ABSTRACT
The fact that Mary later refers to her own historical pregnancy in terms of her having carried Christ under her heart makes it clear that readers are dealing with a form of spiritual pregnancy here. Spiritual pregnancy should therefore not be seen as an isolated motif within medieval religious writing, but as part of a wider engagement with the problem of how the finite might contain the infinite. This means that, despite the analogy with the natural world on which these motifs are predicated, it is not the case that connubium should be understood as the 'cause' of spiritual pregnancy or as an experience which must be precede it temporally. Ambivalence about past and future means that the focus is placed firmly on process rather than on outcome. The motivation for the use of the pregnancy motif is not to harness conventional maternal desires to a spiritual agenda, but rather to highlight a process of deepening introspection and change.
