Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England by Theresa Coletti (review)

REVIEWS 212 contemporary audience fits into the tradition of handy reference works.9 Cockcroft ’s inability to wield persuasive language, however, weakens his effort. Despite his many insights and creative approach, he would do well to reconsider his desultory rhetoric, especially if he wishes to incite pathos in others. LENORE KITTS, Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley Thomas V. Cohen, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 2004) 306 pp., ill. Thomas Cohen’s Love and Death in Renaissance Italy is the result of a peculiar historical study of Italian society in the Renaissance, a collection of stories documenting, or retelling, six episodes of jealousy, love, and murder that happened in Rome after 1550, at the time of the Counter-Reformation. The innovative character of this book consists in the fact that these stories seem the product of pure fiction; instead the material is true and was found in the Archivio di Stato in Rome as the report of several processi, which are criminal trials of the sort made by the inquisition. Different from contemporary trials, the processi were not public events, where laity and a judge listened to different versions of tales from witnesses. They were “closed affairs,” where all the procedure (investigation, the collection of data, and judgment) was in the hand of the judicial authorities of the inquisitio, and several times during a processo courts adopted procedures designed to extort truth from witnesses. The author says that documenting a processo is fascinating for historians; in fact the papers produced in the processi represent very important data that reveal domestic dramas of the lives of ordinary people of that time. So, starting from a perspective of social history, each chapter of the book focuses on the reconstruction, novel-like, of six stories that come from different processi. This book is remarkable for two components; one is the research methodology, the collection and rebuilding of the stories that are important contributions to social history. And the second is the stories in themselves that reveal important spaccati , exemplary pieces of Renaissance Italian society. This work has a particular value for historians of women, of gender, of childhood, or family in premodern Europe: in fact the materials of the processi provide fundamental new voices, information, and rich and very interesting clues to the structure of the society at that time. ROSSELLA PESCATORI, Italian, UCLA Theresa Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2004) xiii + 342 pp. Interdisciplinary approaches have significantly affected the ways in which historians analyze the past. Cultural perspectives and its myriad specializations, including gender studies and literary criticism, have deeply enriched historical scholarship and Theresa Coletti’s work is an exemplary model of how such methodologies can enable historians to effectively reconstruct the past in a 9 For example, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, ed. Edward P. J. Corbett (4th ed., Oxford 1999). REVIEWS 213 meaningful way. With a careful examination of a medieval saint play about Mary Magdalene’s life that makes important connections between medieval drama and religious and gender discourses, Coletti elucidates key aspects of the English religious culture on the eve of the Reformation. The author uses literary criticism to analyze what dramatic representations of Mary Magdalene can reveal about the nature of feminine religious authority. From a historical standpoint, Mary Magdalene’s significance lies in her role as a cultural mediator and thus, the play’s meaning hinges upon the tension between mystical spirituality and sacramental authority of religious institutions. One of Coletti’s insights is that some medieval saint plays criticized what she termed the traditional construction of femininity and its association with weakness . In her analysis, the literary tropes of purity and pollution and scenes of Mary Magdalene’s purgation reveal a uniquely feminine capacity for an indwelling spirit and rather than being considered a weakness, this could lead to a genuine feminine spiritual authority. In addition, the author sheds light on how the playwright of the Digby saint play adapted and invented dramatic scenes to authorize Mary Magdalene’s visionary revelations by having angels communicate to her, thereby giving credence to mystical...