Theresa Coletti

A sinner-saint who embraced then renounced sexual and worldly pleasures; a woman who, through her attachment to Jesus, embodied both erotic and sacred power; a symbol of penance and an exemplar of contemplative and passionate devotion: perhaps no figure stood closer to the center of late medieval debates about the sources of spiritual authority and women's contribution to salvation history than did Mary Magdalene, and perhaps nowhere in later medieval England was cultural preoccupation with the Magdalene stronger than in fifteenth-century East Anglia. Looking to East Anglian texts including the N-Town Plays, The Book of Margery Kempe, The Revelations of Julian of Norwich, and Bokenham's Legend of Holy Women, Coletti explores how the gendered symbol of Mary Magdalene mediates tensions between masculine and feminine spiritual power.

A symbol of penance and an exemplar of contemplative and passionate devotion: perhaps no figure stood closer to the center of late medieval debates about the sources of spiritual authority and women's contribution to salvation history than did Mary Magdalene, and perhaps nowhere in later medieval England was cultural preoccupation with the Magdalene stronger than in fifteenth-century East Anglia.

"A textile of other texts, a 'whodunit' of quotations, a book built of books." So Umberto Eco has described his phenomenally successful novel The Name of the Rose, Theresa Coletti, a medievalist with a special interest in modern critical theory, asserts that Eco, by means of a concrete rendering of medieval social and intellectual life, has made a significant contemporary statement about language, meaning responsible intellectual activity, and the nature of critical discourse. Naming the Rose explores the implications of the unusual status of Eco's novel- at once a highly sophisticated novel of ideas and a best-selling work of detective fiction- perceiving in its problematic reception and hybrid nature reflection of the cultural and theoretical issues with which Eco is concerned.

Theresa Coletti's study is a rigorous development of a seminal idea: as she states in the Introduction, she wants to show that "out of a concrete rendering of medieval society and intellectual life Eco . . . crafts a distinctly contemporary statement about language and meaning."