1. Donne, "The Relique," in The Complete English Poems , 112. According to the informer Richard Baines, Marlowe had asserted that "the woman of Samaria & her sister were whores & that Christ knew them dishonestly"; this allegation seems to conflate two New Testament figures: the woman of Samaria (John 4), whose sister is never mentioned, and Mary of Magdala, a prostitute and the sister of Martha. For Baines's testimony, see Millar Maclure, ed., Marlowe: The Critical Heritage 1588-1896 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 37.

2. Quoted in Winkler, Constraints , 93; fragments of Celsus's treatise survive as quotations in Origen's reply, the Contra Celsum , trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953).

3. For example, Lewis Wager's The Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene (London, 1567); Thomas Robinson, The Life and Death of Mary Magdalene , ed. H. Oskar Sommer, Early English Text Society 78 (London: Kegan Paul, 1899); and Herbert's "Marie Magdalene." Many Roman Catholic texts as well focus on Mary's conversion and penitence; see, e.g., Pierre Janelle, Robert Southwell: The Writer (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1935), 189-90.

4. The Life of Saint Mary Magdalene and of Her Sister Saint Martha [formerly attributed to Rabanus Maurus], trans. and ed. David Mycoff, Cistercian Studies 108 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1989), 55.

5. Steinberg, "Love and Birth," 277; see also Margaret R. Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 124-25.

6. John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne , ed. George Potter and Evelyn Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953-1962), 9:11.417-18; 2:14.480-85; 10:11.668-70.

7. Edmund Gosse, The Life and Letters of John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's , 2 vols. (1899; rpt. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959), 2:360.

8. This account of Christ's appearance to Mary differs from the synoptic Gospels, where Mary Magdalene visits the tomb accompanied by one or more other women; cf. Matthew 28:1-10; Luke 24:1-11. The sequence of events recorded in Mark 16:1-11 is confusing, but it seems closer to John's version, where Christ first appears to Mary Magdalene separately.

9. Other manuscripts ascribe the sermon to Saint Bonaventure, Saint

Anselm, Geoffroy of Vendome, and Saint Bernard (Janelle, Southwell , 184; Victor Saxer, Le culte de Marie Madeleine en Occident, des origines à la fin du moyen âge , pref. Henri Marrou, 2 vols., Cahiers d'archeologie et d'historie [Paris: Librairie Clavreuil, 1959], 2:347n). It is also included in the 1508 Venice edition of the sermons of Zeno of Verona.

10. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women , Text G, l. 418, in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer , ed. F. N. Robinson, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 493.

11. Ten of these appear in editions of Origen and one in the sermons of Zeno of Verona; the one or perhaps two London versions include just the Magdalene sermon. It is also quoted extensively in Cornelius à Lapide's The Great Commentary —the standard Tridentine compendium of biblical exegesis.

12. Complete bibliographic information can be found in John P. McCall, "Chaucer and the Pseudo Origen De Maria Magdalena : A Preliminary Study," Speculum 46 (1971): 491-97.

13. General surveys of Magdalene material can be found in Saxer, Le culte ; Marjorie M. Malvern, Venus in Sackcloth: The Magdalen's Origins and Metamorphosis (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975); Helen Meredith Garth, Saint Mary Magdalene in Medieval Literature , Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950); and John James McDermott," Mary Magdalene in English Literature from 1500 to 1650," Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1964.

14. See Bertha Skeat's preface to Chaucer [pseudonym], The Lamentatyon of Mary Magdaleyne (Cambridge: Fabb and Tyler, 1897), 7.

15. Lawrence Lipking, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago, 1988), 35; Heinrich Dorrie, "L'épître héroïque dans les littératures modernes," Revue de littérature comparée 40 (1966): 48-64.

16. On the fusion of Ovid and Canticles in the Middle Ages, see Nicholas James Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane: An Interpretative History of Kiss Symbolism and Related Religio-Erotic Themes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 115.

17. Andrewes, Sermons , 198.

18. Robert Southwell, Mary Magdalens Funeral Teares (1591) (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1975), 8; cf. Gervase Markham, Marie Magdalens Lamentations (London, 1601), C4(r). Compare with Ovid's "I have stretched myself prostrate on my sorrowful bed, then springing tears, not slumber, is the service of mine eyes.... Oft I am distraught with woe; I lose sense of where I am and what my fate" ( Heroides and Amores , trans. Grant Showerman, 2d ed., Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986], 8.109-12).

19. Markham, Lamentations , G3(r); Southwell, Funeral Teares , 64.

20. Pseudo-Chaucer, Lamentatyon , ll. 216, 674, 693; cf. The Complaynte of the Louer of Cryst Mary Magdaleyn (London, c. 1620), 8, 18-19.

21. Origen [pseudonym], Omelia origenis de beata Maria Magdalena (London, c. 1504), n.p.

22. Markham, Lamentations , B2(v), C3(r).

23. Origen [pseudonym], An Homilie of Marye Magdalene, declaring her fervent loue and zele towards CHRIST: written by that famous clerke ORIGENE (London, 1565), B6(r). Compare with Ovid's "What am I to do? Whither shall I take myself.... where am I to go? ... By these tears I pray you—tears moved by what you have done—turn about your ship, reverse your sail, glide swiftly back to me!" ( Heroides 10.59, 64, 147-51).

24. Markham, Lamentations , B2(r); Southwell, Funeral Teares , 17-18; pseudo-Chaucer, Lamentatyon , ll. 622-37.

25. Southwell, Funeral Teares , 54. This startling image of Christ lying in a lady's lap recurs in Southwell's "At Home in Heaven," which explains how the "ghostly beautie" of the soul "lull'd our heavenly Sampson fast asleepe, / And laid him in our feeble natures lap" (in Saint Peters Complaint, newly augmented with other Poems [London, 1605], 61). Southwell's metaphor seems to envision the hypostatic union as sexual intercourse, the same phrase having an overtly bawdy sense in Hamlet 3.2.111-17.

26. Markham, Lamentations G(v); cf. Southwell, Funeral Teares , 61.

27. Pseudo-Origen, An Homilie , B4(r)-B5(v).

28. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs II , trans. Kilian Walsh, intro. Jean Leclercq, 4 vols., Cistercian Fathers Series 7 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1976), 3:80, sermon 27.7.

29. Bernard, Song of Songs , 3:95-96, sermon 28.9-10. For Mary Magdalene as a type of the church, see Steinberg, "Love and Birth," 247; Malvern, Venus in Sackcloth , 58.

30. John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel According to John , trans. William Pringle, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1956), 2:254.

31. Suspecting her plan forcibly to recover Christ's body, the narrator warns her, "O Mary unlesse thy love have better warrant then common sence, I can hardly see how such designementes can be approved." She replies, "Approoved (saith shee) I would to God the execution were as easie as the proofe, and I should not so long bewaile my unfortunate losse" (Southwell, Funeral Teares , 39). Since Christ comes to Mary and not to the narrator, the latter's position is rendered ipso facto wrong.

32. Ioan P. Culiano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance , trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 4-5, 39-40; Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric , 202-7. Cartesian epistemology differs from the Aristotelian/ scholastic tradition precisely because it breaks the ancient connection between knowledge and imaging.

33. Pseudo-Origen, An Homilie , A4(r); cf. Southwell, Funeral Teares , 3; Markham, Lamentations , C3(v), C4(v); pseudo-Chaucer, Lamentatyon , ll. 428-29. See also Augustine, Lectures or Tractates on the Gospel According to St. John , 2 vols., in The Works of Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo , ed. Marcus Dods, (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1874): "seeing that in the case even of such a Master, when His living presence was withdrawn from their eyes, His remembrance also had ceased to remain" (2:522).

34. Pseudo-Origen, An Homilie , C2(v); Markham, Lamentations , C4(r); Southwell, Funeral Teares , 6; Cornelius à Lapide, The Great Commentary , trans. Thomas Mossman, 3d ed., 6 vols. (London, 1889-1896), 6:261.

35. Culiano, Eros and Magic , 31-32.

36. Southwell, Funeral Teares , 13.

37. Pseudo-Origen, An Homilie , C5(r)-C6(v); cf. à Lapide, The Great Commentary (1889-1896) 6:262.

38. Bossy, Christianity in the West , 99-101.

39. Calvin, Commentary on John 2:252-60. But Calvin's criticism of Mary's disbelief closely resembles Bernard, Song of Songs 3:95, sermon 28.8.

40. Calvin, Commentary on John 2:259.

41. Southwell, Funeral Teares , 43.

42. Pseudo-Chaucer, Lamentatyon , ll. 295-98.

43. Andrewes, Sermons , 205.

44. Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 45.

45. For two examples among many, see Thomas Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology," Representations 14 (1986): 1-41; Bynum, "The Body of Christ."

46. Winkler, Constraints , 17.

47. Perella, The Kiss , 85. For the purposes of this argument, it does not much matter whether the theological origins of courtly love be traced to Christian, gnostic, or Arabic mysticism, the latter two positions being held by Denis de Rougement ( Love in the Western World , trans. Montgomery Belgion, rev. ed. [New York: Harper, 1974], 44-52) and Culiano ( Eros and Magic , 16-18) respectively. According to all three analyses, the representation of spiritual experience structures secular eroticism.

48. "Eloisa to Abelard," in The Poems of Alexander Pope , ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), l. 150.

49. Ibid., ll. 231-34.

50. Ibid., ll. 271-76.

51. Ibid., l. 25.

52. Culiano, Eros and Magic , 4; cf. Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader , ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, Random House, 1984), 340.

53. Shakespeare's sonnets to the young man are thus, by and large, about

eros/love/longing; his dark lady sonnets, in contrast, concern sexuality, guilt, and carnality.

54. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy , ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1977), 2.86.

55. Culiano, Eros and Magic , 30; Southwell, Funeral Teares , 12.

56. Burton, Anatomy 2.58, 65.

57. Sir Thomas Wyatt, in Silver Poets of the Sixteenth Century , ed. Gerald Bullett (London: Dent, 1947), 25, 37.

58. Cf. Spenser's Faerie Queene , 3.2.39, in The Complete Poetical Works . The identification of the bodily tout court with a person's sexual organs seems problematically implicit in some feminist attempts to link gender and writing, which assume that gendered selfhood originates in and is modeled on the secretions and turnescences of the genitals.

59. Burton, Anatomy 2.314-15.

60. Ibid. 2.325-40.

61. Ibid. 2.343, 397. The same basic analysis reappears in Meric Casaubon's digressive hodgepodge, A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme of 1655, which diagnoses its subject as a form of melancholy or "depravation of the Understanding, as well as of the Imagination," caused perhaps by the devil or ambition ([Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1970], 52, 114-17, 130).

62. Henry More, Enthusiasmus triumphatus , intro. M. V. DePorte, Augustan Reprint Society 118 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 12. Note that the path of this "new wine" traces that of semen (thought to originate in the brain and descend down the spinal column) in reverse.

63. Ibid., 17.

64. Ibid., 28, 37. The discovery of genital eroticism seems related to the simultaneous substitution of sexual wrongdoing for ambition and pride as the paradigmatic sin; as desire is traced to its sexual origin, Lovelace replaces Faustus and Iago.

65. Pope, The Rape of the Lock , in The Poems of Alexander Pope , 4.54.

66. Sidney, Astrophel and Stella 72, 199.

67. Already in the more liberal strains of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theology one notes a discomfort with erotic spirituality; thus, Castellio and Grotius, who both develop the Erasmian/humanist stress on ethical responsibility, interpret Canticles as a poem about human, sexual love, Grotius providing copious analogies with the Classical erotic elegy (see Critici sacri 3:252-53; John Calvin, Letters of John Calvin , ed. Jules Bonnet, 4 vols. [Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1858], 1:408-9). Stanley Stewart has, however, shown the continued vitality of medieval bridal mysticism among English Protestants through the mid-seventeenth century in his The Enclosed Garden: The Tradition and the Image in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966).

68. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub to Which Is Added The Battle of the Books and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit , ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), 287.

69. Ibid., 164-65.

70. Ibid., 281.

71. Ibid., 288.

72. Ibid., 288. Gavin Langmuir reports that, in a library copy of The Idea of the Holy , a student has scribbled next to Rudolph Otto's description of the mysterium tremendum : "Sounds like intercourse" ( History, Religion, and Antisemitism , 78).

73. Lipking, Abandoned Women , xvii.

74. Pseudo-Origen, An Homilie , B2(r), 136; cf. Andrewes, Sermons , 205.

75. Southwell, Funeral Teares , 41-42.

76. Pseudo-Origen, An Homilie , 136(r); pseudo-Origen, Omelia , n.p.; pseudo-Chaucer, Lamentatyon , ll. 608-9.

77. Pseudo-Origen, An Homilie , B4(v); in the Latin, "cur derelinquisti me salus mea" ( Omelia , n.p.)—an obvious echo of Matthew 27:46.

78. Pseudo-Chaucer, Lamentatyon , ll. 708-14; cf. Complaynte , 24.

79. Pseudo-Chaucer, Lamentatyon , l. 521.

80. Ibid., ll. 531-32; Southwell, Funeral Teares , 11; pseudo-Origen An Homilie , A8(r)-B(r).

81. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age , trans. Robert M. Wallace, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 133-35. Note the curious similarity to Chaucer's treatment of the Griselda story, where the original allegory—in which Walter figures God and Griselda stands for humankind (or Christian obedience)—is suddenly rejected because by justifying Griselda at the expense of Walter it implicitly contrasts the humble, virtuous soul to a cruel and tormenting (male) deity.

82. Pseudo-Chaucer, Lamentatyon , ll. 561-62.

83. Pseudo-Origen, An Homilie , A7(r).

84. Southwell, Funeral Teares , 8-9.

85. Walter W. Skeat, ed., Chaucerian and Other Pieces (Oxford: Clarendon, 1897), xi. Bertha Skeat comes to the same conclusion, noting that the poem's "strong personal feeling, restricted within a narrow range" indicates female authorship, since "it is a characteristic of women to give general statements a personal application" ( Lamentatyon , 32-33).

86. Pseudo-Origen, An Homilie , C6(r); Southwell, Funeral Teares , 67; cf. Markham, Lamentations , H2(v). Conversely, Nicholas Breton's The Blessed Weeper both muffles the erotic resonances of the medieval Magdalene narratives and explicitly addresses itself to a female audience, concluding, "Yet by her speech it seemed it was she, / That wisht all women might such weepers be" (in The Works in Verse and Prose , vol. 1); similarly, Vaughan's "St. Mary

Magdalen" adjures: "Learn, Ladies , here the faithful cure / Makes beauty lasting, fresh and pure" (in Major Poets of the Earlier Seventeenth Century , ed. Barbara Lewalski and Andrew Sabol [Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1973], ll. 45-46, p. 561). Premodern texts by or for women usually make their gendering explicit.

87. Brown, The Body and Society , 153.

88. Southwell, Funeral Teares , 22.

89. See Lipking, Abandoned Women , xviii-xix.

90. This sense of desolation is movingly articulated by Southwell's Mary: "Alas O my onely desire, why hast thou left me wavering in these uncertainties, and in how wilde a maze wander my doubtfull and perplexed thoughts?" ( Funeral Teares , 16).

91. Andrewes, Sermons , 196, 211; cf. à Lapide, The Great Commentary 6:259.

92. Southwell, Funeral Teares , 57.

93. Gregory the Great, XL homiliarum in Evangelia libri duo , ed. J. P. Migne, in Patrologia latina , 221 vols. (Paris, 1844-1900), 76:1189-90. In his sermon on Mary Magdalene, Andrewes thus remarks: "It is not enough for love, to looke in once. Thus we use, this is our manner when we seeke a thing seriously, where we have sought already, there to seeke againe, thinking wee did it not well, but, if we now looke againe, better, we shall surely find it, then. Amor quaerens ubi quaesivit . Love, that never thinkes, it hath looked enough" ( Sermons , 198); see also à Lapide, The Great Commentary (1889-96), 6:257.

94. Juan Luis Vives, De anima et vita (1538; rpt. Turin: Bottega d'Erasmo, 1959), 178.

95. Southwell, Funeral Teares , 61.

96. Foucault Reader , 371.

97. Southwell, Funeral Teares , 55-56.

98. Pseudo-Origen, An Homilie , CS(v); Omelia , n.p.

99. See Gregory the Great: "humor viscerum ad virilia labitur, quae profecto cum molestia dedecoris intumescunt" ( The Book of Pastoral Rule , 9). In explaining the phrase " viscera miseracordiae ," Andrewes additionally notes that these are "the bowels or vessels near the womb, near the loins ... the bowels of a father or mother" ( The Works of Lancelot Andrewes , 11 vols., Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology [Oxford, 1841-1872], 4:272); the passage suggests that, for Andrewes, the adult sexual organs—the "vessels'' near the womb and loins—are the organs of a nurturing instinct; they are associated with the care of children rather than sexual drive. Here again, Renaissance usage seems to dissolve the modern category of ''sex" into something else—exactly the opposite of the modern tendency to view everything else as somehow sexual.

100. Perella thus cites a striking passage from a seventeenth—century French theologian: "In the ecstasy of human love, who is unaware that we eat

and devour each other, that we long to become part of each other in every way, and, as the poet said, to carry off even with our teeth the thing we love in order to possess it, feed upon it, become one with it, live on it? That which is frenzy, that which is impotence in corporeal love is truth, is wisdom in the love of Jesus: 'Take, eat, this is my body': devour, swallow up not a part, not a piece but the whole" ( The Kiss , 3).

101. Foucault Reader , 355-62.

102. Saint Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine , trans. Rex Warner (New York: New American Library, 1963), 13.9.

103. Foucault Reader , 352.

104. Shuger, Habits of Thought , 89.

105. Beginning with Gabriel Harvey, critics of Nashe's Christs Teares have argued for its debt to Southwell's Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares (McDermott, "Mary Magdalene," 144). If this is so, then Nashe's homily exemplifies the Calvinist transformation of female erotic spirituality into the mythos of male violence.

106. Foucault Reader , 372.

107. The lower figures represent two of the theological virtues—hope and charity—but the figure on the right symbolizes justice—a moral virtue—rather than the third theological virtue, faith. It is therefore tempting to identify the unnamed female in the upper left corner with the missing theological virtue, as though, by a sort of iconographic slippage, faith moves from the allegorical space of the lower portion of the façade into a historical arena comprising state, church, and soul.

108. The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine, Mr. Richard Hooker , ed. John Keble, 7th ed., 3 vols. (1888; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 1:275-76, 338-39; cf. Shuger, Habits of Thought , 139-41.

109. Hooker, Works 3:341, 390; cf. Shuger, Habits of Thought , 39-40, 257, 262.

110. Malvern, Venus in Sackcloth , 160.

111. Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Sussex: Harvester, 1983), 77. For medieval parallels between the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, see Saxer, Le culte 2:343.