Saints and the world in four late medieval British saint plays

Abstract

This thesis examines the four surviving medieval British saint plays, the East Anglian Digby Mary Magdalene and Conversion of Saint Paul, and the Cornish plays Beunans Meriasek and Bewnans Ke. With reference to Walter Hilton’s Epistle on the Mixed Life, Dives and Pauper and Gregory the Great’s Regulae Pastoralis Liber, it considers ways in which the saints related to the world and achieved sanctity within it, and some implications for medieval audiences. I argue that the saints moved in the world in two senses, the moral and the geographic inasmuch as the Cornish saints were commemorated in the local landscape. The East Anglian plays present a positive vision of the world in which engagement in secular activities is legitimate and compatible with intense spirituality, and demonstrate appropriate attitudes towards wealth and social status. In Mary Magdalene, the allegorical characters the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, and the Archangel Raphael from the book of Tobit elucidate these themes, while the Conversion of Saint Paul investigates pride, humility, status and service through the medieval characterisation of Paul as the ‘proud Jew’. These concerns were also relevant in Cornwall, and Beunans Meriasek considers sanctity within the contexts of radical voluntary poverty, and wealth and high office. Dramatising the lives of the Cornish saints and their associations with local landmarks fostered a sense of Cornish culture and identity. Topography, placenames, boundaries, and the promotion of agriculture are important features of the relationship between Saint Kea and the physical world in Bewnans Ke. In 1924 the first modern performance of Beunans Meriasek was also used to teach audiences about Cornish-Celtic identity, within the context of Anglo-Catholicism and the Cornish-Celtic revival. The saint plays did not urge their lay audiences to aspire to sainthood but presented a secular world in which the laity could operate properly in ways that were pleasing to God.