© 2003 by Oxford University Press
Playing the Midwife's Part in the English Nativity Plays
1 Australian National University
Two of the surviving English Nativity plays tell the story of the doubting midwife who witnesses, literally first-hand, the miracle of Mary's virginity at the birth of Christ. Beyond imparting the lesson of the necessity of faith, the plays communicate the complexity of the midwife's life in late medieval and early modern England. The portrayal of the midwife's role in the Chester and N-town versions of the Nativity, considered in relation to evidence from records of civic and parish administration, gives a striking sense of the multiple roles real-life midwives were obliged to play and the competing interests they were bound to serve. This article examines the modes of presentation of the midwives in the Nativity plays in terms of their broad cultural resonance, the language used by the midwives to introduce their roles to the audience, and the function that other characters perceive them as fulfilling. It also notes post-Reformation objections to the inclusion of the doubting midwife sequence in the Chester play, and examines the Chester cycle's portrayal of women, in the Nativity and elsewhere in its sequence of plays, in terms of the privileged empirical knowledge of the human body attributed to them.