For two millennia Mary Magdalene has maintained an enduring hold on the Western cultural imagination. Emerging from the early Christian Gospels and Gnostic writings, Mary Magdalene by the sixth century had assumed the conflated identity of several scriptural women. The Magdalene whom the canonical Gospels variously place at the Crucifixion, Entombment, and Resurrection was identified with the sister of Lazarus and Martha of Bethany and with the mysterious sinner of Luke 7 who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. A few centuries later, legendary elements of an evangelical and ascetic life accrued to the...

On the eve of the Reformation an anonymous East Anglian dramatist working under unknown auspices produced the theatrically demanding play on the life of Saint Mary Magdalene now preserved in Bodleian Library MS Digby 133. The DigbyMagdaleneplay presents the version of the vita through which knowledge about Mary Magdalene was principally made available to the later Middle Ages. This vita augmented Gregory the Great’s enormously influential sixth-century construction of the saint—which conflated the woman named Magdalene who witnesses Christ’s resurrection in all four gospels, the unnamed sinner who anoints Jesus in the home of Simon the Pharisee,...

The stage direction from the Digby saint play that furnishes the epigraph for this chapter simultaneously captures the moment preceding the discovery of Christ’s resurrection in all the gospels and emphatically moves the dramatic agents of that discovery into the late medieval world.¹ Like other occasions inMary Magdalenewhen clothing signals important developments in the saint’s unfolding spiritual biography, the stage direction encodes the narrative and symbolic complexity of the Magdalene figure whom the gospels preeminently identified as anointer of Christ’s body.² The stage direction’s notice of the “sygnis of þe passion,” orarma christi, emblazoned on the breasts...

At three different points in theScale of Perfection, a work remarkably lacking in reference to specific human example, Walter Hilton departs from his characteristic idiom to identify the achievements, assurances, and challenges of the accomplished contemplative with the biblical and legendary experience of Mary Magdalene. Hilton first invokes the saint’s ecstatic angelic feedings in her desert hermitage to illustrate the perfect soul made privy to heavenly mysteries. In theScaleMary Magdalene also bears witness to the promise of full knowledge and love of God in heaven that is presaged in the contemplative’s earthly experience.¹ Because devotion to Christ’s...

The dramatic structure and verbal texture of the DigbyMary Magdalenerely heavily on typology, repetition, and parallelism for their most powerful effects. Scholarship has typically evaluated these features of the text as formal devices contributing to dramatic unity or as evidence that the play seeks to reproduce universal Christian history. Yet the playwright also used these structural and verbal techniques to exploit ambiguities that arise from such moments of symbolic and narrative convergence.¹ One important instance of this ambiguity appears in the encomium uttered by the queen of Marseilles upon waking from the “grevos slepe” of death suffered in...

Christian drama in the West begins with the recognition of a lost body. Early ritual enactments of theVisitatio sepulchrisuch as that recorded in Ӕthelwold’sRegularis Concordiaelaborated thequem quaeritistrope from the Easter liturgy, embellishing with gesture and song the gospel accounts of the Marys who seek, but do not find, the body of Christ at the tomb.¹ At its culminating moment medieval East Anglian theatrical tradition felicitously returns to the scene of Christian ritual drama’s beginnings and to the scriptural and liturgical witness most famously identified with that lost body, returns, that is, to Mary Magdalene,...

Late medieval vernacular drama in England bears witness to the cultural circulation of a Mary Magdalene who brought to the sacred encounter an emphasis on physicality, feminine agency, and experiential authority. Yet the spiritual and ideological example she represented was vulnerable to challenge on all of these counts. The late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-centuryLamentatyon of Mary Magdaleyne, which Thynne first published as the lost Chaucerian translation of “Origines upon the Maudeleyne,” presents one such effort. TheLamentatyonis by no means a straightforward translation of Pseudo-Origen’sDe Maria Magdalena; rather, it is a verse critique of the homily’s central...