"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

But even as this spiritual conception of the world was diligently maintained, new geographic ideas were nonetheless entering into cultural circulation. The effects of maritime travel were making themselves felt, particularly in southeastern England where the wool trade with the Continent was increasingly crucial to the local economies. In East Anglia--the most likely source of the Digby manuscript--evidence of the new geographical understanding of the world would have made itself felt on a daily basis. As Gail Gibson notes, the culture of the area "was influenced increasingly in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries by East Anglia's close economic and cultural links with northern Europe; indeed Norfolk and Suffolk were in some ways closer [sic] allied to Flanders than to London.... Norwich [was] a city that swarmed, like the other East Anglian ports, with Flemish merchants and sea captains and with continental pilgrims to Walsingham" (22). This melting pot of different nationalities brought with it an increasing awareness of the larger world and a growing view of the world as a geographical space whose distances could be crossed. With the daily evidence of this practical, empirical knowledge, a new understanding of the world began to gnaw away at the edges of the church's cartographic discipline, producing new geographical insights in even the most overtly religious of dramas.

The World of Mary Magdalen

The Digby Mary Magdalen is one of only four English saints' plays surviving from the fifteenth century. It centers on Mary's conversion from sin to holiness, tracing her descent into worldliness and lechery, her repentance, and her subsequent rise to grace. It is a sprawling and occasionally unwieldy play that focuses on a series of pilgrimages. Mary journeys from the company of vice--personified by Pride, Flesh, Lechery, and, most interestingly, World--to the heavenly company of God, while other figures, principally the king and queen of Marseilles, find their way to holiness with Mary's help. But perhaps most remarkable is the way the spiritual development of the main characters is mirrored in the sprawling variety of geographical settings. There are repeated journeys across the sea to Rome, Jerusalem, Marseilles, and even to an unnamed island in the middle of the ocean that becomes the site of one of the play's miracles. The breadth of the geographical globe is juxtaposed with the spiritual world of Mary's rise to grace, and in the process, the anonymous playwright marks out a crucial bifurcation between the negative connotations of the World as the inevitable site of sin--the companion of Flesh and the Devil--and the good and promising associations of a world increasingly coming under human control, and thus increasingly seen, not just as a place, but as a large and potentially mappable space.

These two competing understandings of the world highlight an important concern within the increasingly prosperous regions of East Anglia: the need to reconcile a spiritual life with the growing wealth and prosperity arising from the expanding wool trade. Surviving wills of the fifteenth century reveal wealthy citizens trying to ease last minute anxieties about the lurking possibilities of hell and purgatory by leaving money for masses to be said and for churches to be built, and the very richness of these buildings suggests the degree of their uneasiness. As Gibson notes, "The straining church architecture of the East Anglian Perpendicular style has been called propitiating and slightly nervous, somewhat overconcerned with materialistic demonstration of a merchant's old piety and new wealth" (26). Certainly the evidence of these so-called wool churches and other rich bequests reflect a growing hope on the part of wealthy men and women that they might derive heavenly benefits from their earthly gains.