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

In Theresa Coletti's ambitious project, the Digby Mary Magdalene emerges as a kind of hologram that enables us to imagine more vividly the highly charged discourses animating late medieval English culture. Coletti scrupulously traces an elusive web of associations — texts, practices, patrons — in order to reconstruct the play's complex engagement of social, political, and religious concerns on the eve of the Reformation in England. In doing so, she calls for a long overdue reassessment of both the play's and East Anglian culture's place in English literary, social, and religious history.

Coletti's approach merges an attentive reading of the play with exhaustive knowledge of historical and literary scholarship on East Anglia, a "hub" of feminine spiritual activity (46). She begins by engaging in "informed speculation about the play's cultural auspices" (38). The portrayal of the Digby Magdalene is consistent with ideas fostered by East Anglian Franciscans and Dominicans, the most significant promulgators of the cult of the Magdalene in the Christian world. The intellectual milieu of the region promoted frequent contact between these learned religious orders and devout lay people of both genders. Especially informative is the example of Margaret Purdans, a prominent widow whose will attests to her active involvement with circles of learned devotion, both male and female. Together with the region's celebration of continental holy women, Catherine of Siena and Bridget of Sweden, the widow Purdans, provides a real life record of the "ideologies of gender and spiritual authority" (45) that shape the play. This feminine spirituality is also consistent with the play's embodiment of the ideologiesand values of the late medieval hospital, an institution that, under the rubric of Christens medecins, Christ the physician, healed souls as well as bodies. It thus offered wealthy citizens and prosperous lay groups the opportunity for charitable patronage that redounded to them in spiritual rewards. Affluent hospitals were venues for various kinds of performance activity — liturgical, ceremonial, and theatrical — raising the intriguing possibility that the play's inception and production might have been associated with a particular hospital. Coletti stops short of suggesting this, but it is clear she has it in mind when she observes that "Mary Magdalene was a frequent dedicatee of the medieval hospital because of [her] associations with healing, cleansing, and anointing" (39).

In the ensuing chapters Coletti creates a collage that illuminates East Anglia's enduring affiliation with Christ's female apostle, showing how her many visages formed and were formed by the culture devoted to her. Coletti offers insightful readings of numerous texts — among them Margery Kempe's Book, Julian ofNorwich's Revelations, Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection, the Pseudo-Origen De Maria Magdalena, the Macro Wisdom, the N-Town Passion Play I, and Osbern Bokenham's Legendys of Hooly Wummen — to tease out the Digby protagonist's complicated relationship to clerical power, traditional political hierarchies, and biblical commentary.

In concert with her acute textual analyses, Coletti demonstrates the local cultural circulation of these tensions in late medieval East Anglia, often grounding them in material representations. The parish church at Wiggenhall St. Mary the Virgin, for example, is adorned by bench-end depictions of religious women that may well have been funded by the Crabhouse nuns associated with the parish, who desired to commemorate themselves in this way. These connections bear witness to both the spiritual authority and economic influence of late medieval women. Coletti builds upon this nexus of associations, considering how the play's Marian dimensions probe issues of female spiritual authority. She surveys the complex history that associated, and sometimes displaced, the Virgin Mary with Mary Magdalene in order to explicate how each woman's relationship with Christ figures an enduring tension between corporeality and spirituality. Coletti finds that the play's portrayal of its heroine's transformation...