How to do things with the Church Fathers: Mary Magdalene and anti-Calvinist court rhetoric in Lancelot Andrewes’s Easter Sermons (1620-22)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Mary Magdalene was one of the most controversial Scriptural figures in Post-Reformation England. This article draws attention to a remarkable moment in the early 1620s when Lancelot Andrewes decided to preach on Mary Magdalene not once but three consecutive times. Crucially, he did so during the highest point in the Christian calendar, Easter Sunday, and in the locus classicus of political power, the Royal Court. In so doing, Andrewes deliberately challenged a tradition of Reformed Protestant biblical commentaries which saw Magdalene’s femininity as intimately tied to her inability to trust Christ’s promise that he would rise from the grave. For the first time, I uncover how these three sermons constitute a trilogy (I term them the “Magdalene Triptych”). Moreover, I contextualise them within an ascendent English anti-Calvinist movement which began to weaponize the nascent field of patristic scholarship to specific confessional and political ends.