Marian Maternity and Dysfunctional Pregnancy in the N-Town Nativity and the Digby Mary Magdalene

The perfection of Mary and Christ necessitated an anomalous independence of each other in their exemplary and miraculous version of the maternal-fetal assemblage. This article uses late-medieval drama—particularly the N-Town Nativity and Digby Mary Magdalene—to consider how Mary’s and the fetal-Jesus’s discretely bounded and, so, unbonded bodies offer insight into medieval attitudes to reproductive and uterine function, but also, crucially, dysfunction. Miraculous births in these plays temporarily evoke and so enable discussion of the jeopardy of miscarriage or stillbirth, through an image field of cleaving, bonding, and whiteness.