From late 1517 to early 1520 academics in the intellectual hinterland of Paris were much preoccupied with a fierce debate over the identity of Mary Magdalene. The leading French humanist, Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, published a brief treatise arguing that the figure customarily venerated under this name in the Latin west was a conflation of no less than three separate women in the Gospel narratives: Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus; Mary Magdalene; and an unnamed lady with a past (Luke vii. 36–50). A flurry of refutations, refinements and reaffirmations followed over the next few years. As Sheila Porrer points out, this controversy coincided almost exactly with a more momentous controversy over indulgences which was the centre of attention in Germany and Italy. It is a moot point whether one can any longer describe the Magdalene Controversy as ‘relatively obscure’ in comparison with that unleashed by Martin Luther. Arguments over indulgences, and even over justification by faith alone, that ‘article of the standing and falling of the church’, seem no less remote even for an educated audience today than a row over the saint at the heart of a popular medieval devotion. At the time, it was perhaps the realisation that Luther's challenge to Catholic doctrine was of an entirely different order from Lefèvre's query about one Catholic devotion that helped to bring the Magdalene Controversy to a quiet close.

Sheila Porrer has produced an excellent handbook to this controversy, with a very full bibliography covering the debate, its aftermath, and recent scholarly literature on it. Her edition of Lefèvre's contributions makes these rare and interesting works more widely available. This reviewer takes the text on trust, but can confirm that the translation keeps close to the Latin, to which it is obviously intended to be a crib. One might query the editorial decision to use the King James Version to furnish translations for the biblical citations found in Lefèvre's texts. The Douai-Rheims version, which is closer to the Vulgate, might have been a better choice. The introduction is a monograph in its own right, which sorts out the tangled chronology of the debate and surveys the major contributions to it. Moreover, Porrer's analysis does justice to the complexities of the debate, which has too often been summed up as simply a confrontation between humanist goodies and scholastic baddies.

The Magdalene Controversy was at the very least overtaken by the early stages of the Reformation, which not only changed the whole context of religious debate but also changed the perspective in which some of the other controversies of the time were to be seen. It is therefore entirely understandable that the idea of ‘humanist controversies’ which ‘paved the way’ for the Reformation has proved so potent. Porrer does very well to resist the pull of this facile explanatory model. Equally, however, the variety of exegetical debates springing up in the later 1510s, and the readiness of participants in those debates (not least Lefèvre) to raise the spectre of ‘heresy’ in advancing upon their opponents, suggests that the rise of humanist print culture was putting a strain on the traditional rules of the theological game which, even without the game-changing intervention of Luther, would have necessitated some alterations to them. Porrer's edition of Lefèvre's Magdalene pamphlets will be invaluable to scholars endeavouring to see further into the cultural nest in which Luther's egg hatched.