Mary Magdalen's Funeral Tears (by Robert Southwell)

For lovers of Elizabethan English in poetry or prose, for historians and for lovers of the Christian Faith before the Protestant revolution, please visit our sister blog, Mary's English Dowry, which has recently completed the annotation in full of Robert Southwell's poem (792 lines): 'Saint Peter's Complaynt'. 

Noli me tangere...JJ Tissot. Brooklyn Museum.

That blog has just started to explore some of Southwell's better known prose works, beginning with 'Mary Magdalen's Funeral Tears', widely regarded as his best-known and most influential prose work.

Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears was the second of Southwell’s prose works to appear in print, following on from An Epistle of Comfort (1587) . It was published in late 1591 with an author’s preface to the reader, and dedicated to Dorothy Arundel  ('Mistress A.D.'), possibly the daughter of Sir John Arundel of Lanherne (1500-1557). The work is sometimes traced to Origen's homily on Mary Magdalen’s encounter with Christ on Easter morning.  Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears is in the form of a meditation on this encounter. It is written as a dialogue between Mary, the angels in the empty tomb, Christ, and the narrator.