This collection uncovers how medieval literature challenges dominant narratives of pregnancy through depictions of marginalized reproductive experiences. In the Middle Ages as today, pregnancy was both a private, embodied experience and a public metaphor shaped by law, morality, and politics. In a moment when U.S. courts cite medieval legal treatises to restrict reproductive rights, reexamining medieval narratives of pregnancy has never been more urgent. The chapters in this book explore marginalized reproductive experiences—such as caesarean section, nursing, generational trauma, and trans pregnancy—revealing how medieval texts offer alternative ways of thinking about gender politics, reproductive agency, and embodiment. This volume aims to reframe the political implications of pregnancy through a critical reexamination of the biological discourse through which it is often viewed, highlighting the way control of the pregnant body exceeds the boundaries of both the nine-month term and the category of woman.

By engaging with abortion, miscarriage, coerced conception, bodily autonomy, and queer/nonbinary parenthood, literary texts explore the complex political effects of pregnancy discourse on pregnant people. The discourses of pregnancy have historically framed it as a defining experience of womanhood—one that both carries significant moral responsibility and maintains dominant social institutions. Within this framework, pregnancy is a strictly bounded event that describes a nine-month biological process unique to cis women. The naturalized understanding of pregnancy belies its political centrality as a mechanism for distributing and maintaining social power. While medieval medical and legal texts sought to define and prescribe reproductive processes, literary texts from romance poetry to mystic writing to biblical dramas complicate this normative framework of pregnancy and birth. By expanding the historical archive of reproductive discourse and challenging exclusionary narratives, this book intervenes in contemporary legal, medical, and political conversations surrounding pregnancy.