Lady, Hero, Saint: The Digby Play’s Mary Magdalene by Joanne Findon (review)

The figure of Mary Magdalene ever excites the imaginations of her many readers, devotees, and defamers, both old and new. To early Christian and medieval imaginations in particular, she was not a simple, one-dimensional character, but a complex, repeatedly relayered palimpsest of different personae, even seemingly contradictory ones. Since her Biblical debut, but especially after her influential recasting in Gregory the Great’s tractates on the Gospel of John, composed in the sixth century, Mary Magdalene was transformed into a composite of many of the named and unnamed Marys who appear in the Gospels. And, in her subsequent reappearances in medieval saints’ lives, liturgical songs, sermons, theological summae, poems, plays, and various forms of iconography, from manuscript illuminations to altarpieces, she increasingly became the embodiment of multiple paradoxes— saint and sinner, virgin and whore, apostle and supplicant—refusing to be easily located within any binary, modeling the Christian life for all to imitate, whether poor or rich; clerical, vowed religious, or lay; female or male.

So rousing has Mary Magdalene continued to be that she has received considerable scholarly attention. The most influential and expansive studies are Victor Saxer’s Le culte de Marie Madeleine en Occident: des origines à la fin du moyen âge, Susan Haskins’s Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor, and Katherine Ludwig Jansen’s The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages. More specialized monographs and articles have helped to provide fine-grained analyses of singular portraits of Mary Magdalene that were created within particular geographical and temporal bounds. Several works have been dedicated to reportraying the sinner-saint who stars in the late fifteenth-century Middle English Digby Play of “Mary Magdalene,” most notably Theresa Coletti’s Mary Magdalene and the Drama of the Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England, and now Joanne Findon’s Lady, Hero, Saint: The Digby Play’s Mary Magdalene.

Findon’s monograph makes a significant contribution to the conversation on the Digby Play of “Mary Magdalene” with respect to the reading of both the play as a whole and the play’s hero. Building upon Coletti’s thorough analyses of the religious texts that informed the cultural milieu in which the playwright wrote, Findon complicates this landscape by investigating the secular, nondramatic texts that also likely shaped both the play’s creation and reception. Julia Kristeva’s use of the term “intertexts,” as well as Hans Robert Jauss’s “horizon of expectations,” serve Findon well as key theoretical foci for her investigation of both the play and its audience. She effectively joins these concepts to probe the various cultural productions that set the play’s stage, so to speak. Failure to attend to these productions in all of their variety—both religious and secular and oral and written—shortens the expansive horizon against which this play was written, seen, and read, and according to Findon, this horizon should indeed be viewed as expansive.

In her lengthy Introduction, “Context and Intertext,” Findon draws on a wealth of both written and nonwritten materials to detail the play’s political, social, religious, and literary backdrops. Particularly noteworthy is the attention that she gives to several fourteenth- and fifteenth-century authors, from Geoffrey Chaucer to John Lydgate, who may have informed the literary consciousnesses of the play’s East Anglian audience. She affirms earlier scholarly research on the literariness of East Anglia’s gentry class, a prime candidate for the play’s audience, but she also opens up the possible address and reception of the play to those of lower socioeconomic status, like mariners. Even more intriguingly, Findon asserts with Karen Winstead that there was an eager “‘market’ in East Anglia for positive depictions of women,” which would have appreciated the Digby Play’s “valorization of women’s voices” (p. 45). Not only does the play trouble traditional expectations for both femininity and masculinity, but “[t]he playwright’s...