Passions and the Passion: Robert Southwell's Mary Magdalene

Abstract:

While still a fugitive at large, the Jesuit poet Robert Southwell published his best-selling prose masterpiece, Mary Magdalens Funerall Teares, which deftly combines the English literary vogue of complaint with Ignatian meditation in an eloquent grand style. While scholarship has mostly treated this work as a meditation for recusant Catholics separated from Christ's body in the Eucharist, as Mary was separated from Christ on Easter morning, this article argues that its widespread popularity and literary influence was a strategic success in large part owing to its bold and timely approach to human passions directed to its Protestant readers. In an era in which England's "finest wits are now given to write passionat discourses," Southwell suggested an alternative both to Neostoic curbing of passion and even to Augustinian moderation, presenting the Magdalen as a figure of godly vehemence in whom reason itself is ruled by a love in which "the excesse cannot be faultie."