ABSTRACT
The prominent role of the Virgin Mary in the N-Town Play reflects her preeminent position in late-medieval East Anglia: the pilgrimage route to her shrine at Walsingham passed through the town of Thetford which has been cited as a possible "home" for the play. The N-Town Mary is a role-model, particularly for women: not only a focus for, and channel of, devotion, but an educated, literate woman who teaches her audience. She was certainly an avid reader if evidence from late medieval and renaissance iconography is anything to go by. The N-Town Play has some answers, in a speech by the Virgin Mary herself that not only corroborates but develops the iconographic tradition in a unique fashion, not least because the speech is a soliloquy. Throughout the rest of the play, and in iconography generally, there are always others in the picture, but in this scene she is alone with her Psalter.
