"Curtesy Doth It Yow Lere": The Sociology of Transgression in the Digby "Mary Magdalene"

Author(s): Theresa Coletti

Reviewed work(s):
Source: ELH, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 1-28
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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"CURTESYDOTH IT YOWLERE":
THE SOCIOLOGYOF TRANSGRESSION
IN THE DIGBY MARY MAGDALENE
BY THERESA COLETTI

In a recent study of late medievalcourtesyliteratureaddressedto

young women, Felicity Riddy contends that the effort to model
female behaviorwhich motivatesthese texts furnishesevidence of a
largerculturalproject that allied the productionof a particularkind
of female virtue with the preservationof powerfulinterests in urban
society."Ungoverned"youngwomen migratedin increasingnumbers
to late medieval English towns. Riddyposits that texts such as How
the Good Wife TaughtHer Daughterdirectedthese women to pursue
a virtuous ideal that sought to mitigate the threats they posed to
bourgeois society, cautioningagainstthe desire for upwardmobility,
endorsing"householdvalues ... [and] male authority,"and containing "female energy and enterprise."'Manuscriptcontexts for these
texts, rangingfrom friar'shandbookto mercantilehousehold collection, point to the variableand wide receptionof late medievalfemale
conduct literature; in all these disparate contexts, discourses of
female vice andvirtue are deeply implicatedin visionsof social order,
hierarchy, and control. This essay investigates the production of
female virtue in a different but related textual site: vernacular
religious drama. My particularfocus is the late medieval English
dramaticvita of MaryMagdalenepreservedin Bodleian LibraryMS
Digby 133, a text whose distinguishingfeatures point to probable
originsin a prosperousurbanvenue, the same sort of environmentin
which Riddy finds male clerics and city fathers collaboratingto
produce female-oriented conduct literature.2Like those texts, the
Digby saint play represents the intersection of contemporarysocial
ideologies and the constructionof female virtue; more specifically,
the play'scritique of gendered moral behaviorbears witness to late
medieval consciousness of attributesand responsibilitiesassociated
with particularstatus positions and social roles. In the play, Mary
Magdalene'sfall into sin is an important moment in a panoramic
drama that embraces the full sweep of her conflated biblical and
ELH 71 (2004) 1-28 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

legendaryvita, widely disseminatedin Jacobusde Voragine'sLegenda

Aurea. Focusing on the scene in which MaryMagdaleneis seduced
by the gallant Curiosity,I shall examine how this dramaticepisode
privileges questions of social identity ratherthan sexual sin. I argue
that the play employsdiscoursesof statusand courtesymade familiar
through late medieval conduct literaturein order to foregroundthe
sociology of Mary Magdalene's transgression, linking her moral
demise not exclusivelywith feminine moral culpabilitybut also with
deceptions and instabilitiesof the social order. The preoccupation
with socialidentityin this saintplay,I suggest, atteststo late medieval
vernacular theater's broader engagement with the spiritual and
materialformationof subjectivitiesin premodernEngland.
In the Middle Ages, Mary Magdalene'sassociationwith vice was
the abidinglegacyof Gregorythe Great,whose sixth-centuryconsolidation of several biblical women-the witness to the Resurrection
from whom Christ expelled seven demons, the sister of Marthaand
Lazarus,and the namelesswoman who anointed Christat the house
of Simon the Pharisee-secured for the saint an identificationas a
sexual sinner that survivesto this day.3The model penitent resulting
from Gregory's "wilful misinterpretation"of scripture, in Susan
Haskins'sphrase, suited the "purposesof an ascetic Church"in need
of an image of the converted sinner as a moral paradigm.4Generations of clerical exegetes pledged to poverty and celibacy readily
allied Mary Magdalene'svice with the corrupting influences of
wealth, as well as the fleshliness and fallibilitythat they deemed
central attributesof the female sex.5Over the course of the Middle
Ages, MaryMagdalene'sassociationswith sexualvice were imaginatively elaboratedin influentialscripturalcommentaryand vitae that
sought to explain, though not excuse, how the figure who was
understoodas Christ'sintimatefollowerand beloved could have been
guilty of sexualsin.
Medievalwriterstook full advantageof the opportunitiesoffered
by MaryMagdalene'sconflicted identitynot simplyto reproducebut
to elaborate,probe, and revise the implicationsof Gregory'sfoundational biography.As the saintwhose symboliccomplexityin medieval
culturewas surpassedonlyby thatof the VirginMary,MaryMagdalene
always exceeded the gendered social and ethical meanings that a
misogynistclerisy ascribedto her. The conflated scripturalidentities
and figural and legendary attributesthat eventually accrued to the
saint produced troublingparadoxeseven within the clerical culture
that excoriatedfemale sexualsin. More than for any other reformed
2

The Sociologyof Transgression

sinner, vice and virtue were inextricably knit in Mary Magdalene; her
lapses as fleshly sinner were understood not only as the enabling
condition of her spectacular penitence and redemption but also as
the source of her spiritual power. In the twelfth century Peter
Comester asserted that Mary Magdalene was more useful as a moral
example than the Virgin Mary because "there are more people in the
church who have corrected their faults than there are people who do
not know how to err";he even maintained that the penitent saint was
more desirable as intercessor than the mother of Jesus because her
personal knowledge of sin gave passionate immediacy to her petitions
on behalf of sinners.6
As a product of medieval clerical culture, Mary Magdalene's
designation as female sexual sinner served different purposes in
specific historical contexts. At the turn of the twelfth century
prominent clerics from the Loire school, such as Marbode of Rennes,
Hildebert of Lavardin, and Geoffrey of Vendome, articulated uncompromising views of feminine corruption and evil while obsessively
maintaining the unique female purity of the Virgin Mary. When they
turned to Mary Magdalene, however, it was to interpret her feminine
weakness as an allegory of the fragility of humankind; they directed
their exegesis of her sinful example not to a female audience but to
their fellow monks.' In the thirteenth century Jacques de Vitry
promoted Mary Magdalene's example as penitent and converted
sinner to beguines and other mulieres religiosae; but he stopped well
short of recommending full identification between contemporary
holy women and a biblical saint who, according to scriptural exegesis,
liturgy, and hagiography, had also reconciled her sexual sin with a
recovered virginity, practiced silent confession, and preached in
public.8 Following a liturgical precedent that paid relatively little
attention to the sinful dimensions of Mary Magdalene's composite
biography, theologians, exegetes, homilists, and vernacular poets and
dramatists showed just as lively an interest in elaborating Mary
Magdalene's other spiritual roles as contemplative, apostle, and
desert hermit.9 One late medieval French drama elides Mary
Magdalene's identity as sexual sinner in order to focus entirely on her
legendary life, in which she appears as an exemplar of bourgeois
charity.'0 These permutations in Mary Magdalene's material and
spiritual meanings illustrate what Sarah Beckwith has observed about
the production of complex symbols: they always occur "in the context
of specific social and political relations" and often "mobilize meaning
in the service of power.""
Theresa Coletti

As dramatic hagiography,the Digby play does not share the

explicit rhetoricalpurpose of modeling behavior shown in the conduct texts examinedby Riddy,but the MaryMagdalenewhose moral
demise it charts nonetheless conspicuouslyresembles the negative
examplesoffered by female conduct literature.Sanctionedby centuries of clerical commentaryon the woman'smorallapses, the behaviors exhibitedby the dramaticsaint-going abouttown unsupervised,
socializingin taverns,drinking,freely grantingher attentionto men,
consortingwith suitorsbeneath her in socialstation-also makeher a
textbook case for what the respectable late medieval young woman
ought not to do. The maternalspeakerin How the Good Wife Taught
Her Daughteradvisesher pupil to "go ... nou3ht to be tauerne,/ Thy
godnes forto selle ber-Inne" and anticipates the likes of Mary
Magdalene'stempter Curiositywhen she warns:"Allebe men be not
trew / That fare speche to be can schew."The admonitoryvoice of
The Good Wife Wold a Pilgrimagespeaks of the dangers of sitting
alone with men and expressesspecial concern that a young woman's
pride about her "a-stat"will lead to queries about her social station;
men will look after her "and aske 'who ys that?"'taking her for "a
gentyllwoman,or a callot"when she is neither.2 The male speakerof
The Book of the Knight of the Tower similarlyoffers key points of
advice that the Digby heroine would have done well to recall; he
warnsthat the trulyfaithfulmale paramourdoes not act hastily,only
declaringhis love "tyllthe tyme of seuen yere and an half be passyd
& gone." The Book also threatens with the loss of "worshipand
honoure" the lady who takes "ony plesaunce of them that ben of
lower estate or degree than they be of."13Just as the Digby play
dramatizes Mary Magdalene'stransgressionof behavioralrules advanced in female conduct texts, it also recognizes how the performance of female vice and virtue is inextricablyknit to the masculine,
patriarchalforces in her life, ranging from her father Cyrus and
brotherLazarus;to the World,the Flesh, and the Devil, all figuredas
masculine rulers;to the Tavernerand suitor Curiosity;and finallyto
her true lover Jesus.
The Digby play situates its heroine in a familial context where
materialsatisfactionand courtlybehaviorsare prominentlyvalued, a
characterizationthat acknowledges Mary Magdalene'straditional
association with wealth and high social status. William Caxton's
translationof Jacobus'svita observes, for example, that the famous
penitent "was born of ryght noble lygnange and parentis" and
"haboundedin rychesses."l4The scene in which Cyrus praises his
4

The Sociologyof Transgression

children and divides his properties among them points to material

wealth as a key constituentof social identity and behavior.Maryand
her siblings gratefullyacknowledgeCyrus'sgenerosity:the inheritance of a substantial"lyfelod"promisesfreedom,in Lazarus'sphrase,
"from all nessesyte," and deliverance, in Mary Magdalene'sjudgement, from "peynes of poverte." Safeguarded from all "wordly
labors," Mary Magdalene deems her "lyfflod"-this "place of
plesavns"--suitable"forhe dowtterof a kyng."'5
In the act of dividing his wealth among his children, Cyrus
establishes that the family possesses the behavioraland social attributethat prosperouslate medievalpeople optimisticallyassociated
with their materialabundance:gentility.Marthapraisesher fatherfor
showing them "poyntys of grete jentylnes" (D, 105), and Cyrus
commandshis "jentyllknyttys"to serve the "ladysof jentylnes"(D,
112-13) in his household. "Gentle," as Kate Mertes notes, "was
probablythe most common term fifteenth-centuryaristocratswere
likely to apply to themselves."16In late medieval England the term
acquiredsignificancein the "schemeof... statusranks,"where it was
appliedto the peerage and to the nonnoble ranksof knight,esquire,
and gentleman, in the sense of landholdinggentry.17Through such
self-identifications, Martha and Cyrus reinforce their privileged
position within the social order.
Cyrus'spresentationof his household is further inflected by the
courtlyidiom in which he describes his "[t]o amyabylldovctorsfull
bryghtof ble":"Mary,ful fayurand ful of femynyte,/ And Martha,ful
[of] bevte and of delycyte, / Ful of womanly merrorys and of
benygnyte"(D, 68, 71-73).1s While praising Mary Magdalene and
Martha in language that accords with the family's gentle status,
Cyrus'sreference to "[b]erdysin my bower so semely to senne" (D,
51) also invokesconstructionsof gender that may introducea note of
erotic tension into this scene.19Cyrus'saddressto his daughterseerily
anticipatesthe King of the Flesh's reference to Mary Magdalene's
allegoricaltemptress Lady Luxuriaas "flowyrfayrest of femynyte"
(D, 423); the King of Marseilles'spraise of his queen, "full fayurin
hyr femynyte"(D, 943); and the courtly idiom throughwhich Mary
Magdaleneis seduced by the gallantCuriosity.
If the saint play suggests that Mary Magdalene is vulnerable to
temptation because her father has already constructed her as a
feminine object of courtly desire, it further hints at the familial
backgroundfor her sinful lapse by elaboratelystaging Cyrus'sdeath
and by grantingMaryMagdalenea "heuynesse"(D, 454) over his loss
TheresaColetti

that renders her susceptible to the consolationspromised by Lady

Luxuria.Absentparental-especially paternal-control, the dramatic
Magdalene'sabandonmentof her castle and siblingsputs her in the
social position that late medieval preacherssuch as Olivier Maillard
and MichelMenotrailedagainstwhen they invokedMaryMagdalene's
high birthand legendaryprofligatelife to critiquewaywarddaughters
and the patricianfamilies who failed to provide sufficient guidance
for them.20Unrulygirls, as Claire Sponslernotes, make rare appearances in late medievaldrama.When they do, as in the case of Mary
of Nemmegen,a Dutch dramatranslatedas an English prose tale in
1518, it is in partto expose "anxietiesaboutparenting"and indict the
"inappropriatebehaviorof those who are authorizedto protect and
control"the young woman: Maryof Nemmegen's abandonmentby
her uncle and false accusationsby her aunt drive the young woman
into the arms of the devil himself.21
The scene of Mary Magdalene'smoral demise in a Jerusalem
tavernis one of the majoradditionsthat the Digby playwrightmade
to the saint'straditionalvita. Criticalemphasis on the scene's use of
allegoricalstrategiesmore typical of the moralityplay has obscured
its social and material preoccupations, which are fundamentally
linked to its occurrence in a commercial site. Revealing a debt to
mercatorepisodes of Latindramasthat associatedMaryMagdalene's
propensityto sin with her purchaseof perfumes and cosmetics, this
setting invokes homiletic discourses that made the tavern a "resoMore important,it situatesthe
lutely carnal"locus of transgression.22
woman'smoral demise in late medieval systems for the exchange of
wealth and goods. For all its allegoricaltrappings,MaryMagdalene's
seduction is notably framed by a discussionof commodities on one
end and by a spectacle of consumption on the other: the tavern
keeper who introducesher to Luxuriapresentshimselfby boastingof
the qualityand value of his wines (D, 470-80), and MaryMagdalene
signalsher submissionto Curiosity'sadvancesby drinkingand eating
with him (D, 534-42). Emergingin the later Middle Ages as an icon
of the "new profit-oriented urban economy,"the tavern, in both
literaryand historicalterms, gave materialand semiotic prominence
to commercial exchange as a central concern of vernacular,urban,
mercantile culture.23Telescoping sacred legend and secular life,
moral critique and facts of the marketplace,the tavernsite of Mary
Magdalene'sseduction points to the Digby play'sinvestmentsin the
negotiationof social relationsthat was a distinguishingfeatureof late
medieval urban space.24For urban environmentsdivided by class,
6

The Sociologyof Transgression

vocation, and activity,the tavern provided,in Paul Strohm'scharacterization,"akind of neutralzone, a place where reconsideration...
of social statusmight occur."It is just such an "impendingoccasionof
social redefinition"that is signaledby the Digby tavern scene.25
Satanadumbratesthat MaryMagdalene'sseductionwill be played
out in sociological as well as moral terms when he declares to
Mundusthat this "womanof whorshep"must become their "servant"
(D, 384).26From its outset MaryMagdalene'smoraldownfallis thus
expressed in the common parlance of social connection among the
prosperous and aspiring classes of late medieval England, who
cultivated the trappings and terminology of feudal ties long after
these had lost their commanding influence over the structure of
socioeconomicrelationships.Appealingto MaryMagdalene'spride in
her worldlystation, Satanseeks to bring about eternal comeuppance
in status for the gentlewoman.Ironically,it is precisely the prospect
of occupyingthe higherpositionin a servicerelationshipthat initiates
MaryMagdalene'scapitulationto Satan'scompany.Luxuriareceives
an order from the King of the Flesh to present herself to Mary
Magdalene:"Yowxal go desyyr servyse, and byn at hure atendavns"
(D, 424). Won over by a vision of her own preeminence, Magdalene
quickly succumbs to the blandishments of her temptress: "Your
debonariusobedyaunsravyssytme to trankquelyte!"(D, 447).27The
aureate diction that the King of the Flesh, Luxuria, and Mary
Magdaleneall employ here demonstratesthe dramatist'sawareness
of sociologicaldecorum:Magdalene'sseductionwill be articulatedin
a languagecommensuratewith her social station.28The tavernkeeper
furthers the status-consciousnessof the seduction scene when he
introduces Mary Magdalene and Luxuriato Curiosity-"Here are
jentyll women dysyoreyour presens to se" (D, 513)-reiterating the
social position alreadyattributedto Maryand opening the door for
the social-climbingCuriosity.
By figuringMaryMagdalene'stempter as a gallant,the Digby play
invokesa well-developeddiscourseof social critiquethat, as far back
as the earlyfourteenthcentury,had directed opprobriumto youthful
men of fashion who wasted "their substance on vanity above their
station"and projected false images of high status.29Curiositysports
the gallant'stwo main trademarks:extravagantdress (D, 496-506)
and the signaturecatchphrase-"Hof, hof, hof" (D, 491)-that he
utterswhen he makeshis entrance.30Hangingabouttaverns,mimicking mannersof the aristocracy,and sportingan outwardextravagance
that disguisedpovertyof spiritas well as purse, the gallantexpressed
TheresaColetti

the "wholenexus of ... social and moralfailingsof the contemporary

world,"in the view of the moralistsand homilistswho condemned
him.31Widelyrecognizedby the mid-fifteenthcenturyas a satiricand
socioeconomictype, the gallantreceivesexceptionalattentionin East
Angliandrama.Gallantryprovidesa guise for Lucifer himself in the
prologue to PassionI in the N-TownPlays,where Satan'sdescription
of his clothing shows even greaterprecisionthan Curiosity's.32
In the
Macro moralityplay Wisdom, Lucifer once more dons the gallant's
attire in order to remake Mind, Will, and Understandingin his own
image, luring them to abuses of maintenance,perjury,and lust. A
parallel seduction by gallantsoccurs in the Macro Mankind,where
the dandies Nought, New Guise, and Nowadayssucceed in getting
Mankindto exchange his long robe for the gallant'sshort gown.33
Even East Anglian commonplace books bear witness to the latemedieval currencyof the figure; dramaticextractspreserved in the
fifteenth-century miscellany compiled by Robert Reynes,
churchwarden of Acle, Norfolk, include a lengthy speech by a
characternamed Delight, who introduceshimself as "aladde lyght,/
Al fresche I 30u plyght,/ Galantand joly."34
Denunciationsof the late medieval gallantidentified the figure's
wanton ways and material excesses with serious sin. The early
sixteenth-centuryTreatiseof a Galaunt assertsthat the seven letters
comprisingthe name "galaunt""fygureththe vij deedly synnes ... /
In league with the
By whome man is made to the deuyll thrall."35
cosmic forces of the World,the Flesh, and the Devil, the Digby play's
Curiosity is a close cousin of East Anglian dramatic gallants who
providedcover for Lucifer;he is a manifestationof the deadly sin of
Pride (D, 551).36Summingup the functionof these dramaticgallants,
Tony Davenport asserts that the "stereotype. .. is part of a wideranging (though indiscriminatelyused) dramaticvocabularyof figures, styles and stage effects. . . . [A] mere instrumentof the devils
and sins who controlthe action,he is not made to bear any real moral
But it is preciselybecause the gallant'sextravagantclothing
weight."'37
the
intersectionof economic, social, and ethical transgressignified
sion that the figure proves such a symbolicallyrich tempter for the
Digbyplay'sMagdalene,enablingthe constructionof a nuancedimage
of sin in which all of these meaningsare simultaneouslyavailable.38
From his very firstwords,Curiosityis associatedwith questionsof
social and economic identity:"What?Wene 3e, syrrys,bat I were a
marchant, / Becavse bat I am new com to town?" (D, 493-94).
Intimatingthat he does not wish to be confusedwith anyonein trade,
8

The Sociologyof Transgression

his query invokes the socially ambitious merchant whose affectations

of manner were mocked in late medieval satiric discourses.39Curiosity boasts of his elegant clothing-his "shert of reynnys wyth slevys
peneawnt" and the lace of silk he sports for his "lady constant"-and
the high social status that these are meant to convey: he awes
sovereigns and disdains subjects (D, 496, 497).40 Although sons of
gentry were the ones frequently criticized for the gaudy outward
show of the gallant, both high-ranking and lesser merchants of late
medieval London favored extravagant details of costume such as
those sported by Curiosity, whose doublet and hose, he claims, always
match (D, 502).41The line between merchants and the gallant sons of
newly landed gentry, moreover, was not always easily drawn: the
claim to dual status of merchant and gentleman on the part of some
late medieval London merchants reflected the fluid movement
between city and country that these groups cultivated.42
The gallant Curiosity's preoccupation with fashion and social class
points to anxieties about the signs of status difference that motivated
the promulgation of sumptuary laws and other late medieval homiletic and didactic discourses that sought to regulate clothing precisely
because of its capacity to counterfeit social identity and to produce,
rather than simply reflect, social status. The very fact that clothing
was assumed to display social distinctions made it an agent for the
blurring of clear status differences. If clothing signified social standing, then its diversity and novelty, as Sponsler notes, "seemed to
threaten the stable social positioning of individual subjects by producing an abundance of signs of difference that could be displayed on
the body," making it "difficult to match individuals up with fixed and
identifiable subject positions."43 In the Digby saint play, Curiosity
relies on his "ile3ant" attire to provide appropriate signifiers of his
status, even as he confuses the social identity that he claims for
himself when he resists an identification with merchants and reveals
his desire to whisper with "sum praty tasppysstere" (D, 505, 495).
Illustrating Sponsler's claim that "dress in late medieval England ...
[was] a key site where struggles over the mutability of the social order
could be undertaken," his example also calls attention to other
moments in the saint play when disordering of social hierarchiesamong the devils and Lucifer, the priest and his servant, Nauta and
his boy-erupts into the play's aristocratic and religious plots.44
A prominent signifier in all medieval drama, clothing is particularly effective in representing the mistaken identities and ethical
transformations of the morality plays: the falls of the eponymous hero

TheresaColetti

in Mankindand of Mind, Will, and Understandingin Wisdom are

But the representationof
figured in their adoption of new array.45
a
seduction
identified
with moral,social,
MaryMagdalene's
by figure
and economic dimensionsof excessive attire complicatesthe signifying functionof clothing,with importantimplicationsfor the dramatic
image of female vice. Sponsler suggests that the frequency with
which regulatoryrhetoricsof clothing link extravagantattireto pride
and other deadly sins can be seen as an effort to proscribeindividual
transgressionsof social hierarchythroughmoralcoercion.46Instabilities of the social order symbolizedby clothingare thus renderedevil,
whereas control of the signs of status difference, and the abilityto
know social position unambiguouslythrough such signs, is morally
good. From the perspectiveof the regulatoryrhetoricsof fashionthat
shadowCuriosity'sseductionin the tavern,MaryMagdalene'scapitulation to sin is less a function of her gendered nature than it is a
byproduct of the dramaticeffort to expose violations of status and
social hierarchythat these rhetoricssought to restrict.
By making Mary Magdalene'stempter a status-consciousgallant,
the Digby play thus drawsattentionto the fluidityof class and status
markers among the privileged sectors of late medieval English
society. SylviaThrupp'sobservationson the simultaneousassertion
and blurring of status differences among London merchants and
provincialgentry are corroboratedin more recent findings of social
historians,who highlightthe paradoxicalrelationshipof ideologies of
status to larger patterns of social interaction in late medieval England.47Late medievalconsciousnessof statuswas articulatedin the
1413 Statuteof Additions,which dividedgentryinto knights,squires,
and gentlemen and requiredthat defendantsin all writs,appeals,and
indictments involvingoutlawryhad to identify themselves by name,
residence, and their "estate,degree, or mystery."48
Upwardlymobile
social groups-gentry, prosperous burghers, aspiring aristocratscultivated a lively awareness of status and sought to establish and
displaydifference throughtangible,outwardsigns:they created fake
pedigrees, adopted armorialbearings, sported extravagantand expensive attire, and keenly defended class sensitivitiesthat upheld an
individual'sclaim to worship and honor.49Yet other evidence of late
medievalsocial life indicatesthat upper and lower gentry,gentryand
merchants,and gentryand local magnateculturesjust as consistently
overlapped.50As the Pastons' experience in Norwich makes clear,
landed gentry maintained substantialties to provincialtowns, and
prominent urbanmerchantswere themselves often deemed equiva10

The Sociologyof Transgression

lent to gentry in social status, making it possible to speak, in more

than one sense, of a late medieval "urban gentry."5, In many towns,
merchants and gentry together comprised the core of urban
potentiores; distinctions between well-to-do townsmen and country
gentry were further eroded by these groups' sharing of interests,
values, and acquaintances.52 Blurring of class and status differences
was further complicated by, and perhaps also reflected in, provisions
of sumptuary legislation that specified financial equivalencies of
various social ranks, permitting merchants and citizens with incomes
of five hundred pounds per year, for example, to dress like gentlemen
with annual incomes of only one hundred pounds.53
In these circumstances, then, it is not surprising to find the gallant
emerging as a cultural signifier for social and economic anxieties that
accompanied the shifting and crossing of status boundaries. In fact,
the frequency with which the gallant appears in late medieval East
Anglian drama intimates a broader cultural response to the production of such crossings by virtue of the region's social activity and
economic prosperity. The social constructions that shape the Digby
play's creation of Curiosity as the agent of Mary Magdalene's seduction and inflect her embrace of vice with a studied awareness of
status differences point to preoccupations of the play's probable
target audience. East Anglian dramatic texts consistently position
themselves rhetorically in relation to the governing classes, specifying
their address to "sufferens," or sovereigns, as does the Digby saint
play (D, 2131), or appealing to "lordys and ladyes and frankelens in
fay," as does the dramatic fragment preserved in Reynes's late
fifteenth-century commonplace book.54
Tracking the social significance of the Digby play's gallant has
brought us some distance from the issue of female moral conduct,
but that is precisely my point: Mary Magdalene's encounter with sin
is refracted through the discourse and spectacle of status and class
differences. The blurring of these differences is further developed in
Curiosity's highly ambiguous wooing of Mary Magdalene herself. At
first, his hasty courtly advances to Mary Magdalene do not go over
well: "A, dere dewchesse, my daysyys icee! / Splendavnt of colour,
most of femynyte" (D, 515-16). With a striking echo of Curiosity's
own concern about mistaken identity ("Wene 3e, syrrys, bat I were a
marchant?"), Mary Magdalene protests the substance as well as the
manner of his come-on. "Why, syr, wene 3e bat I were a kelle?" (D,
520), she queries, employing a word that contains the twin signification of loose woman and low status and thereby fulfilling the good

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11

wife's prophecy about the confusion of social identity that plagues

young women who frequent taverns.55Denying any social offence,
Curiosity forcefully asserts his desire: "3e be my hertys hele, / So
wold to God 3e wold my loue fele!" (D, 521-22) Magdalenechides
Curiosityfor his haste-"Qwat cavse bat 3e love me so sodenly?"(D,
523)-and when he proteststhat he simplycannotresistthe power of
her "womanly"person, she ambiguouslyretorts:"Syr,curtesydoth it
yow lere!"(D, 525, 527).
Davenportcallsthis scene a "neatlittle pasticheof... courtlylove,"
noting that the exchangebetween MaryMagdaleneand Curiosity"is
one of the few places in late medieval drama where 'gallantry'
In this instance, courtesy involves much more
involves courtesy.'"56
than Curiosity'saping of the courtly language by which he thinks
"jentyll women" should be addressed. Curiosity'swooing speech
perhaps owes its success to its resemblance to the idiom in which
Cyrus earlier praised his daughters. Curiosity'smimicry of these
aristocraticexpressionsof masculine desire also establishes his kinship with the King of Marseilles'serotic excesses, which Mary
Magdaleneherself eventuallydisciplines and redirects.At this point
in the dramaticaction, however, the play insists on her utter selfabandonment.Curiosity'sadorationof his "gracyusgost wythowtyn
pere" and "derlyngdere" (D, 528, 540) produces complete submission when he asksher to dance: "Syr,I asent in good maner./ Go 3e
before, I sue yow nere, / For a man at alle tymysberyt reverens"(D,
531-33). To his invitation to dine on "soppys in wynne" Mary
Magdaleneprovesequallyyielding:"As3e don, so doth me" (D, 537).
Not surprisingly,his importunatequeries-"wol yow do be my rede?"
and "[w]yllwe walk to another stede?"(D, 540, 542)-bring on her
total collapse:"Ewynat yourwyl, my dere derlyng!/ Thowe 3e wyl go
to be wordyseynd, / I wol neuyr from yow wynd"(D, 543-45).
Mary Magdalene'sfailureto direct her own will properlyand her
consequent submission to that of Curiosity recalls an Augustinian
psychologyof temptation,in which suggestionleads to a delight that
ushers in consent. Her moral collapse before the manipulationsof
the gallant'scourtlinessis so extreme and complete, however,that it
also calls attention to the excesses and contradictionsof courtliness
itself, as both a discoursethat producedspecific gender relationships
and an attributeof the ruling-classidentityto which Curiosityaspires,
heightening the sinister associationsof social climbing that result
from his partnershipwith the World,the Flesh, and the Devil.
Mimi Still Dixon has observed that Mary Magdalene'sfall in the
Digby play involvesan "analysisof female socializationand power"in
12
The Sociologyof Transgression

which Mary allows "herself to be defined as spectacle and sexual

object" in the interests of male pleasure." What merits emphasis,
however, is the role that courtliness plays in this performance of
female socialization. Mary Magdalene has already revealed that she is
susceptible to the blandishments of courtly speech with her approval
of Lady Luxuria's "tong . . . so amyabyll, devydyd wyth reson" (D,
451). Lauding her superlative "femynyte" (D, 515) and "person ... so
womanly" (D, 525), Curiosity praises Mary Magdalene as "dere
dewchesse" (D, 515), "prensses"(D, 521), and "gracyousgost withouten
pere" (D, 528). Her refusal of his love, he claims, will strike him
"wyth peynnys of perplexite" (D, 519); she holds power over him as
his "hertys hele" (D, 521). The contradiction between Curiosity's
socially exalting rhetoric and the total submission with which Mary
Magdalene responds to it provides a devastatingly concrete illustration of what R. Howard Bloch terms the "ruse" of courtly discourse,
which "seems to empower women along with an enabling femininity"
because it "places the woman on a pedestal and worships her as the
controlling domna" but in fact produces "abstractions of the feminine
whose function was . . . the diversion of women from history by the
annihilation" of their identity as individuals. It is a mode of coercion
whose idealizations hide "its disenfranchising effects," making it a
"much more effective tool even than misogyny for the possession and
repossession" of women."5 The ideological workings of courtliness
described by Bloch resonate in the process by which the icon of
female vice is seduced in the Digby saint play. Mary Magdalene does
not embark upon the path to her downfall as an already eroticized
feminine subject; rather, she becomes one through the appealing
coercions of the pseudodominant position in which Curiosity places her.
Courtliness in the Digby seduction scene has other important
social dimensions. When Mary Magdalene responds to Curiosity's
hasty advances by remarking that "curtesy"should have taught him to
"refreyn" himself (D, 527, 526), she invokes the cultural discourse
that interrogated the nature and sources of gentility itself. Although
late medieval society "may well have harboured a sense that gentility
by birth was the best sort of gentility," as Rosemary Horrox observes,
in practice gentility was widely recognized as something that could be
both taught and learned as well as inherited.59 Increasing social
mobility, brought about by economic expansion in the fifteenth
century and the other social forces we have examined, helped to
install a conception of gentility-and the courtesy that was its
behavioral manifestation-as a set of socially acquired characterisTheresa Coletti

13

tics.60 The fifteenth-century proverb, "Ever manner and clothing

maketh the man," inscribes the degree to which social identity was
seen to inhere in appearance and behavior, that is, to be a product of
nurture rather than nature.6' Evidence of such social slippage is
lexically attested in the first English-Latin dictionary, the East
Anglian Promptorium Parvulorum (circa 1440), which translates
ingenuitas, or nobility, as "gentry,"which it defines as "nortore and
manerys."62
When Curiosity counters Mary Magdalene's mention of courtesy
with praise of her good breeding-"Mych nortur is bat 3e conne" (D,
529)-he echoes the definition of the Promptorium and redirects the
seduction scene's erotic repartee into the realm of conduct literature.63Late medieval England saw the proliferation of conduct texts,
whose circulation and consumption were greatly enhanced by the
advent of print: Caxton importantly introduced to this expanded
market texts such as his own translations of The Book of the Knight of
the Tower and a Book of Curtesye.64Addressed principally to socially
aspiring and upwardly mobile audiences, late medieval conduct and
courtesy literature took pains to elaborate fine distinctions of rank
and order, detailing the minutiae of precedence, even as its very
existence signaled an increasing acceptance of gentility as a social
construct rather than a natural attribute.5 Because it defined "identity as something that is based on cultural behaviors rather than on
natural essences," conduct literature stressed "nurture over nature."66
Conduct literature owed its popularity not only to the prospects for
social success that it offered but also to the connection between
personal advancement and positive moral valuation that it assumed.
As Mark Addison Amos asserts, this ethical dimension provided a
higher rationale for conduct literature's recommended self-correction.67
The Digby saint play's staging of Mary Magdalene's seduction is
exactly contemporaneous with these developments in manuscript
and print culture and social ideology.68 Its heroine's verbal sparring
with Curiosity exhibits conduct literature's emphasis on the acquisition of behaviors understood to signal the possession of particular
social identities and the virtuous personal attributes assumed to
accompany them. Mary Magdalene's retort about the courtesy that
Curiosity has or should have learned invokes the idea that courtesy
could in fact be taught. Such is the premise of the opening exhortation of the Book of Curtasye: "Qwo so wylle of curtasy lere, / In this
boke he may hit here! / Yf thow be gentylmon, 3omon, or knaue, /
14

The Sociology of Transgression

The nedis nurture for to haue."69Curiosity's expressed appreciation

for Mary Magdalene's "nortur" may be more important for its
revelation of his social aspirations than for its assessment of her
deportment and status. The late fifteenth-century Babees Book (circa
1475) articulates a similar sentiment: "And yif ye shulde at god aske
yow a bone / Als to the worlde, better in noo degre / Mihte yee desire
thanne nurtred forto be."70 Conduct literature ceaselessly asserted
the value of acquiring the signs of gentility, for example, claiming that
"good nurtur wylle saue by state" and that knowledge of proper table
manners and control of the tongue could earn an individual the name
of "gentylnesse and of goode governaunce" and the ability "in vertue
al-wey youre silf [to] avaunce."71
The appeal to the idiom of late medieval conduct literature in the
Digby play's seduction scene serves a function parallel to the one
performed by its invocation of critiques of inordinate attire. From
different perspectives, both phenomena addressed the mobility of
social identity, a mobility epitomized in the figure of Curiosity.72The
Digby play draws upon meanings associated with these late medieval
sites of social mobility-and their attendant anxieties-not simply to
show how they provide an occasion for Mary Magdalene to mistake
vice for virtue, the typical gesture of the morality play narrative, but
rather to represent the confusion that attends the discernment of vice
and virtue in an environment characterized by instability of social
roles and identities. Late medieval conduct literature itself acknowledges the dangers of the social realm of manners that it promotes.
Observing that manners are not fixed, Caxton's Book of Curtesye
describes the slippery slope of an everchanging world of social
behavior: "Mennis werkis haue often enterchange / That nowe is
norture somtyme had be strange / Thingis whilom vsed ben now leyd
a syde / And new feetis dayly ben contreuide / Mennys actes can in no
plyte abyde / They be changeable ande ofte meuide / Thingis somtyme
alowed is now repreuid / And after this shal thinges vp aryse / That
men set now but at lytyl pryse." To navigate such instabilities in the
realm of social behavior, the text recommends that its addressee
"Take hede to the norture that men vse / Newe founde or auncyent
whether it be," advising "bt ye shal haunte / The guyse of them that
do most manerly."73Caxton immediately illustrates the difficulty of
following such advise, however, with the example of the "unthryft
Ruskyn galante / Counterfeter of vnconnyng curtoisye," whose threat
to the eager student of courtesy resides precisely in the changeability
of the realm of manners epitomized by his deportment.74
Theresa Coletti

15

Allyingthis instabilitywith evil itself, the Digby Mary Magdalene

mounts a challenge to the aspirationsand optimism of a courtesy
literaturethat promoted the felicitous concordanceof mannersand
morals, and the belief, as Caxton put it, that "there is no gretter
vertue for to cause yow to haue the grace of god / and the loue of alle
The play solicits the
peple than for to be humble and curtoyse."75
of
an
of
social
preoccupations
age
mobility,interrogatingits belief in
surface perfectibilityand its cultivationand endorsement of proper
appearance as both a ground of social identity and sign of moral
value. Courtesyand nurture,as evidenced in tangible signs of status
and the whole realm of manners,are suspect preciselybecause they
can be counterfeited,because they are social performances,mobile
signifiers that refer not to some essential principle of virtue or
goodness but rather to each other.76In widening the gap between
nature and nurture,conduct literaturealso drives a wedge between
inner and outer being." If nurture, courtesy, and gentility are
performancesthat produce the appearanceof the virtuousself, how
does one identify true virtue?
The Digby saint play tenders an answer to this question that
significantlyrelocatesthe dilemmaabout identityconstructionto the
sphere of the play'slargeraims as hagiographicdrama.My discussion
of the duplicityof social performanceshas focused on Curiosity,but
it also appliesto MaryMagdalene,whose identityin the tavernscene
is no more stablethanthat of her tempter.WhereasMaryMagdalene's
embrace of vice in the play is a function of her involvement in a
complex web of assumptionsand interactionsfocusing on her social
roles and behaviors,her encounter with-and conversionto-virtue
is represented as a discoveryof her true, inner being. Sorrowfulfor
her sin and hopeful of receivingChrist'smercyas she approacheshim
in the home of Simon, she laments: "Thow knowyst my hart and
thowt in especyal- / Therfor,good Lord, aftyrmy hart rewardme!"
(D, 639-40). It is preciselythose inner qualitiesof "hart"and "thowt"
that Christ recognizes when he praises her "expert"contrition and
the "inward mythe" (D, 686, 687) of her soul, and that Mary
Magdaleneacknowledgeswhen she declaresher transparencybefore
Christ'smercy:"Mythowthhou knewystwythowttynony dowth"(D,
696). In place of MaryMagdalene'scoy reparteewith Curiosityabout
signs of social status, the scene of her penitential encounter with
Christintroducesthe prospect of an identity formulatedin different
terms, an identity that makes her "holin sowle"(D, 677).78
16

The Sociologyof Transgression

For some clerical commentators, the silent, internal nature of

Mary Magdalene's penitence and conversion posed theological problems, particularly because her forgiveness was accomplished without
sacramental penance.79 In the Digby play the emphasis on the inner
piety of her transparent heart and soul registers a more general
spiritual style that corresponds to the habits and preferences of the
prosperous late medieval laity. The cultivation of an inward piety, to
be sure, was hardly a late medieval invention; its roots go back to
Saint Anselm's prayers in the late eleventh century, to Cistercian
spirituality in the twelfth, and to the affective preoccupations of
Franciscan spirituality in the thirteenth. By the late Middle Ages the
importance of cultivating an inner spiritual self had received enormous impetus from various forms of feminine piety, the spread of
mysticism, and spiritual aspects of reformist movements such as
Lollardy that located true religion in individual experience and belief
rather than institutional structures. The Digby play's emphasis on
Mary Magdalene's inner piety of heart and thought not only corresponds to the well-documented spiritual preferences of the prosperous classes in late medieval England, but also bears witness to the
way the inward turn of these spiritual preferences took momentum
from the modes of social awareness that I have been describing,
which were sensitive to the instability of status and social roles and
uncertain about a world in which social identities were deeply
invested in verbal performance and visual appearance. In some ways
the late medieval cultivation of an inward piety was an ideal solution
to the problems posed by that social realm, because it posited an
individual's true spiritual worth as an internal rather than an external
matter. Such piety had the ideological advantage of being able to
coexist with social performances and aspirations precisely because
inner spiritual values, like those described in late medieval devotional
texts such as Walter Hilton's Epistle on the Mixed Life, the Abbey of
the Holy Ghost, and Contemplations on the Dread and Love of God,
occupied a different realm of interest and concern.80
Crediting the Digby saint play with this insight enables us to
discern its participation in important premodern cultural developments. Its self-consciousness about the slippage between morals and
manners in late medieval social ideology signals its contemporaneity
with the larger cultural project that saw the gradual divorce of
manners from ethics, a development whose relationship to changing
structures of social relations and processes of individuation over
several centuries has been usefully analyzed by Jorge Arditi. The late
Theresa Coletti

17

medievalsaintplay'sacknowledgmentof the value of spiritualinteriority also anticipates the privileging of the personal transaction
between the believer and God that was a distinguishingfeature of
reformationspiritualities.
The conversionof Mary Magdalene in the Digby saint play is a
signalmomentin that drama,then, not simplybecause it foregrounds
an exemplary penitence but because it emends the terms of the
discoursesof identity-formationthat characterizeher preconversion
life. Dramaticperformanceof these discourseselaboratesthe sociology of MaryMagdalene'stransgression,in a mannerconsistent with
the play'sinterpretationof her life as a storyaboutthe intersectionof
materialand spiritualvalues embracedby the late medievallaity.The
dramaticvita incorporatesan expanded image of the activities of
Cyrus'sprosperousfamily-bequeathing property,makingwills, expressing anxietyabout materialsufficiency,staginga proper funeral.
The life change that Mary Magdalene experiences in the course of
the play focuses as much on her transformationfrom wealth to
voluntarypovertyas on her movement from sin to blessedness.8"
The sociology of Mary Magdalene'stransgressionis also theatrically important because it puts at issue the relationshipbetween
spiritualvalues and the materialsigns on which sacred dramamust
depend to articulatethese values. Even her inner sorrow of heart
must be expressed, and in a sense is only completely known, in the
wordlessphysicalgestureof anointingJesus.Paradoxically,
the woman's
forgiveness and recognition of her "inward might" are followed
immediatelyin the playby the spectacularexpulsionof seven demons
from her body. The inward manner and the outward spectacle of
Mary Magdalene'sconversionbear witness to a tension between an
interior, spiritual self and the external signs that may disclose it,
stagingin miniaturethe largertension between the Digby saintplay's
sacred concerns and its secularcommitments.
In an influentialstudy of female sexualityand the traditionof the
penitent prostitute,Ruth Karrasobservesthat medievalnarrativeand
dramatic versions of the life of Mary Magdalene show how her
"opennessto all lovers,of whateverstatus,transgressedthe boundsof
social class as well as appropriategender behavior."Karrasfurther
assertsthat issues of status matterlittle in the moraldemise of Mary
Magdalenein these texts, which principally"conveyedthe message
that despite the social and economic distinction,all women were the
same in their sinful sexuality."82
The Digby play'sMary Magdalene
"did take care to distinguishherself from the lower class of women
18

The Sociologyof Transgression

even while she searched for a lover";but in the end she "proved
herself at least a loose woman"by succumbingto Curiosity,thereby
demonstrating that a "rich lady with lovers might rank above a
I have been arguingthat the
prostitute socially,but not morally."83
in the Digby play is not
of
seduction
Mary Magdalene's
point
her
to
demonstrate
how
high status is leveled by her
principally
sexual behavior-for it surely is-but rather to link her fall to the
categoryconfusionthat resultsfromthe formationof socialand moral
identities by an ideology that credited proper appearances,words,
and gestures with real social capital.84
By showinghow MaryMagdalene'sdemise is implicatedin ruling
class mores and discoursesof social identity,the Digby play discloses
its affinities with late medieval dramatictexts such as Wisdom and
Mankind,whose regional and codicologicalconnections to the saint
play are well known but whose similaritiesof ideologicalinvestment
have yet to be fully explored. Recent studies of Wisdom have
persuasivelyargued that the play disrupts identity categories with
respect to the relationshipof outer appearanceand inner spiritual
state and to gendered subjectivities.Garrett Epp has made a provocativecase for the fundamentalconnectionbetween the instability
of transgressivemasculine sexual identities and the moral plot of
Mankind.85Recognizing how these plays collectively examine the
convergenceof social and spiritualforces in late medievaldiscourses
of identity-formationbreaks down the artificial,formal boundaries
between hagiographicand morality drama, while pointing to the
larger social commitments of late medieval East Anglian theater.
Attention to the sociology of transgressionin the saint play also
mitigates its critical and scholarly isolation from nondramatic
hagiographyin late medieval England and East Angliain particular.
Important recent work has shown that the propensity of these
hagiographic texts to critique social mores and constructions of
gender underscoreshow the lives of virgin martyrsand other female
saints were deployed and promoted for complex political and social
ends.86The culturalforces that produced these late medieval saints'
lives are deeply implicatedin the representationof female vice and
virtue. The Digby Mary Magdaleneis no exception.
Universityof Maryland

TheresaColetti

19

NOTES
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2001 International Congress
on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University. I am grateful to Juliet Sloger
for the opportunity to contribute to a panel on female vice and virtue. I also thank
Kathleen Ashley and Kent Cartwright for their comments and encouragement.
1 Felicity Riddy, "Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text,"
Speculum 71 (1996): 74. P. J. P. Goldberg ("The Public and the Private: Women in
the Pre-Plague Economy," in Thirteenth-Century England, ed. P. R. Coss and S.
Lloyd, no. 3 [Woodbridge, Eng.: Boydell Press, 1991]) is cited by Riddy in her
discussion of ungoverned young women (74). Riddy's essay suggests that enlisting
the production of female virtue as part of the cultural project of bourgeois identity
formation begins as early as the fourteenth century; for an analysis of this subject in
a later context, see Kathleen Ashley, "The Mirour des Bonnes Femmes: Not for
Women Only?" in Medieval Conduct, ed. Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001), 86-105.
2 Institutional and
geographical auspices of the Digby Mary Magdalene are
unknown, but scholarly opinion, following the linguistic evidence, has consistently
posited an East Anglian or East Midland town, such as Chelmsford, Norwich, King's
Lynn, Ipswich, or Lincoln, as its likely venue. See Alexandra F. Johnston, "Wisdom
and the Records: Is There a Moral?," in The Wisdom Symposium, ed. Milla Cozart
Riggio (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 94; John Coldewey, "The Digby Plays and the
Chelmsford Records," Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 18 (1975):
103-21; Clifford Davidson, "The Middle English Saint Play and Its Iconography," in
The Saint Play in Medieval Europe, ed. Davidson, Early Drama, Art, and Music,
Monograph Series 8 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1986), 74-75;
Jacob Bennett, "The Mary Magdalene of Bishop's Lynn," Studies in Philology 75
(1978): 1-9; Glynne Wickham, "The Staging of Saint Plays in England," in The
Medieval Drama, ed. Sandro Sticca (Albany: SUNY Press, 1972), 111-15; Harry M.
Ritchie, "A Suggested Location for the Digby Mary Magdalene," Theatre Survey 14
(1963): 51-58.
3 Gregory the Great, Homilia 33, in XL Homiliarum in Evangelia (Migne PL
76.1238-46). Gregory's creation of the composite Magdalene is discussed by Susan
Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1993), 95-97; and Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen:
Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 2000), 32-35.
4 Haskins, 97.
See Haskins, 134-91; and Jansen, 145-96. See also Ruth Mazzo Karras, "Holy
Harlots: Prostitute Saints in Medieval Legend,"Journal of the History of Sexuality 1
(1990): 17-28.
6 See Peter Comestor, In Festo Sanctae Magdalenae Sermo Unicus: "Plures enim
sunt in Ecclesia qui errata correxerunt; quam qui errare non noverunt: plures,
inquam, justificati quam justi. Plures ergo proficiunt exemplo huius" (Migne PL
171.677-78). Jansen corrects the attribution of this sermon to Hildebert of Lavardin
in Migne (239 n. 130).
Jacques Dalarun, "La Madeleine dans l'Ouest de la France au Tournant des XIeXIIe Sikcles," Milanges de l'icole Frangaise de Rome Moyen Age 104 (1992): 71119.

20

The Sociology of Transgression

8 Michel Lauwers, "'NoliMe Tangere':Marie Madeleine,Marie d'Oignies et les

Pdnitentesdu XIIIe Siecle,"Mdlangesde 1l'cole Frangaisede Rome.MoyenAge 104

(1992): 209-58, esp. 257-58.

9 Karras discusses the relative lack of attention to Mary Magdalene's sexual sin in
the liturgy (18 n. 51). For a detailed overview of the saint's fulfillment of these other
roles, see Jansen.
'0 La Vie de Marie
Magdaleine, ed. Jacques Chocheyras and Graham Runnalls
(Geneva: Droz, 1986).

" SarahBeckwith, Christ's

Body: Identity, Cultureand Society in Late Medieval

Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), 2.

12

How the Good Wife TaughtHer Daughter, in Queene ElizabethesAchademy,

ed. F. J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, Extra Series 8 (London: N. Triibner
and Co., 1869), pages 46 and 47, lines 65-66 and 89-90 respectively; The Good Wife

Wold a Pilgrimage,in QueeneElizabethesAchademy,pages 40 and 41, lines 75 and

25-30 respectively. Riddy observes that the passage from The Good Wife Wold a
Pilgrimage quoted here warns girls of middling rank against deliberate social climbing
(76). Although the Digby saint play depicts its heroine as a gentlewoman, it also exposes
the linkage between pride and mobile social identity articulated in the conduct poem.
13

The Book of the Knightof the Tower,translatedby William Caxton,ed. M. Y.

Offord, Early English Text Society, Supplementary Series 2 (Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1971), 173, 169, 168.
14

A Critical Edition of the Legend of Mary Magdalenafrom Caxton's "Golden

Legende" of 1483, ed. David Mycoff, Salzburg Studies in English Literature 92:11
(Salzburg: Institut fiir Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1985), 118-19. See also Karras,
19-28; and Susannah Milner, "Flesh and Food: The Function of Female Asceticism
in the Digby Mary Magdalene," Philological Quarterly 73 (1994): 388-90.
15

Digby, in The Late MedievalReligiousPlays of BodleianMSS Digby 133 and E

Museo 160, ed. Donald C. Baker, John L. Murphy, and Louis B. Hall, Jr., Early
English Text Society, o.s. 283 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), 87 ("lyfelod"), 88
("nessesyte"), 96 ("peynes"), 98 ("labors"), 99 ("lyfflod"; "kyng"), 100 ("place").
Hereafter all citations from the text of the Digby saint play are from this anthology
and will be abbreviated D and cited parenthetically by line number.
16 Kate Mertes,
"Aristocracy," in Fifteenth-CenturyAttitudes: Perceptions of
Society in Late Medieval England, ed. Rosemary Horrox (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1994), 45.
17 D. A. L. Morgan, "The Individual Style of the English Gentleman," in Gentry
and Lesser Nobility in Late Medieval England, ed. Michael Jones (Gloucester, Eng.:
Alan Sutton, 1986), 16.
18Cyrus's description of Mary Magdalene, Martha, and Lazarus in the Digby play
resembles the laudatory account of the talent, beauty, and manners of Mary and her
siblings that appears in the thirteenth-century life of the saint, occasionally attributed to Rabanus Maurus in the Middle Ages: "[I]n each of them there were found an
admirable beauty of body, a most winning grace of manners, and a most pleasing
lucidity of speech. Indeed, they could be seen competing among themselves in
appearance, manners, grace, and honesty" (The Life of Saint Mary Magdalene and of
her Sister Saint Martha, trans. Mycoff [Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications,
1989], 29). The Latin text appears in PL 112.1431-1508.
19 See Laura Severt King, "Sacred Eroticism, Rapturous Anguish: Christianity's
Penitent Prostitutes and the Vexation of Allegory, 1370-1608" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of

TheresaColetti

21

California, Berkeley, 1993), 163-64. The East Anglian dramatic fragment known as
Dux Moraud goes much further, presenting father/daughter incest (Non-Cycle Plays
and Fragments, ed. Norman Davis, Early English Text Society, Supplementary
Series 1 [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970], 106-13).
20
Jacques Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1988), 139-44. These preachers were especially concerned with the
difficulty of distinguishing such patrician daughters, in their freedom and finery,
from common courtesans. Compared to French plays such as Jehan Michel's
Mystkre de la Passion (1486), the Digby saint play is fairly reserved in presenting its
heroine's engagement with material goods and pleasures. Its portrayal of Mary
Magdalene's familial situation nonetheless suggests a correspondence with sermons that
Maillard and Menot preached to thousands in the early decades of the sixteenth century,
as Rossiaud notes (143 n. 26), when their sermons were also widely printed and read.
21

Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance:Bodies, Goods, and Theatricalityin

Late Medieval England (Minnesota: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997), 97-98.

Sponsler links the unruly girl of the Dutch play to the proscriptions that appear in
conduct texts such as How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter. Drama offers a
space to challenge the formulations of conduct texts by raising a question "never
entertained by the untroubled self-help world of conduct books: what happens if
parental advice is bad?" (97). For the early English version of the Dutch prose tale,
see Mary of Nimmegen, intro. Harry Morgan Ayres and Adriaan Jacob Barnouw
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1932). Elsa Streitman discusses resemblances
between the Digby saint play and the dramatic rendering of the Dutch tale; "The
Face of Janus: Debatable Issues in Mariken van Nieumeghen," Comparative Drama
27 (1993): 64-82.
22 See the Tours Easter
play (in The Drama of the Medieval Church, ed. Karl
Young, 2 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon, 1962], 1:438-47), and the "Greater Passion" from
the Carmina Burana manuscript of Benediktbeuern (Ludus de Passione, in Medieval
Drama, ed. David Bevington [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975], 206-9). Marjorie
Malvern discusses the mercator scenes in continental Easter dramas (Venus in

Sackcloth: The Magdalen's Origins and Metamorphoses[Carbondale:Southern

Illinois Univ. Press, 1975], 103-9). Sponsler identifies the tavern in Mary of
Nemmegen as a site for the connection of "pleasure, play, and consumption" that
poses a "threat to the dominant economic order" through its "free spending with no
productive labor"; Drama and Resistance (98-99). Andrew Cowell points up the
"resolute carnality" of the tavern (At Play in the Tavern: Signs, Coins, and Bodies in
the Middle Ages [Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1999], 16). For a related
analysis of the Digby tavern scene, see my "Paupertas est Donum Dei: Hagiography,
Lay Religion, and the Economics of Salvation in the Digby Mary Magdalene,"
Speculum 76 (2001): 350-52.
23 Cowell, 16.
24 Cowell identifies the tavern as the "privileged
point of contact" between
competing discourses and practices in the Middle Ages (9). Henri LeFebvre
observes that late medieval urban space was "fated to become the theatre of a
compromise between the declining feudal system, the commercial bourgeoisie,
oligarchies, and communities of craftsmen." The Production of Space, trans. D. N.
Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 269, quoted from Paul Strohm, "Three London
Itineraries: Aesthetic Purity and the Composing Process," Theory and the Premodern
Text (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2000), 7.

22

The Sociology of Transgression

25 Strohm, 10. On the space of the tavern, see also Ralph Hanna III,
"Brewing
Trouble: On Literature and History-and Alewives," in Bodies and Disciplines:

Intersectionsof Literatureand Historyin Fifteenth-CenturyEngland,ed. BarbaraA.

Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1-17;
and Hanawalt, "The Host, the Law, and the Ambiguous Space of Medieval London

Taverns,"in "Of Good and Ill Repute":Gender and Social Control in Medieval
England (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 104-23.
26 On worship and service, see Horrox, "Service," in Fifteenth-Century Attitudes,
62-63.
See
John W. Velz, "Sovereignty in the Digby Mary Magdalene," Comparative
Drama 2 (1968): 36.
28 Robert H. Bowers calls attention to the
playwright's self-conscious use of style
and diction ("The Tavern Scene in the Middle English Digby Play of Mary

Magdalene,"in All Theseto Teach:Essays in Honor of C. A. Robertson,ed. Robert

A. Bryan, Alton C. Morris, A. A. Murphree, and Aubrey L. Williams [Gainesville,
FL: Univ. of Florida Press, 1965], 29). Stating that the aureate style is better suited
to narrative rather than dramatic action, Bowers deems the Digby playwright's use of
aureate diction in the tavern scene a violation of rhetorical decorum (24). For a
discussion of aureation in other East Anglian contexts, see Derek Pearsall, John
Lydgate (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1970), 262.
29 Tony Davenport, "'Lusty Fresche Galaunts,'" in Aspects of Early English
Drama, ed. Paula Neuss (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983), 112.
30 Davenport notes the origins of the gallant's "hoff (or hof or huffa)" in the
"falconer's cry to flush the prey from cover" (114). The gallant's refrain appears
scribbled in the margins of the text of the morality Wisdom (The Macro Plays, ed.
Mark Eccles, Early English Text Society, o.s. 262 [London: Oxford Univ. Press,
1969], xxix). See also "Huff. A Galaunt" from Bodleian Library MS. Rawlinson poet.

34, Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries,ed. Rossell Hope Robbins

(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959), 138-39.

31 Davenport, 116.
32
The N-Town Play, ed. Stephen Spector, Early English Text Society, 2 vols.,
Supplementary Series 11 and 12 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), 1:248-49, lines
65-87; see also Spector's commentary on this scene, 2:490-91. Although the text
does not specifically identify Lucifer as a gallant, his speech shares the Digby saint
play's interest in using the gallant's example to expose fraudulent social climbing and
counterfeiting of social identity.
See
Wisdom, in Macro Plays, 125, stage direction at line 324; and Mankind, in
Macro Plays, 175-77, lines 671-76, 694-701, 718. Davenport discusses Nought,
New Guise, and Nowadays as gallants (114).
See Reynes Extracts,in Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments,121, lines 1-3.
in three late-fifteenth century manuscripts and was printed
35 The poem survives
three times by Wynkyn de Worde. For de Worde's version, see Treatise ofa Galaunt,
in vol. 3 of Early Popular Poetry of England, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt (London: John
Russell Smith, 1864-1866), 147-60, quotation at lines 59-60. See also Davenport,
115-16; and John Scattergood, "Fashion and Morality in the Late Middle Ages," in
England in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Daniel Williams, Proceedings of the 1986
Harlaxton Symposium (Woodbridge, Eng.: Boydell Press, 1987), 268.
36 Curiositas was regularly associated with Pride; see Christian Zacher, Curiosity
and Pilgrimage (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), 31.

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37Davenport, 121-22.
38
Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, 15.
39Mark Addison Amos, "'For Manners Make Man': Bourdieu, De Certeau, and
the Common Appropriation of Noble Manners in the Book of Courtesy," in Medieval
Conduct, 44. See also Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The
Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973), 99-103. The consciousness of social
stratification that nourished desires for upward mobility seems not to have provided
too much of a problem for new arrivals, who did not have to cross a significant
mental or cultural divide. As Horrox notes, "the successful merchant who makes a
fool of himself in adopting a gentle lifestyle is not yet a stock literary character, at
least in England" ("The Urban Gentry in the Fifteenth Century," in Towns and
Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century, ed. John A. F. Thomson [Stroud, Eng.: Alan
Sutton, 1988], 36).
40 Few late medieval versions of
Mary Magdalene's vita are as explicit about the
nature of her worldly companions as is the Digby play. Haskins notes a fresco near
Bolzano, Italy depicting Mary Magdalene with a paramour whose foppish clothing
resembles the trademark of Curiosity (161).
41 See
Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (1300-1500)
(1962; reprint, Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1992), 149-50. In 1479 London
mercers had sufficient concern about inordinate array to specify that any young man
admitted as a shopholder had to "sadly dispose hym and manerly bothe in his arreye
& also in Cuttynge of his here / & not to go lyke a gallaunt or a man of Courte" (150).
42 Thrupp, 269-78. See also Amos's discussion of the convergence of aristocratic
and urban secular elites in late medieval England and the consequent struggle on the
part of each group to define its class identity.
4. See also Sponsler, "Narrating the Social
43 Sponsler, Drama and Resistance,
Order: Medieval Clothing Laws," Clio 21 (1992): 265-83; and Scattergood, 269-70.
44 Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, 20.
45 See Davenport, 111-12; Garrett Epp, "The Vicious Guise: Effeminacy, Sodomy,
and Mankind," in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and
Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1997), 305-6. The Digby saint play employs
changes of clothing to signal its heroine's evolving spiritual state; see my "The
Design of the Digby Play of Mary Magdalene," Studies in Philology 76 (1979): 313-33.
46 Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, 17, 20-21.
Critiques of fashion made excessive
clothing the cause of numerous social ills, including demands for higher wages by
common laborers and the impoverishment of England (Scattergood, 269-72).
F. R. H. Du Boulay, An Age of Ambition: English Society in the Late Middle
47
Ages (New York: Viking, 1970), 61-79; C. E. Moreton, "A Social Gulf? The Upper
and Lesser Gentry of Later Medieval England," Journal of Medieval History 17
(1991): 255-62; Moreton, The Townshends and Their World: Gentry, Law, and
Land in Norfolk c. 1450-1551 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); Colin Richmond, The
Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: The First Phase (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1990); Horrox, "The Urban Gentry"; Morgan; Palliser, "Urban Society,"
in Fifteenth Century Attitudes, 132-49.
48 See Statutes
of the Realm, 11 vols. (London: G. Eyre and A. Strahan, 18101828), 2:171; William Shakespeare's 1 Henry V, quoted in Morgan, 16; for other
legislation related to the scheme of status, see Morgan, 18-19. On the Statute of
Additions, see also Moreton, "A Social Gulf?," 259; and Du Boulay, 70.

24

The Sociology of Transgression

49 See
Jennifer Kermode, "The Merchants of Three Northern English Towns," in
Profession, Vocation, and Culture in Later Medieval England, ed. Cecil H. Clough
(Liverpool: Univ. of Liverpool Press, 1982), 7-48; Christine Carpenter, "FifteenthCentury English Gentry and Their Estates," in Gentry and Lesser Nobility in Late
Medieval Europe, 36-60; and Michael J. Bennett, "Education and Advancement," in
Fifteenth-Century Attitudes, 79-96. Margaret, Lady Hungerford specified in the
ordinances for her private chapel in Salisbury Cathedral that visitors could be lent
her own psalter for their devotions if they were a "'man or woman of worship' or
suche as be right worshipfull and of grete estate'"; quoted from Devizes Museum,
Personal i, folio 274 in M. A. Hicks, "The Piety of Margaret, Lady Hungerford (d.
1478)," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 38 (1987): 28.
50 For evidence of this interaction in late medieval East Anglia, see Moreton's "A
Social Gulf?" and The Townshends and Their World. See also Robert Gottfried,
Bury St. Edmunds and the Urban Crisis: 1290-1539 (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1982), 131-66. For an illustration of East Anglian class sensitivities, with
specific reference to the terminology of status difference, see Richmond, "What a
Difference a Manuscript Makes: John Wyndham of Felbrigg, Norfolk (d. 1475)," in
Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, ed. Riddy (Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 1991), 129-41.
Horrox, "The Urban Gentry"; see also Palliser.
52
Palliser, 140.
53 Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, 12.
54 See Reynes Extracts, 121, line 2. In the N-Town Passion II Pilate orders the
crucifixion of Jesus, specifying "bat ... no man xal towch 3oure kyng / But yf he be
knyght or jentylman born" (in N-Town Play, 1:322, lines 676-77).
55 See Karras, 23 n. 69, who is citing the Middle English Dictionary's definition of
"kelis" as "ill-bred people."
"6Davenport, 121. See also Wisdom, where Mind describes the fallen mights' new
behavior: "To avaunte thus me semyth no schame, / For galontys now be in most
fame. / Curtely [courteous] personys men hem proclame" (133, lines 597-99).
57 Mimi Still Dixon, "'Thys Body of Mary': 'Femynyte' and 'Inward Mythe' in the
Digby Mary Magdalene," Mediaevalia 18 (1995, for 1992): 235-36.
18 R. Howard Bloch, Medieval
Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic
Love (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), 196-97. For analysis of ways in which
courtly constructions of the feminine in late medieval devotional literature could
offer more appealing, alternative subject positions for women, see Anne Clark
Bartlett, Male Authors and Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in
Middle English Devotional Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995), 56-85.
59Horrox, "Urban Gentry," 36.
60Thrupp, 303; Du Boulay, 65-66. Morgan notes that gentility was a matter of selfassertion, requiring neither the "royal patent of creation" or "writ of parliamentary
summons" of nobility, nor the dubbing ceremony of knighthood; its recognition "was
essentially a social rather than a legal process" (18).
61 Horrox, "Service," 62.
62
Promptorium Parvulorum, ed. A. L. Mayhew, Early English Text Society, Extra
Series 102 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Triibner and Co., Ltd., 1908), 189. See also
Richard Firth Green's discussion of "noriture" in Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto
Press, 1980), 73.

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63
Studies on the relationship between Middle English drama and conduct
literature include Kathleen M. Ashley, "Medieval Courtesy Literature and Dramatic
Mirrors of Female Conduct," in The Ideology of Conduct, ed. Nancy Armstrong and
Leonard Tennenhouse (New York: Metheun, 1987), 25-38; Sponsler, Drama and
Resistance, 75-103, 182-87; and W. A. Davenport, "Peter Idley and the Devil in

Mankind,"English Studies 64 (1983): 106-12.

64

See Carol Meale, "Patrons, Buyers and Owners: Book Production and Social

Status," in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375-1475, ed. Jeremy

Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 201-38;
Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), 8889; and Lerer, "William Caxton," in The Cambridge History of Medieval English
Literature, ed. Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 720-38.
65 On audiences for conduct literature in late medieval England, see Sponsler,
Drama and Resistance, 50-74, 177-82. See also the following essays in Medieval
Conduct: Claire Sponsler, "Eating Lessons: Lydgate's 'Dietary' and Consumer
Conduct," 1-22; Anna Dronzek, "Gendered Theories of Education in FifteenthCentury Conduct Books," 135-59; and Amos, 23-48.
66
Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, 72. See also Mertes, 47.
67 Amos, 30. Jorge Arditi argues that the
embedding of manners in ethics is an
essential feature of conceptions of courtesy in the premodern era and constitutes an
aspect of social relations ignored by Norbert Elias's classic formulations on the

civilizingprocess (A Genealogyof Manners:Transformationsof Social Relationsin

France and Englandfrom the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries [Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998]). Still, Arditi's important revision of Elias's account of
the emergence of civility also oversimplifies the role played by ethics in medieval
constructions of behavioral propriety. Arditi's term for this premodern convergence
of manners and moral principles-ecclesia-relies
on a monolithic construction of
medieval culture and the Church. C. Stephen Jaeger's analysis of the origins of
courtliness in ecclesiastical households in medieval Europe suggests that a specifically Christian conception of virtue was not always at the center of courtly ideals, and that
many aspects of courtesy were antithetical to, rather than supportive of, ecclesiasti-

cal values; see The Origins of Courtliness:Civilizing Trendsand the Formationof

Courtly Ideals, 939-1210 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).

68For a related discussion of the role played by female saints in conduct literature
for women, see Katherine J. Lewis, "Model Girls? Virgin-Martyrs and the Training
of Young Women in Late Medieval England," in Young Medieval Women, ed. Lewis,
Nodl James Menuge, and Kim M. Phillips (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 2546. Karen Winstead notes the parallel aims of late medieval conduct literature and
saints' lives produced by East Anglian hagiographers John Lydgate and Osbern

Bokenham(VirginMartyrs:Legendsof Sainthoodin Late MedievalEngland[Ithaca:

Cornell Univ. Press, 1997], 112-46).

69 Quoted from British
Library MS Sloane 1986, in Early English Meals and
Manners, ed. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, o.s. 32 (1868; reprint, London:
Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner and Co. Ltd., 1904), 177, lines 1-4.
70 Babees Book, quoted from British Library MS Harley 5086, in Early English
Meals and Manners, 254, lines 117-19.
7' The first quote in this sentence is from Urbanitatis (circa 1460), 263, line 30; the
latter two are from the Babees Book, 257, lines 188-89; both in Early English Meals

and Manners.

26

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72 Roberta Krueger usefully observes that the origin of fashion as a cultural system
in premodern European culture coincided with the proliferation of conduct literature, making for "contingent phenomena that attempted to negotiate, in distinct and
seemingly opposing ways, the ambivalence and volatility of social identity in a period
of intense historical change" ("'Nouvelle Choses': Social Instability and the Problem
of Fashion in the Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry, the Mdnagier de Paris, and
Christine de Pizan's Livre des Trois Vertus," in Medieval Conduct, 50).
73 Caxton's Book of
Curtesye, ed. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, Extra
Series 3 (1868; reprint, Millwood, NY: Kraus, 1973), 45, lines 440-48, 436-37, 44950. Caxton's text is to be distinguished from the other work, already cited, also
known as the Book of Curtasye.
74 Caxton's Book
of Curtesye, 45, lines 451-52. Sponsler relates the bad model of
the gallant in this passage to ways in which conduct literature makes a space for the
very misbehaviors it seeks to control (Drama and Resistance, 73-74). See also Amos,
43. The Good Wife Wold a Pilgrimage recognizes a parallel confusion for feminine
identity categories. It warns its female addressee of the danger of frequenting
taverns, where she risks being mistaken for either a "gentyll woman, or a callot
[tart]," and yet neglects to report how one might tell the difference between the two.
Book of the Knight of the Tower, 23-24. This passage is also discussed by Ashley,
75
"The Miroir des Bonnes Femmes," 101. Opportunities for deception provided by
courtly social performances receive important attention in the Book of the Knight of
the Tower. The Knight calls up memories of his youthful "felauship" in companies of
men who "told of suche thynges as they fond with the ladyes and damoyselles / that
they requyred and prayd of loue. ... And though so were that they had good or euyll
answers / of al that they rought not / For they had neyther drede ne shame / so
moche were they endurate and acustomed / And were moche wel bespoken / and
had fayre langage / For many tymes they wold haue oueral deduyte / And thus they
doo no thyng but deceyue good ladyes / and damoysellys" and say villainous things
about them (12). The Knight resolves to make a book to honor the manners and good
deeds of women defamed by such men. On the deceptions of courtly language, see
also David Burnley, Courtliness and Literature in Medieval England (London:
Longman, 1998).
76 My thinking here is informed by Arditi's analysis of this aspect of conduct
literature from the later Middle Ages: "A behavior is valued because it is the
supposed consequence of good breeding; good breeding is valued because it implies
behavior that is considered worthy in the first place" (71). Amos's analysis of
different ways that the same conduct text could be understood by aristocratic and
nonaristocratic readers further illuminates the mobility of external signs of status
(30-31).
also makes this point (Drama and Resistance, 73).
77 Sponsler
78 Dixon also compares Christ's recognition of Mary Magdalene's inner self and
Curiosity's exploitation of her social appearance (236). For a discussion of how
patriarchal and ecclesiastical regulation of women's external appearance based on
social roles helped to produce an internalized female piety, see Dyan Elliot, "Dress
as Mediator Between Inner and Outer Self: The Pious Matron of the High and Later
Middle Ages," Mediaeval Studies 53 (1991): 279-308.
79 Lauwers, 257-58. Some homilists and exegetes compensated for this lack by
inventing a confession for Mary Magdalene; see Jansen, 214-18.

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80 On the increased
emphasis on individual experience in late medieval lay
religion, see Jonathan Hughes, The Religious Life of Richard III: Piety and Prayer in
the North of England (Stroud, Eng.: Sutton, 1997), 21-22.
81See Coletti, "'Paupertas est Donum Dei."'
82

Karras,25.

83 Karras, 22 ("did take care"), 23 ("proved herself"; "rich lady").

84
Clerical and homiletic interpretations of Mary Magdalene's feminine weakness
and transgressive inclinations notwithstanding, the Digby play complicates the
representation of female sexual vice by suggesting that masculine lust is just as
prominent a social leveler. The saint play dramatizes an expansive brotherhood of
masculine desire that reaches up and down the social ladder, embracing servant boy
and king; what takes the form of courtly discourse in the high-status characters
becomes bawdy, homoerotic repartee among the low. I discuss this aspect of the play
in Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late
Medieval England (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
85 See Malcolm Godden, "Fleshly Monks and
Dancing Girls: Immorality in the
Morality Drama," in The Long Fifteenth Century, ed. Helen Cooper and Sally
Mapstone (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 225-27; Marlene Clark, Sharon Kraus, and
Pamela Sheingorn, in "'Se in what stat thou doyst indwell': The Shifting Constructions of Gender and Power Relations in Wisdom," in The Performance of Middle
English Culture, ed. James J. Paxson, Lawrence M. Clopper, and Sylvia Tomasch
(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), 43-57; and Epp.
86 For
example, see Winstead; Sheila Delany, Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and
Society in Fifteenth-Century England (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998); and
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints' Lives and Women's Literary Culture c. 1150-1300
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).

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