The figure we know as Mary Magdalene was formed from stitching together the stories of a number of scriptural women and as such she is the creation of pre-Reformation attitudes towards theological truth and yet, remarkably, she survives the Reformation virtually untouched. The underlying thesis of this well-researched and intriguing book is that the Magdalene negotiates the losses of the Reformation for both Protestant and Counter-Reformation writers: she is ‘the perfect manifestation of the lieu de mémoire that mitigates the amnesia of history by materializing something of the past … . [a] physical vessel for a numinous idea of presence that puts the Reformation question of missing bodies at some remove’ (pp. 218, 71). The theoretical angles of each of the book's five chapters are interesting and challenging, although the relationship with the text, or group of texts, under discussion can remain slightly speculative. The first chapter analyses Lewis Wagner's Life and repentaunce of Mary Magdalene (1566) with reference to a reading of the saint as ‘a residual sight [sic] of continuity within the unfolding drama of the Reformation’ (p. 47). The second chapter argues that in the Counter-Reformation poetics of Southwell's Marie Magdalens funeral teares (1591) Mary becomes an aesthetised memory of the ‘“idea” of bodily presence that once captured in iconic art and in the sacramental ritual of transubstantiation’ (p. 64). Chapter iii considers the large number of Magdalen poems dedicated to Protestant noblewomen in the context of the transformation of the eremite of the Legenda aurea into the contemplative reader of Protestant poetics. Chapter iv traces the affinity between text and image of the Magdalene in the early seventeenth century, connecting pictures and the visually striking bible harmonies produced in Little Gidding with texts such as the lyrics of Herbert and the ekphrastic poetry of Herrick, Vaughan and Crashaw. The final chapter looks at the numerous paintings of courtly ladies à la Madeleine and connects this fashion with the pictures of Angellica Bianca in Behn's The Rover. As a whole The Maudlin impression – which is lavishly illustrated and written in a refreshingly playful style throughout – gives ample evidence for post-Reformation engagement with Mary Magdalene beyond Donne's famously punning poems (of which, however, it would have been good to see more). As Badir states, Mary ‘facilitates the creative processes by which the longing born of absence (the physical absence of Christ; the loss of the doctrine of transubstantiation; the destruction and desecration of religious art; or, more generally, the loss of a sense of history) is transformed into commemorative work that allows its readers to see and feel at least an idea of past presence in aesthetic terms’ (p. 215). The central thesis of the work is compelling; the Magdalene proves a fruitful site for the investigation of the continuities, as well as the ruptures, of the Reformation.