English: This remarkably illuminated manuscript presents a latter-day seventeenth-century copy of a letter purportedly sent by the Blessed Virgin Mary from Roman-occupied Judea in the year 42 CE. It was sent as a benediction to the citizens of the Sicilian port city of Messina, following an embassy made from there to the Holy Land comprised of Saint Paul and four elite men of the city. According to the legend, while preaching the gospels in Sicily, Paul was struck by the precocious interest and piety with which Christ’s teachings were received in Messina, where he had stayed for a time during a portion of his long apostolate across the Mediterranean. The mother of Christ was similarly impressed and put into their hands a letter, written in Hebrew and then translated by Paul into Greek, to take back to their home city. Unfortunately, this holiest of apostolic missives was intercepted by Saracens en route.

The tale then fast forwards to 1467, when the Greek grammarian Constantine Lascaris—an exile from Constantinople after its fall to the Ottoman Turks some fifteen years earlier—landed in Messina in order to instruct Basilian monks in the original language of the Greek Septuagint. It was Lascaris who concluded the legend of translation and retranslation by rendering Saint Paul’s version of the Virgin Mary’s Hebrew original into Latin, allowing its witnessing of Sicily’s unprecedented “early adoption” of Christianity to be revealed to the wider Roman Catholic world.

Although the oral tradition of the Madonna della Lettera may reasonably date from as early as the eleventh century, it was held in considerable skepticism by the church. Nevertheless, by the mid-seventeenth century, ties between the Marian legend and the people of Messina had been consolidated in the popular imagination, most notably through the consecration of the main altar and a chapel in the city’s cathedral to the Madonna della Lettera. A considerable push had been given to the tradition by the Jesuit Melchior Inchofer through his “authentication” of the letter’s text on biblical and chronological grounds, published under the title Epistolae B. Virginis Mariae ad Messanenses veritas vindicate ac plurimis gravissimorum scriptorum testimoniis et rationibus erudite illustrate (Messina, 1619). Inchofer was cited to Rome therefore and his book was forbidden "until corrected". He republished it in 1632 with the title De epistola B. Mariae ad Messanenses conjectatio plurimis rationibus et verosimilitudinibus locuples; this version was approved (ADB).

The present manuscript is probably linked to an annual celebration of the June 3 feast day of the Madonna della Lettera in the later seventeenth century, when special veneration of the relics of the “original” Hebrew letter and accompanying lock of the Virgin’s hair would have attracted many to the city’s cathedral. This exemplar, executed nearly a half-century after the Madonna’s cult had begun to be firmly established, is likely an occasional devotional keepsake produced by a scribe and sold to worshippers and pilgrims visiting the relics.

Credit: Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University. Work held at the John Work Garrett Library, Johns Hopkins University.