Transparent Mary: Visible Interiors and the Maternal Body in the Middle Ages

I. INTRODUCTION

Many of the Marian plays of the English Biblical cycles include scenes in which the Virgin, visibly pregnant, is questioned about her sexual history: variously doubted, slandered, and even medically examined. In the fabliaulike scenes of Joseph's doubt, which appear in plays associated with the towns of Chester and York and in the N-Town and Towneley manuscripts, Mary has to explain to her older, suspicious husband the mystifying logistics of her "wombe" that stands "to hyye": who the father is ("[t]he Fadyr of Hevyn and ye it is")¹ and where the bewildered Joseph might locate himself within such a complicated family. In the N-Town Trial of Mary and Joseph, a larger community struggles within a legal setting to reconcile Mary's claims of "pure clennes" with her expanding middle (l. 172). "Þu art with chylde we se in syght," a doctor legis insists, "to us ϸi wombe ϸe doth accuse!" (ll. 302-3). Lacking the reassuring angel who advises Joseph to believe Mary, the men of the Trial—doctor legis, detractors, and episcopus—have her drink a draught of bitter herbs as part of a truth-seeking ordeal to provide surety for the words that they will not believe. Finally, in the Nativity plays of N-Town and Chester, the doubtful midwife Salomé goes so far as to reach her hand inside of Mary's postpartum body in order to confirm the virginity on which the new mother calmly insists. It is only in this physical breach that she becomes satisfied that the female body before her is different: "[n]att fowle polutyd as other women be" (l. 303).²

Contrary to Salomé's belief, this essay argues that the urge to comprehend Mary's pregnant body through sight or touch—and particularly by feeling and seeing inside of her—frequently has the corollary effect of associating the incomparable body of the Virgin with the bodies of ordinary women. Despite the assurances of sacred history in which such representations of Mary are couched, images, descriptions, and performances of the desire to understand the inner workings of her body recall the social hierarchies of power that render nonmiraculous women physically vulnerable and easily opened in order to satisfy suspicion or curiosity, with their bodies sometimes inscribed within reassuring masculine discourses of authority. The many awed, earnest, frustrated, and hostile attempts to interrogate and understand the Virgin's miraculous and confusing body intersect with similar modes of inquiry that take the bodies of ordinary women as their subject, bodies unprotected by Mary's aura of sanctity.

Of course, the question of how ordinary women can be compared to Mary, who, by definition, is incomparable, subtends any feminist claims upon her. The Virgin Mother is, after all, dauntingly inimitable: "makeless" in medieval lyric, and always "alone of all her sex."³ Nonetheless, others have shown how Mary's exceptionalness could offer a figure through which to test out the possibilities of thought about medieval women's bodies and their creative capacities. Certainly, the connection pregnant women themselves felt toward Mary—or were thought to have felt toward her—is suggested through prayer-inscribed birth girdles, lying-in talismans, and other images, artifacts, and texts.⁴ In this essay, however, instead of focusing on the positive, empowering attributes associations with the Virgin might provide for medieval women, I investigate the other side of the coin: how the conjured bodies of other women, relegated to secondary status in the social realm, also had their effects upon representations of Mary.⁵ I suggest that the shadowy forms of "other women" (to use Salomé's category) haunt images, performances, and textual descriptions of the Virgin, particularly those that attempt to scrutinize the interior of her inviolate body in order to prove its perfection.

This vocabulary of conjuration and haunting speaks to a second difficulty in comparing the incomparable Virgin to ordinary women: the relative absence of the reproductive experiences of the latter in the historical record. Writing of women's health care generally, Monica Green points out that "it...