“This matere here mad is of the modyr of mercy,” announces the character Contemplacio at the beginning of the so-called “Mary Play” that is found interleaved into the miscellaneous collection of biblical dramas from East Anglia we term the “N-Town” plays. The “matere” is not only the life, but the power, of the Virgin Mary and the need to revere her as an essential figure in the drama of creation and salvation. Following the Resurrection play in the same collection, Jesus announces of Mary:

It is particularly in the popular drama that we see the extraordinary extent to which devotion to the Virgin was central to the everyday life of the later Middle Ages in England. But we can also sense, lurking behind (or in Irigaray's metaphor, “sidling” up to) the ideological (and state) apparatuses of what in many ways was a rigid and repressive society, possible alternate readings of Mary, despite her being coded very carefully by the Church as created outside human sexuality and its (apparent and incessantly emphasized) discontents. In this chapter, I shall examine the presence of Mary in late medieval popular culture – poetry, romance, and story – but the main focus will be on the drama, especially on plays where she provides a major role in events that in many cases would come to be seen by the reformers as an idolatrous, pagan, and blasphemous feminization of Christianity.