Conflicts over the nature and power of the Virgin Mary have shaped Christianity from its beginnings, but likely never more strongly than the long period of transition in England from late medieval to early modern. Both the physical body of the Virgin and its representations and symbolizations become matters of intellectual controversy, powerful feelings and, all too frequently, conflict and violence. At the heart of the Catholic theological tradition, Tina Beattie maintains, is a symbolic space centered on the Virgin so central that its version of Christianity “is not fully coherent without it.” That was emphatically not the view of the reformers, who believed vehemently that the medieval Church had sexualized that space and filled it with sinful fantasies and idols. In this chapter, I will sketch out the issues of sexuality, physical and metaphorical, related to the Virgin which became central points of conflict, raising questions not only of how she was depicted, venerated or denigrated, but also the implications for real women, and for the men who responded to them, too often in ways that used a fantasized account of the Virgin's body and sexuality to denigrate them. The subject of this chapter is female bodies, one an intensely mythologized body, the subject of many stories, especially concerning its generative and maternal functions, but as well, I will argue in this and subsequent chapters, impacting deeply on the bodies of female pilgrims and worshippers, and of women's bodies generally.