Secular Women and Late-Medieval Marian Drama

Abstract

This article examines secular women's relationship to late-medieval Marian drama, as participants, commissioners and spectators. Paying particular attention to the Marian pageants of N-Town, Chester, Towneley and York, and The Mary Play, a discrete Marian drama embedded in the N-Town compilation, the discussion proposes that female spectators might create their own dramatized ‘Life of the Virgin through watching the plays in which the Mother of God appeared. Dramatic representation of Mary, as young girl, wife, mother and matron, mapped Mary's lifecycle onto the key moments in many lay women's lives. The article contends that women's interpretation of episodes in the Virgin's life was dependent on the point that they had reached in their own lives, and that their ‘reading of Mary might be in ways other than those intended by the playwrights.