Devotional Iconography in the N-Town Marian Plays by Theresa Coletti

This article (from Doug’s collection) by Theresa Coletti looks at the content and staging of the N-Town Marian plays in light of the religious iconography of the Middle Ages in order to better understand the cultural function of these plays. Coletti explores the staging of the N-Town plays as it interacts with medieval iconographic art and argues that iconographic presentation in the N-Town plays is justified by “forms of late medieval spirituality” (267), which I found to be a really interesting tracking of the relationship between the N-Town plays and the society from which these plays were born. Her overall argument is that medieval drama is inseparable from the devotional background that produced them, and the interaction of the two introduces a crossing of artistic sensibilities and iconographic representations that has transformed from painting and liturgy to dramatic interpretation.