Medieval images of womanhood: the construction of Mary of Nemmegen

Abstract

The late-medieval English prose text Mary of Nemmegen (c 1518) relates the tale of a girl who spends seven years with the devil but is ultimately miraculously saved. In the context of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s textualisation of female experience versus male authority, this feminist study problematises the orthodox interpretation of the exemplum as a quintessentially medieval tale of the triumph of Good over Evil by offering a “resisting” reading of the text’s constructions of Good/Evil, the church, and female identity. It does so by means of an investigation into the “authoritative” textual and iconographical sources of medieval images of womanhood — their nature and their coercive power in the construction of female identity, both generally and in the specific context of the operation of their discourse in Mary of Nemmegen. The text’s culminating dream is also read “resistingly” as unmasking the falsity of these images of womanhood by liberating the text to interrogate and deconstruct its own key terms, notably the binary Good/Evil and the medieval church’s construction of God.