Performing Reform: Lay Piety and the Marriage of Mary and Joseph in the N-Town Cycle

Abstract

Performing Reform: Lay Piety and the Marriage of Mary and Joseph in the N-Town Cycle Emma Lipton University of Missouri–Columbia The cult of the Virgin Mary was strong in the late Middle Ages: the life of the Virgin was told in many texts, and new feasts of the Virgin were added to the Ecclesiastical calendar.1 Curiously little attention, however, was given to the subject of her marriage. There was no feast for the marriage of the Virgin and few of the late-medieval English texts that tell the life of the Virgin devote more than passing mention to it.2 This lack of emphasis is particularly odd given the important role the Virgin’s marriage played in the development of the theology of the sacramental nature of marriage, from Augustine to I would like to thank Sarah Beckwith, Lee Patterson, Judith Ferster, and Gail McMurray Gibson for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this essay. 1 See R. W. Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 40–61, 97–115. New feasts of the Virgin added in the late Middle Ages include The Visitation (1389), The Compassion of the Virgin (1497), and The Presentation of the Virgin (1372). 2 On the uniqueness of the attention devoted to Mary and Joseph in the N-Town plays, see Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1972), pp. 161. For other late-medieval English texts recounting the life of the Virgin, see Joseph A. Lauritis, Ralph A. Klinefelter, and Vernon T. Gallagher, eds., A Critical Edition of John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, Duquesne Philological Series, no. 2 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1961); Roscoe E. Parker, ed., The Middle English Stanzaic Versions of the Life of Saint Anne, Early English Text Society [hereafter EETS], o.s., 174 (London: Oxford University Press, 1928); and Michael G. Sargent, ed., Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992). Earlier versions of the life of the Virgin also give little attention to the subject of her marriage, including the acknowledged sources for the N-Town Mary plays, most notably The Golden Legend. See Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. William Granger Ryan, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). The story of the Life of the Virgin is contained in the Greek Protevangelium, the Latin Gospels of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary, and later in the Legenda aurea and the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi. 407 ................. 8972$$ CH13 11-01-10 12:22:10 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Hugh of St. Victor and Peter Lombard, which became the basis for the canon law practiced in the courts of England throughout the Middle Ages. However, the subject of the Virgin’s marriage was given unusual emphasis in the late-fifteenth-century manuscript BL MS Cotton Vespasian D.8.3 This manuscript contains one of the four surviving English mystery play cycles, a composite and in many ways unique dramatic collection, commonly known as ‘‘N-Town.’’ Compared to the other cycles and other late-medieval English Lives of the Virgin, the manuscript pays unusual attention to the subject of her marriage, devoting an entire play to the subject, ‘‘The Marriage of Mary and Joseph,’’ that contains within it a wedding ceremony enacted according to contemporary liturgy . The cycle’s preoccupation with the marriage is also evident in ‘‘The Trial of Mary and Joseph,’’ in which a conspicuously pregnant Mary and her husband are tried for adultery. The emphasis on the life of Mary in the N-Town cycle may be explained by the probable existence of an separate and self-contained Mary Play added to preexisting cycle material when the manuscript was compiled .4 Both ‘‘The Marriage of Mary and Joseph’’ and ‘‘The Trial of Mary and Joseph’’ are believed to have been part of the original cycle, although the former probably also contains material from the Mary Play.5 3 A date of 1468 written on the manuscript gives a terminus ad quem for the cycle, but the play may have been performed or written down...