Abstract:
The Digby play, performed in a period when women were excluded from preaching, celebrates Mary Magdalene as a most successful preacher. 2 It is not a marginal work: this is a large play which takes over three hours to perform, has a cast of over 60, and thus would need at least 100 people to produce. 3 The play is highly entertaining, with stage mechanics, song, and dangerous-sounding pyrotechnics. With impressive spectacle the play shows the Magdalene as the apostola apostolorum: a woman who out-apostles the apostles. 4 There is a challenging irony in the situation of a woman preaching before a medieval audience, as Theresa Coletti shows and investigates. Coletti, noting that "discourses of female vice and virtue are deeply implicated in visions of social order, hierarchy, and control," 5 examines the historical East Anglian context of the Digby Mary Magdalen more fully in her book, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints. I want to add to Coletti's anatomization of the play further evidence of its feminine perspective. Agreeing that "Medieval dramatic performance can no longer be construed as unreflective vehicles of instruction in a timeless Christian faith," 6 I examine the way that the Digby play heightens Magdalene's transgression of gender roles. In line with non-biblical material it amalgamates several episodes now considered not to belong to the Magdalene but to other women. 7 Consistently, dramatic strategies endorse the Magdalene's social transgressions: her open sexuality and her preaching. There are male foils to female