Reading her Psalter: The Virgin Mary in the N-Town Play 1

It can sometimes seem as though it was the sixteenth century which first made religion accessible to ordinary laity. It was then that the first legal versions of scripture in the vernacular appeared, along with participative vernacular liturgy and, of particular relevance here, metrical versions of the psalms for all to sing. However, several recent writers have shown that the “great divide” between medieval and early modern culture is less marked than has been generally supposed. In particular among vernacular versions of scripture and drama in England, the mystery plays—cycles of Biblical and para-biblical stories performed in English, largely by amateurs—survived in performance until the 1570s, overlapping with the new development of a professional, London-based theatre, while in parts of mainland Europe the amateur tradition of putting on religious plays in the streets continues to this day. In the Middle Ages, too, the scriptures, and the psalms in particular, were at least selectively available in the vernacular during the fifteenth century and even earlier. Versions of Scripture in English, then, form an important link between the medieval and early modern worlds. ² Late medieval translators of and commentators on the psalms include the mystic Richard Rolle, and Dame Eleanor Hull who translated a commentary on the Seven Penitential Psalms from Old French into Middle English. Dame Eleanor also translated Magnificat: a rare instance of a medieval woman translating a text originally attributed to another woman—the Virgin Mary. ³ It is the Virgin Mary’s use of psalms that is the focus of this essay, in a medium that introduced vernacular liturgy to a wide range of ordinary people: the mid-fifteenth-century dramatic text known as the N-Town Play. ⁴