"To passe the see in shortt space": mapping the world in the Digby Mary Magdalen

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Annual, 2006 by D.K. Smith

THE world as seen from medieval England was largely a spiritual construct. The only sense of distant lands commonly available was derived from pilgrimage accounts and from the occasional world map seen on public display in a cathedral or Bible. And though these maps and descriptions alluded to a larger world, the way in which they presented it almost completely ignored its geography. For most of the medieval period the earth, even its distant and exotic corners, was seen not as it would be today--a series of imagined areas organized spatially in relation to one another--but as a variety of separate and specific locales beyond the reach of spatial ordering. As P. D. A. Harvey observes, "It simply did not occur to people in the middle ages to use maps, to see landscape of the world in a cartographic way" (Harvey 1991, 7).

And while this slowly began to change in the fifteenth century, with the expansion of maritime exploration and the beginning of a modern geographical awareness on the Continent, England remained a backwater. Because of the island nation's isolation, the popular state of geographical knowledge in England through to the end of the fifteenth century was less likely to be reflected in the technologically advanced maps of southern Europe's "new geography" than in the spiritual and historical shape of the thirteenth century's mappae mundi.

Into this spiritual schema the growing empirical and local awareness of geography intruded, not through the medium of cartography, as we might expect, but through another cultural venue: popular drama. In the fifteenth-century drama, Mary Magdalen, preserved in the Digby Manuscript, the traditionally spiritual focus of the saint's play begins to reflect a new awareness of the physical and geographical world that maritime exploration was then making accessible. In its treatment of Mary's voyage in the Holy Land--an episode that occupies a central place in the action--this play offers what is in many ways a typical saint's life, with its focus on pilgrimage and spiritual reclamation. But the play is unusual in the way it implicitly sets this story of Mary's holy transformation and her subsequent good works within an overtly geographical context, effectively highlighting the geographical journey as much as the spiritual one.

In so doing the play can be seen to foster the first cracks in the age's controlling discipline of spiritual cartography, helping to open late medieval England to the possibilities of a broader world that could be conceptualized in terms of its physical spaces rather than its spiritual component. By dramatically emphasizing the physical world through which Mary traveled in her spiritual journey, the Digby Mary Magdalen allows the first expression in a dramatic form of the new geographical sense of the world. Why and how this happens is the subject of this article. Answers are to be found, I will show, in the play's original locale in East Anglia, in the nature of pilgrimage, in the history of mapmaking, and in the position of drama within fifteenth-century English culture, all of which conspired to make this play a less surprising vehicle for a new geographic awareness than at first it might seem.

"A peculiarly English genre"

The majority of dramatic texts surviving from the Middle Ages focus more on charting the annals of creation and salvation, than on charting lands and oceans. The dramatic emphasis is much less on this life than on the next, and in the ongoing exploration of the relationship between God and man, the physical world is seen--if it is noticed at all--as a place of spiritual danger and chaos in which "the perpetual intervention of God was the only guiding law" (Sumption 14). This is a world organized around God's power and intervention: the world, in short, of the medieval mappae mundi. (See figure 1)

These maps offered a complex and vivid representation of the world, but it was one less concerned with geography than with spiritual history. Their illustration of biblical sites and events provided a visual rendering of familiar religious narratives, and "blended concepts of both time and space as a context for understanding the Christian life" (Woodward 511). Although examples of these maps survive from different parts of Europe, they were in many ways "a peculiarly English genre" (Harvey 1991). Of the large, detailed mappae mundi that survive from this period, all share English associations, and as a group they provide an excellent sense of the geographical knowledge in England well into the late Middle Ages.

It might seem strange to take, as a measure of fifteenth-century geographical awareness, a species of map dating from two hundred years before, but England lagged far behind the Continent in geographical technology. And while there were significant improvements in European mapmaking and a growing geographical sophistication arising from the expansion of maritime travel during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these developments occurred in centers of cartographic advancement--Venice, Spain, and Portugal--and are unlikely to have extended, in any widespread way, to England. For one thing, it seems certain these new charts, being both economically valuable and politically sensitive, would not have been allowed a wide circulation. The more decorative versions that survive today would likely have spent their lives locked away in their owners' libraries, and would have been carefully preserved from unauthorized copying. And even when word of the new cartographic discoveries made it to England, the maps themselves were unlikely to have quickly followed, given a lack of demand for them by English economic and political interests. Even as late as 1520, English seaman possesed no sea charts "except a very few drawn by foreigners" (Lynam 13). Moreover, the dominance of mappae mundi in England contributed a resistance to change that kept out-of-date cartographic representations in use long after they might have been corrected in the light of experience. (1) In this context, outmoded mappae mundi spawned more mappae mundi in a sealed intertextual belljar.