"To passe the see in shortt space": mapping the world in the Digby Mary Magdalen.

THE world as seen from medieval England was largely a spiritual construct. The only sense of distant lands commonly available was derived from pilgrimage accounts and from the occasional world map seen on public display in a cathedral or Bible. And though these maps and descriptions alluded to a larger world, the way in which they presented it almost completely ignored its geography. For most of the medieval period the earth, even its distant and exotic corners, was seen not as it would be today--a series of imagined areas organized spatially in relation to one another--but as a variety of separate and specific locales beyond the reach of spatial ordering. As P. D. A. Harvey observes, "It simply did not occur to people in the middle ages to use maps, to see landscape of the world in a cartographic way" (Harvey 1991, 7).

And while this slowly began to change in the fifteenth century, with the expansion of maritime exploration and the beginning of a modern geographical awareness on the Continent, England remained a backwater. Because of the island nation's isolation, the popular state of geographical knowledge in England through to the end of the fifteenth century was less likely to be reflected in the technologically advanced maps of southern Europe's "new geography" than in the spiritual and historical shape of the thirteenth century's mappae mundi.

Into this spiritual schema the growing empirical and local awareness of geography intruded, not through the medium of cartography, as we might expect, but through another cultural venue: popular drama. In the fifteenth-century drama, Mary Magdalen, preserved in the Digby Manuscript, the traditionally spiritual focus of the saint's play begins to reflect a new awareness of the physical and geographical world that maritime exploration was then making accessible. In its treatment of Mary's voyage in the Holy Land--an episode that occupies a central place in the action--this play offers what is in many ways a typical saint's life, with its focus on pilgrimage and spiritual reclamation. But the play is unusual in the way it implicitly sets this story of Mary's holy transformation and her subsequent good works within an overtly geographical context, effectively highlighting the geographical journey as much as the spiritual one.

In so doing the play can be seen to foster the first cracks in the age's controlling discipline of spiritual cartography, helping to open late medieval England to the possibilities of a broader world that could be conceptualized in terms of its physical spaces rather than its spiritual component. By dramatically emphasizing the physical world through which Mary traveled in her spiritual journey, the Digby Mary Magdalen allows the first expression in a dramatic form of the new geographical sense of the world. Why and how this happens is the subject of this article. Answers are to be found, I will show, in the play's original locale in East Anglia, in the nature of pilgrimage, in the history of mapmaking, and in the position of drama within fifteenth-century English culture, all of which conspired to make this play a less surprising vehicle for a new geographic awareness than at first it might seem.

"A peculiarly English genre"