless patient and powerful nurse.

This thesis is concerned with the transformation of prostitutes and other women in the magdalen asylums, the convict refuge, and the certified inebriate reformatory conducted by a roman catholic order of nuns in nineteenth century Britain. Laundry work came to play a central role in the activities expected of the women admitted to these quasi-monastic houses. Its significance is examined in terms of organisational and symbolic correspondences with the structure and ideology of transformative institutions directed to christian conversion. The thesis initially identifies different organisational forms and the ideology revealed by the long-span history of convent refuges. It goes on to consider the problems that tradition posed in the later institutions. The historical account, ordered around a primary sociological concern with transformation, discloses the struggle between the nuns, the secular authorities, and others, to assert differing ideas of religion, morality, and work. The theoretical discussion examines the structure and process of transformation, and the system of classification and control on which it is based. Moving from the notion of Total Institution, the analysis formulates a sociological model of the refuge as a 'Theopticon'. This provides a stable context for a pattern of transformations ranging from the laundry work to the liturgy. The analysis also deals with the role and status of the long-term transformand in pursuit of christian holiness. The theoretical model is then taken back to analyse the major issues raised by the historical account: the persistence of laundry work in the refuges, the nuns' resistance to public inspection and control, and their refusal to pay wages to the penitent women. The historical data is largely derived from primary sources and includes architectural, statistical, and photographic material, as well as documentary evidence.