"Veniance, Lord, apon thaym fall": maternal mourning, divine justice, and tragedy in the Corpus Christi plays

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Annual, 2006 by Katharine Goodland

Although the epithet "Empress of Hell" occurs elsewhere in medieval literature, Mirk's description is unique in its attribution of independent power to Mary. This noncanonical description of the Mother of God's sovereignty over the realm of the underworld imbues her with the power of judicial reciprocity. In Mirk's account of the swearing judge, the forces of nature and the supernatural are intimately linked to the power of the mother. The imagery associates the mother's utterance with the action that ensues: the Virgin opens her mouth to speak and the great womb of the earth cleaves, encircling the judge in the fiery cave of hell within.

The ethical matrixes of the medieval English Nativity plays engage the same moral economy as Mirk's treatise on excommunication and his story of the swearing magistrate. Mary's maternal grief, like the curse of excommunication, exceeds in its demands the dictates of mere human law: her mourning for her suffering child transcends earthly justice and secures the judge's eternal punishment. (28) Similarly, the medieval English plays embrace the belief that Herod's earthly power, like that of Mirk's blaspheming magistrate, will ultimately be overthrown by the justice embodied in maternal mourning. The plays, like Mirk's homily, are thematically structured around the contrast between secular, human law and divine justice. Just as Mirk's Mary appears with her bleeding babe to condemn the judge before his community, so the mothers in the Slaughter plays and the Holy women of the Passion sequences wail for sorrow and cry for justice in public confrontations with the evil and powerful men who prey upon the innocent.

In performing their grief, the mothers participate fully in the bodily suffering of their children, voicing their mutual pain in lamentation. Their cries articulate not only the problem of evil and the need for justice, but also the rapture of love and the anguish of loss.

III

In medieval England, the feast of the Purification, or "Candlemas," as it was popularly known, was among the most important festivals of the liturgical year. (29) The celebration of Mary's "churching" involved an elaborate procession of lighted candles, which were blessed by the clergy. Each parishioner contributed candles for the feast, the virgin wax being associated with Mary's virginity. As Eamon Duffy points out, "[t]he first of the five prayers of blessing in the ritual for Candlemas unequivocally attributes apotropaic power to the blessed wax, asking that 'wherever it shall be lit or set up, the devil may flee away in fear and trembling with all his ministers, out of those dwellings, and never presume again to disquiet your servants'" (16). The people took the blessed candles home, "to be lit during thunderstorms or in times of sickness, and to be placed in the hands of the dying" (17). The apotropaic power of the virgin wax of Candlemas, which could keep evil spirits away, suggests the profound sense of protection Mary's motherhood bestowed upon medieval people. During life, she protected them from the violence of nature as well as human evil; after death, as Empress of Hell, she commanded fiends to unhand their souls. The performance of the curse of excommunication the Sunday after Candlemas, and Mirk's Passion sermon, which deals not with Christ's suffering, but with Mary's maternal outrage, suggests how closely her mourning was associated with the forces of good that fought against evil in the universe.