Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints

Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England

Theresa Coletti

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812201642
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A sinner-saint who embraced then renounced sexual and worldly pleasures; a woman who, through her attachment to Jesus, embodied both erotic and sacred power; a symbol of penance and an exemplar of contemplative and passionate devotion: perhaps no figure stood closer to the center of late medieval debates about the sources of spiritual authority and women's contribution to salvation history than did Mary Magdalene, and perhaps nowhere in later medieval England was cultural preoccupation with the Magdalene stronger than in fifteenth-century East Anglia.Looking to East Anglian texts including the N-Town Plays, The Book of Margery Kempe, The Revelations of Julian of Norwich, and Bokenham's Legend of Holy Women, Theresa Coletti explores how the gendered symbol of Mary Magdalene mediates tensions between masculine and feminine spiritual power, institutional and individual modes of religious expression, and authorized and unauthorized forms of revelation and sacred speech. Using the Digby play Mary Magdalene as her touchstone, Coletti engages a wide variety of textual and visual resources to make evident the discursive and material ties of East Anglian dramatic texts and feminine religion to broader traditions of cultural commentary and representation.In bringing the disciplinary perspectives of literary history and criticism, gender studies, and social and religious history to bear on specific local instances of dramatic practice, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints highlights the relevance of Middle English dramatic discourse to the dynamic religious climate of late medieval England. In doing so, the book decisively challenges the marginalization of drama within medieval English studies, elucidates vernacular theater's kinship with influential late medieval religious texts and institutions, and articulates the changing possibilities for sacred representation in the decades before the Reformation.

1

The Drama of Saints

On the Eve of the Reformation an anonymous East Anglian dramatist working under unknown auspices produced the theatrically demanding play on the life of Saint Mary Magdalene now preserved in Bodleian Library MS Digby 133. The Digby Magdalene play presents the version of the vita through which knowledge about Mary Magdalene was principally made available to the later Middle Ages. This vita augmented Gregory the Great’s enormously influential sixth-century construction of the saint—which conflated the woman named Magdalene who witnesses Christ’s resurrection in all four gospels, the unnamed sinner who anoints Jesus in the home of Simon the Pharisee, and Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus—with legendary episodes that had accrued to Mary Magdalene’s biography as her cult expanded in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. The anointer and witness of biblical narrative and the apostle and hermit of the legendary expansions were eventually consolidated by Jacobus de Voragine in the Legenda aurea.¹

Ample evidence—in manuscript book and printed text—points to late medieval familiarity with Jacobus’s life of Mary Magdalene. The 1477 will of William Bruyn, chaplain of St. Stephen’s, Norwich, provided for his copy of the Legenda aurea to be displayed in the parish church for interested readers, one sign of the “exceptional [. . .] popular [ity]” of the work that Norman Tanner finds among bequests in wills from late medieval Norwich.² The Legenda aurea had circulated widely in Latin and the European vernaculars from the 1270s, and the advent of printing brought the work into even broader distribution. Caxton’s Middle English version went through ten editions between 1483 and 1527, the very years that span the probable composition and copying of the Digby saint play.³

Although correspondences between the Digby play and the traditional vita associated with Jacobus’s legendary have long been acknowledged, the dramatic text’s substantive departures from that influential narrative are sufficiently numerous to prompt some critics to propose that the playwright either drew upon other, unidentified, sources or, more likely, imaginatively revised the vita for strategic ends.⁴ What importantly emerges from these discussions of the saint play’s differences from Jacobus’s vita is not a debate about the dramatic text’s possible sources, which in any case is likely to remain unresolved, but an effort to map the textual horizons and expectations of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century English dramatic audiences.

In a gesture thoroughly consistent with the rhetorical strategies of sacred biography, the Digby saint play takes full advantage of the complexities of the biblical and legendary vita popularized by Jacobus and interprets the life of Mary Magdalene in light of ideological commitments, symbolic interests, and spiritual practices of late medieval religion and society.⁵ The Digby play’s Magdalene exhibits a piety based on visionary revelation and angelic communing with the deity that counters the play’s representations of the sacramental authority and privilege of the priesthood. Dramatic images of Mary Magdalene as contemplative and mystical lover of Christ valorize personal knowledge, interior will, and individual experience as elements of a religious sensibility in which the institutional church plays a diminished role. The saint’s dramatic roles as visionary and apostle also call to mind spiritual identities of medieval holy women and resonate with late medieval anxieties about feminine authority in mystical experience and the evangelical sphere.

Much of this book is devoted to investigating the Digby playwright’s important interventions in the well-known account of the sinner-saint turned apostle and hermit. These interventions, I contend, enter into explicit and implicit dialogues with East Anglian social and religious traditions and with larger late medieval cultural formations. This chapter addresses literary, methodological, and cultural contexts for evaluating these dialogues, situating Mary Magdalene in relation to key issues in medieval English drama studies and central features of East Anglian religious culture. It proposes analyzing the play through a revised critical and historical paradigm, one that is shaped by recent arguments and advances in the study of late medieval religion and hagiography. This chapter also assesses the interpretive potential of this paradigm in light of exigencies and constraints involved in addressing the relationship between East Anglian religious culture and dramatic texts. As part of a new case for ways that these might profitably be brought into dialogue with each other, I identify symbolic, institutional, and ideological points of contact between the discourses of dramatic hagiography and late medieval East Anglian society.

The Digby Magdalene and Medieval English Drama

By the time her vita came to be the principal subject of a major East Anglian play, Mary Magdalene had been occupying a host of starring and supporting roles in the religious drama of medieval Europe for nearly five hundred years. The Magdalene figure had gotten in on the ground floor, so to speak, of European drama with her appearance as one of the myrrophores in tenth-century performances of the quem quaeritis trope; thereafter, changes in her dramatic roles coincided with the expansion of her cult and virtually paralleled the growth of European drama itself.⁶ Twelfth-century dramas such as the Tours Ludus paschalis and the thirteenth-century Benediktbeuern Greater Passion from the Carmina Burana manuscript expanded dramatic representation of Mary Magdalene, creating entirely new scenes for her life based on her role in the gospels and incorporating elements from scriptural exegesis and devotional texts.⁷ Vernacular dramas from the later Middle Ages continued to accord a privileged position to the Magdalene: in France she was renowned for her mondanité, in Germany for her gossipy reporting of the Resurrection. In England she makes prominent appearances in all the biblical cycles as well as the meditative dramas preserved in Bodleian Library MS e Museo 160.⁸

With the exception of Il Miracolo di Santa Maria Maddalena, however, the Digby play is the only extant medieval dramatic text that depicts the saint’s entire legendary life as well as her biblical career, and it alone offers such a highly embellished treatment of her vita.⁹ Unique among the many medieval dramatic treatments of Mary Magdalene, the Digby play is nearly as anomalous in the annals of its own native English drama: along with its companion piece in Bodleian Library MS Digby 133, the Conversion of Saint Paul, it constitutes the sole surviving Middle English specimen of a kind of drama commonly termed saint or miracle plays.¹⁰ In light of this scarcity of extant texts, the Digby saint plays have had to bear some large literary-historical burdens: they have been invoked as model instances of a dramatic genre whose very characteristics are hypothesized on the basis of their own idiosyncratic example.¹¹

Suppositions about the generic kinds of early English drama—morality and mystery as well as miracle—have notably informed interpretation of the Digby Mary Magdalene.¹² Because the play exhibits characteristics of all three recognized “types” of drama, its manipulation of the formal elements of saint’s life, biblical history, and allegorical representation has been assessed in light of its contributions to a developmental narrative of early English drama. Robert Weimann observes, for instance, that because “Mary Magdalene … is a late play,” its “elements of synthesis may well reflect a process of decline in the original barriers between the two genres [saint play and biblical cycle] rather than any genetic constellation or any transitional link between miracles and mysteries.”¹³ Other efforts to situate the Digby saint play in English literary history focus on a discursive and representational variety that makes it “the most elaborate and demanding” or “most complex and interesting” play in the extant corpus of early English drama.¹⁴ Weaving together hagiographical narrative, courtly discourse, mercantile and anticlerical satire, scriptural texts, and contemplative and mystical idioms, Mary Magdalene unfolds on a stage in which dramatic action vacillates between naturalistic representation, allegory, ritual, parody, and dreamscapes, all pursued with great mechanical and technical virtuosity. Staging, in fact, is the aspect of the play’s complexity most often singled out for commentary.¹⁵ The play is remarkably spectacular, providing for regular journeying of human and divine messengers, sudden appearances and disappearances of Jesus on earth and in heaven, a cloud that descends from heaven to set a pagan temple on fire, seven devils that “dewoyde” from Mary during the feast at the home of Simon the Pharisee, a floating ship that crosses the platea with saintly and regal cargo, visionary processions of Mary and angels scripted by Jesus, and the saint’s elevation into the clouds for her daily feedings with heavenly manna. Critical approaches attentive more to the matter than the manner of the play’s representation have focused on its larger purposes as hagiographic drama, framing Mary Magdalene’s dramatic function in terms of her saintly exemplarity. Thus she is figured as a “model Christian, male and female,” a “representative of mankind,” and a “paradigm of God’s mercy.”¹⁶ More recently, the Digby saint’s role as “everyman” has had to make way for a gender-oriented critique that recognizes the medieval Magdalene as an important site for writing the history of the feminine subject.¹⁷

While it would be foolish to contest the significance of formal eclecticism, exuberant theatricality, and potent exemplarity in the Digby Magdalene, I want to suggest that the play’s cultural agenda exceeds these important dimensions of text and performance. Much-warranted attention to the play’s theatricality has meant that its textual subtleties and multiple registers, though often remarked, have yet to be analyzed in the context of late medieval devotion to the saints and East Anglian society and religious culture. Admittedly, hypotheses on the significance of the saint play as a textual entity in literary history and as a social and material event whose representations unfold in historical time have had a small knowledge base to draw from when constructing both generic and cultural contexts for the development and reception of the English saint play. Unlike the biblical cycles, for at least some of which substantial data survive attesting to the complex functions of these works as cultural performances, there exists little in the way of dramatic records or other documentary materials that might clarify our understanding of the English saint play as a literary genre and as a cultural artifact.¹⁸

On the basis of scattered extant dramatic records in English sources that make reference to the mounting of ludi, miracula, plays, games, and pageants on the feasts days of saints and other holy days and seasonal commemorations of the festive year, the saint or miracle play is often assumed to have been the most ubiquitous and long-lived of medieval English dramatic forms.¹⁹ Lawrence Clopper’s recent analysis of documentary records believed to furnish evidence of saint play production, however, has set in bold relief the uncertainty that attends reigning assumptions about the late medieval and Tudor saint play. Arguing that the narrative of English literary history that made the saint play the most popular type of medieval dramatic performance is based on critical misreadings of the terminology in which evidence of putative saint plays is articulated, Clopper asserts the unlikelihood that “there were ever many saint plays in England in the later medieval period up through the Reformation or during the reign of Mary.” What we have believed to be saint plays, he maintains, were in fact “a variety of lay and clerical activities held on saints’ feastdays” that involved festive play or enactment and/or the display of objects, shrines, and mechanical devices. Unlike the Digby Mary Magdalene and Conversion of Saint Paul, these ludi, miracula, and “plays” were not scripted dramas on the lives of the saints.²⁰

Clopper’s contention that the generic boundaries and performative contexts of the medieval English saint play are far less stable than has previously been supposed makes the Digby Mary Magdalene newly available as a complex text as well as an instance of cultural performance.²¹ While attenuating the hermeneutic utility of the generic approach to early English drama, a revisionary conception of medieval cultural performances of saintly biography implicitly posits a medieval “saint play” of far more fluid and complex aims. The analysis of Mary Magdalene pursued here construes the play not simply as the dramatic life of a saint of the universal Church known principally for exemplary and admonitory sin and repentance but rather as text and performance that are, for example, as polemically engaged with questions of ecclesiastical authority as is the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and as implicated in contingent constructions of the spiritual life as is the morality Wisdom. Paradoxically, once we recognize Mary Magdalene and the Conversion of Saint Paul not as representative saint plays but as texts that in fact may be even more exceptional in the history of English literature than was previously thought, we can incorporate them into a reconfigured nexus of East Anglian dramatic texts that posits their common engagement with questions about gender roles, spiritual authority, and social and religious practice that were critically important to late medieval clergy and laity.

Looking beyond problematic categories...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Drama of Saints
• 2. Some East Anglian Magdalenes
• 3. Mystic And Preacher
• 4. Gender And The Anthropology of Redemption
• 5. Bodies, Theater, and Sacred Mediations
• 6. Conclusion
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index