Stilling time: stop making sense

Medieval authors offered myriad accounts of the Virgin’s life and person. Some focused on the experiential world of the historical Mary, speculating upon her responses to her place in the salvation story and her apprehension of the suffering of her son. Others considered the Virgin’s post-assumption role as mediatrix in the lives of the faithful, describing her elastic capacity to intervene in human affairs and to provide consolation and succor. In these accounts, Mary is always suitably decorous, perfected and unsullied, conforming to the theological protocols that governed her representation. In spite of this perfection, however, medieval authors made her insistently fully human and placed her in narratives that ranged from the ludic to the tragic. In developing the Virgin’s dramatic and poetic range, the Virgin was insistently fleshed out on the page and on the stage in ways that threatened to exceed the borders within which she had been bound by theologians.