ABSTRACT
The first recorded woman playwright in England was Katherine of Sutton, abbess of Barking nunnery in the fourteenth century. Between 1363 and 1376 the abbess rewrote the Easter dramatic offices because the people attending the paschal services were becoming increasingly cool in their devotions (‘deuocione frigessere’). Wishing to excite devotion at such a crowded, important festival (‘desiderans…fidelium deuocionem ad tam celebrem celebracionem magis excitare’), Lady Katherine produced unusually lively adaptations of the traditional liturgical plays.1 Particularly interesting is her elevatio crucis, one of the few surviving liturgical plays that contains a representation of the harrowing of hell. In the visitatio sepulchri that follows, the three Marys are acted not by male clerics, which was customary, but by nuns.2 The Barking plays are not unique, however, in showing the participation of nuns. In religious houses on the continent women sometimes acted in church dramas, and Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim and Hildegard of Bingen wrote Latin religious plays. Although the destruction of liturgical texts in England at the Reformation makes certainty impossible, it is likely, in view of the uniformity of medieval European culture and the considerable authority of women who headed the medieval nunneries, that other English abbesses contributed to the slow, anonymous, communal growth of the medieval religious drama.
