Robert Southwell’s Mary Magdalen

The imaginative life of Robert Southwell in Rome as a student and in England as a mission priest was energized by the figure of Mary Magdalen. From the translation of a Franciscan sermon to an extended meditative prose work, in poems and illustrative reference, he explored the complexity of her life, finding in it a depth of emotional experience in which he himself was immersed. Her torment of sorrow was seen reflected in the life of Catholics in England, in their suffering and in the strain of endless endurance. It is an irony that through his writing on Mary Magdalen’s witness to the Resurrection in the garden, Southwell’s message of comfort and hope introduced England to the ‘literature of tears’.