Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England. By Theresa Coletti. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Pp. xiii + 342; 15 illustrations. $59.95.

Theresa Coletti's Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints has as its central focus the Mary Magdalene play from MS Digby 133 but is in fact a more ambitious enterprise, for it is an attempt to locate this unique work within the culture, understanding of gender, and spirituality of East Anglia. Saint plays seem to have been common in this region. The Digby manuscript also contains a Conversion of St. Paul, and the East Anglian N-Town compilation contains plays about the Virgin Mary. Other saint plays (now lost) were recorded in the region at Braintree, Basingbourn, Maldon, Ipswich, King's Lynn, and Lincoln, Spalding, and Sutterton in Lincolnshire. Contrary to the opinion of Lawrence Clopper which Coletti appears to accept, the majority of references to lost saint plays are unlikely to have designated games or entertainments rather than plays, though some ambiguity in the records must be accepted. In all likelihood these plays were shorter in length and less original than the Digby Mary Magdalene, and most if not all would have taken far fewer resources in order to stage. The play's theatrical effects and its musical demands"including, as Richard Rastall notes in The Heaven Singing (1996), the need for professional singers (p. 174)"would have put the Mary Magdalene beyond the abilities of the region's smaller towns, including no doubt Chelmsford, which John Coldewey has claimed as the site of a possible revival in 1562.

Clifford Davidson
Western Michigan University