Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
1. The Drama of Saints
2. Some East Anglian Magdalenes
3. Mystic and Preacher
4. Gender and the Anthropology of Redemption
5. Bodies, Theater, and Sacred Mediations
6. Conclusion
Abbreviations
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Promotional Information

"A broad and deep analysis of Mary Magdalene's prominence through overlapping discourses of late medieval English culture. . . . An elegantly written and valuable resource on theater, gender, and religion."—Baylor Journal of Theater and Performance

About the Author

Theresa Coletti is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. She is author of Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs, and Modern Theory.

Reviews

"Theresa Coletti's book, eagerly awaited, does not disappoint."--Speculum "The book is magisterial: learned, gracefully written, intelligent, and aware."--Gail McMurray Gibson, Davidson College "The importance of this study cannot be underestimated."--The Medieval Review "An elegantly written and valuable resource on theater, gender, and religion."--Baylor Journal of Theater and Performance "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."--Renaissance Quarterly This fascinating and important interdisciplinary study of theatrical practice ... reveals the importance of Middle English drama to the religious environment of fifteenth-century England"--Religious Studies Review