The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550–1700 (review)

Who was Mary Magdalene? A woman by that name received exorcism of seven demons by Christ (Luke 8) and attended the sepulcher to see the risen Lord in all Gospel accounts. Pope Gregory the Great identified her as Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus, and the woman who anointed Christ's head (Matt. 26, Mark 14, John 12) and with the "sinner" who bathed Christ's feet in Simon the Pharisee's home (Luke 7). Multiplying legends to embellish the Gospel accounts, succeeding ages depicted the Magdalene as profligate sinner and penitent saint. Patricia Badir skillfully surveys early-modern English reimaginings, as they appear in a wide array of poems, biographies, religious tracts, homilies, dramas, and illustrations.

Beginning with the work of Katherine Jansen, who demonstrated that the Middle Ages invented a Magdalene to embody the evils of vanity, luxuria, prostitution, and female frailty, Badir shows how later writers, particularly Protestants, reappropriated this legacy. Lewis Wager's morality play, The Life and Repentance of Mary Magdalene (1566), for example, presents a polemical rereading wherein the Magdalene's conversion from sin suggests the Reformation, her rejected sensual finery standing for Catholic ceremony. Catholics like Henry Constable, Robert Southwell, Richard Verstegan, and William Alabaster focused instead on the sepulcher and hortulanus scenes. For them Mary's lamentations on the absent body of Christ expressed the desolation of early modern Catholics in England, bereft, cut off from sacraments and clergy, yearning for the Lord.

Identified as Martha's sister who chose to listen and adore rather than act, the Magdalene also became a model of piety that inspired a poetics of devotion and contemplation for all. Medieval traditions that outlined her journey to France, miracles, and retreat into the desert as a penitential eremite and mystic inspired many artists: Tiziano Vecellio painted a sensual Magdalene holding a book and gazing upward; Anthony van Dyck sketched in chalk a semi-recumbent woman swathed in garments and clutching fabrics with an expression of grief and longing. Richard Crashaw immortalized Magdalene's penance in "The Weeper," a dazzling succession of epigrams and conceits that, in its revised version, explores the connections between the effluent tears without and the flaming heart within. Badir contrasts these affective representations with the restrained and intellectual engravings of Boethius Bolswert and the biblical illustration of Martin de Vos; in the latter, human longing "is lost beneath the refined complexity and infinite reproducibility of the printed engraving" (p. 167).

Badir finally answers the question "Who was Mary Magdalene?" by defining her as a lieu de mémoire, or a site of memory, which took on various lives in time. She closes her study by exploring adaptations in the late-seventeenth century, such as Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677), in which ironic iterations of medieval iconography, sadly, replace devotional meditation. Wide-ranging, well-documented, and sharply observed, this book usefully complicates the oft-repeated assertion that Mary Magdalene became a Counter-Reformation symbol of penance. She did, of course, but as Badir demonstrates, she also became a complex and evolving figure who gave various shapes to religious experience and doctrine for Catholics and Protestants alike.