The Maudlin Impression

English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550–1700

Patricia Badir

Patricia Badir’s The Maudlin Impression investigates the figure of Mary Magdalene in post-medieval English religious writings and visual representations. Badir argues that the medieval Magdalene story was not discarded as part of Reformation iconoclasm, but was enthusiastically embraced by English writers and artists and retold in a wide array of genres. This rich study bridges the historical division between medieval and early modern culture by showing the ways in which Protestant writers, as well as Catholics, used the medieval stories, art, and symbolism related to the biblical Magdalene as resources for thinking about the role of the affective and erotic in Christian devotion. Their literary and artistic glosses protected a range of religious devotional practices and lent embodied, tangible form to the God of the Reformation. They employed the Magdalene figure to articulate religious experience by means of a poetics that could avoid controversial questions of religious art while exploring the potency and appeal of the beautiful.

The Maudlin Impression is a literary history of imitation and invention. It participates in the “religious turn” in early modern studies by demonstrating the resilience of a single topos across time and across changing Christian beliefs.

Patricia Badir is associate professor of English literature at University of British Columbia.

ADVANCE PRAISE: “In this historically rich and theoretically informed study, Patricia Badir argues that the medieval figure of Mary Magdalene serves as a ‘site of memory’ for early modern writers, enabling them both to reflect on what has been lost in the aftermath of the Reformation and to fashion their own Protestant and Counter-Reformation models of piety, repentance, mourning, and holiness. Drawing from poems, plays, sermons, homilies, biographies, and paintings, Badir convincingly demonstrates the remarkable resiliency and flexibility of the Magdalene trope in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her fascinating narrative traces the evolution of the Magdalene from the Reformation to the Restoration and raises provocative questions about the mnemonic function of religious art, the power of beautiful images in an iconoclastic culture, and the place of affect, longing, and embodiment in a Protestant poetics.” — Huston Diehl, professor of English, University of Iowa

Reviews

“Badir reveals a Magdalene far more complex than the iconic sinner-saint. This Magdalene represents Catholic sacramental devotion, Protestant attention to the Word, vain luxuriousness, meditative bereavement, and aristocratic allure.” — Times Literary Supplement

“In this well-researched and clearly written book, Badir draws on poetry, homilies, plays, sermons, and paintings. A valuable contribution for scholars of Renaissance literature, this will also be accessible to serious nonspecialists curious about the figure of Mary Magdalene.” — Library Journal