Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England by Theresa Coletti

Abstract

REVIEWS neglects to account for the simultaneous emergence of the ‘‘radical’’ Chaucer: the ostensible author of The Plowman’s Tale, whose works were marshaled as evidence in fifteenth-century heresy trials and who was later notoriously deemed by John Foxe to be a ‘‘right Wycliffian.’’ The image of the medieval author and his audience that emerges from this book is a proto-capitalist one in which ‘‘the reader-consumer is almighty’’ and ‘‘the writer-producer . . . becomes a virtual wage slave’’ in the vineyards of bastard feudalism (p. 44). Yet like the idea of bastard feudalism itself, the notion of what work may have meant to a preindustrial author and his audience remains largely unexplored; in fact, the book never discusses what notions of work—whether intellectual, spiritual, or manual—would have been available to a fourteenth-century person at all. Despite this shortcoming, the book will be salutary for its polemical tone, perhaps stirring many devils to advocate. In the end, what Carlson says of Chaucer—that he was ‘‘a useful poet, rather than a good one’’ (p. 64)—could be said, mutans mutandis, of this book about Chaucer’s poetry as well. Kellie Robertson University of Pittsburgh Theresa Coletti. Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Pp. xiii, 342. $59.95. The play of Mary Magdalene, preserved in a single copy in MS Bodleian Digby 133, is one of the most remarkable artifacts of late medieval English theater. At more than 2,000 lines, 40 speaking parts, and multiple geographic locales—including some purely psychic ones—it is a daunting play to consider staging, and we can only imagine how the grand spectacle of the saint’s life, derived from Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, occupied the East Anglian community that originally performed the work. Its subject, sometime called the ‘‘Apostle to the Apostles,’’ is of course a source of perpetual fascination in European culture, up to the current best seller, The Da Vinci Code. Theresa Coletti ’s exhaustively researched Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints sets out to explore this intriguing play from every possible angle of its PAGE 287 287 ................. 16094$ CH17 11-01-10 14:05:01 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER sources, location, and performance. Among her central arguments is that medieval drama, often overlooked as canonical literature, is important precisely for what it can tell us about more popular and public forms of devotion. Coletti’s introduction and first chapter deal with the Digby play’s immediate historical context with particular reference to the material culture of fifteenth-century East Anglia. By examining the records of Norfolk religious institutions, Coletti arrives at a new proposal for the site of the play’s original production, Saint Giles’s hospital in Norwich. She presents a convincing circumstantial argument about the hospital’s overall devotional culture, which includes both a ‘‘religiomedical discourse ’’ (42) about two of the play’s major themes, death and charity, and also a record of liturgical spectacles and processions. Coletti thus locates the Mary Magdalene play squarely within an intellectual world familiar to readers of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, in which there were frequent contacts between clerics and laypersons, and female authors like Catherine of Siena and Bridget of Sweden had an encouraging impact on the spiritual lives of local women. Indeed, as Coletti points out, St. Giles was, like other medieval hospitals, staffed by ‘‘chaste’’ women ‘‘of good life’’ (52) who exemplify the informal lay religious ‘‘orders’’ that thrived at this time. The second and third chapters both focus closely on the figure of Mary Magdalene herself in East Anglian texts and visual art. As Coletti shows in readings of Julian’s Showings, Kempe’s Book, Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, and Osbern Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen, Mary Magdelene comes to represent the authority of experiential knowledge ; as an eyewitness of both the passion and resurrection of Jesus’ body, she is the ultimate figure of mediation between the human and the divine. The saint’s sexual sin becomes the mark of both her physicality and transcendence. For late medieval...