The Maudlin Impression

English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550-1700

Patricia Badir

Publication Year: 2009

Patricia Badir’s The Maudlin Impression investigates the figure of Mary Magdalene in post-medieval English religious writings and visual representations. Badir argues that the medieval Magdalene story was not discarded as part of Reformation iconoclasm, but was enthusiastically embraced by English writers and artists and retold in a wide array of genres. This rich study bridges the historical division between medieval and early modern culture by showing the ways in which Protestant writers, as well as Catholics, used the medieval stories, art, and symbolism related to the biblical Magdalene as resources for thinking about the role of the affective and erotic in Christian devotion. Their literary and artistic glosses protected a range of religious devotional practices and lent embodied, tangible form to the God of the Reformation. They employed the Magdalene figure to articulate religious experience by means of a poetics that could avoid controversial questions of religious art while exploring the potency and appeal of the beautiful. The Maudlin Impression is a literary history of imitation and invention. It participates in the “religious turn” in early modern studies by demonstrating the resilience of a single topos across time and across changing Christian beliefs.

Published by: University of Notre Dame Press

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John Marbeck was an unremarkable Tudor Protestant. In the 1530s he was an early supporter of John Calvin; in 1543 he was arrested and charged with contempt for the mass, and his papers, including an unfinished Bible concordance, were confiscated. Under Edward VI, Marbeck rose to minor prominence, publishing, in 1550, The booke of Common praier noted for the use of cathedrals and collegiate...

Chapter 1. The Look of Love

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pp. 21-57

In 1618 Harim White, bachelor of divinity and chaplain to James I, wrote a sermon called The Ready Way to True Repentance, and he dedicated it to his mother, Dorothey Dalby. The sermon is a meditation on the seventh chapter of the Gospel of Luke, cited in the epigraph above. In accordance with long-standing tradition, White conflates Luke’s “woman in the citie” with Mary Magdalene and ties the...

Chapter 2. Touch Me Not

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pp. 59-89

Thomas Walkington is probably best remembered as the author of The Optik Glasse of Humours (1607), a forerunner of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.¹ Walkington’s Magdalene sermon, Rabboni; Mary Magdalens Teares, of Sorrow, Solace (1620), shares with The Optik Glasse an extravagant and digressive prose style, and in both texts the author’s interest in alchemy and humoral theory is probably...

Chapter 3. The Task of Beauty

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pp. 91-119

Manuscript versions of what have come to be known as the “Divine Poems” suggest that this tribute was a dedicatory verse that prefaced either La Corona or perhaps a more random collection of holy sonnets.² The poem begins with a playful allusion to the controversy over the Magdalene’s biography, and with the gentle mocking of post- Tridentine attempts to distinguish the...

Chapter 4. Penance in a Sheet

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pp. 121-186

The mourning Magdalene is summoned as an alarm for a constituency that has become insensitive to Christ’s sacrifice. Andrewes renders Mary’s desolation elegantly, moving his congregation from indifference to a like melancholy: “There was no taking away His taking away from her.” Christ’s departure is figured as cruel and absolute and Mary’s grief as enduring and inconsolable. And yet, in a familiar segue...

Chapter 5. She’s a Nice Piece of Work

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pp. 187-216

In 2.2 of Aphra Behn’s play The Rover, three portraits, one large and two smaller, of the famous courtesan Angellica Bianca are mounted against her balcony facing the public piazza. The portraits immediately draw the attention of prospective clients who comment upon Angellica’s extraordinary beauty and, with great regret, her exorbitant price. Angellica herself briefly...

Postscript: A Something Else Thereby

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pp. 217-220

There are more early modern Magdalenes than are accounted for here. Some of them, like Elizabeth Cary’s life of the saint, now lost, lie beyond my reach.¹ Others were simply set aside: the anonymous and aptly titled “Another on the Same Subject” (1601), for instance, which is a meditation on the heavenly Jerusalem wherein Magdalene is no longer maudlin, having forever “lost her moane.” Also...

Notes

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pp. 221-263

Bibliography

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pp. 264-289

Index

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pp. 290-300

E-ISBN-13: 9780268075743
E-ISBN-10: 0268075743
Print-ISBN-13: 9780268022150
Print-ISBN-10: 0268022151

Page Count: 304
Illustrations: Images removed; no digital rights.
Publication Year: 2009

Series Title: ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern
Series Editor Byline: David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, James Simpson