"The Miracle of the Pregnant Abbess": Texts and contexts of a medieval tale of sexuality, spirituality, and authority.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation focuses on a miracle of the Virgin that was broadly disseminated during the High and Late Middle Ages. Chapter one surveys the miracle's diverse appearances across Europe in various languages and genres as it attempts to describe the tale as pan-European narrative phenomenon. It also attends to narrative variances from version to version in order to explore how the tale was adapted and employed to suit the goals and purposes of its creative context. Chapter two situates the abbess tale in the socio-historical context of women's monasticism and explores how the miracle's main plot both raises cultural anxieties women's monasticism and then responds to those anxieties with the presence of the paternalistic bishop. Chapter three delineates the typological identifications between the abbess and Eve and between the abbess and Mary. These typological similarities lead to an interpretation of the miracle itself as the abbess's redemption, which, in turn, reinforces the traditional inversely reciprocal relationship between women's spirituality and women's sexuality. The chapter then explores how both the abbess's typecasting as Mary and the Virgin's redemptive miracle set off chains of dialogic and potentially subversive associations in the text that resist containment. Chapter four explores the representation of motherhood from a womb-centered perspective in order to bring the tale's patriarchal assumptions into sharper relief. This approach reveals that the aspects of motherhood only women can do are consistently disrupted and devalued, while aspects of mothering that either sex can do are appropriated by men in the miracle. The overarching conclusion of the study is that the written versions of the abbess tale, although superficially concerned about women and women's issues, work to reproduce, reaffirm, and undergird the values, assumptions, and preferences of patriarchy.