Performing Feminine Sanctity in Late Medieval England: Parish Guilds, Saints' Plays, and the Second Nun's Tale

Abstract

“In this yere was the pley of seynt Katerine.” So reads the entry for 1393 in the Chronicle of London contained in British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xvi, the first of the Chronicle’s two references to St. Katherine pageants. It is a tantalizing record for the scholar of medieval drama or vernacular hagiography, pointing to a public representation of the saint, but in its formulaic syntax omitting reference to the civic institutions, urban geography, and theatrical conventions that informed the performance. 1 Unfortunately, in this it is representative of the historical record of saints’ plays and pageants, a tradition amply documented, but in so fragmentary and incidental a way as to make clear only its prevalence. 2 The problem is compounded by the even sparser textual tradition, witnessed only by the Digby manuscript plays of Mary Magdalene and the Conversion of St. Paul. The archival and textual limits on how well we can understand hagiographic drama are especially frustrating now, in the wake of increasing critical interest in virgin martyr narratives and the role of gender in communal performance. 3 Plays like the London St. Katherine raise fundamental questions about the practice of devotion in the late medieval city: How did the performance of female sanctity intersect with the civic ideologies and social tensions explored by scholars of the Corpus Christi plays? How might we understand the public representation of feminine sanctity and its relation to the space of the late medieval town? What is the relation between the mimesis of saints’ legends as urban drama and the mimesis of saints’ legends as ethical practice; that is, between the communal performance and the exemplarity of female saints’ legends? We do not have enough information about the performance of virgin martyr legends as community drama to answer these questions confidently. But the silences of the historical record are themselves telling, of