ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the Mary Magdalene plays—performed under Catholic, Protestant, and Counter-Reformation auspices—that did manage to stage Magdalene’s sins, and explores the culturally sanctioned ways that made expressions socially permissible. In the Low Countries in Mons in 1501, Magdalene was performed by a priest, and the Passion Play of Lucerne in what is Switzerland, featured a Magdalene performed by one Ruodolff Enders, notary by profession. Cross-dressing in Mary Magdalene drama played with liminality in its light-hearted disruption of gender categories and sexual norms. Mary Magdalene may protest all she wants, but for spectators in the audiences the image of the Magdalene’s repentance and good works are evoked in the mind’s eye. Chouza-Calo argues, the ‘saint’s physical attributes become the instrument of her salvation, and both her hair and tears stand for the mortified flesh, which in turn symbolises increasing spiritual gain’.
