Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780268022150

Table of Contents

Reviews

<p><p> <p> In an original and illuminating study, Badir writes a new history of the Magdalene figure, one that turns on the irrevocable loss of Christ, first through his ascension and again through Protestant revisions of Eucharistic theology . . . In Badir's insightful book, the Magdalene's unique and imaginatively captivating role articulates an emerging meditative and representational poetics of absence and presence, of desire and grief. -- Renaissance Quarterly

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

In an original and illuminating study, Badir writes a new history of the Magdalene figure, one that turns on the irrevocable loss of Christ, first through his ascension and again through Protestant revisions of Eucharistic theology . . . In Badir's insightful book, the Magdalene's unique and imaginatively captivating role articulates an emerging meditative and representational poetics of absence and presence, of desire and grief. -- Renaissance Quarterly

Author Information

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

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available