The most powerful image of woman in the Middle Ages, one which embodied all the occulted misogyny that the idealization of virginity entailed, was of course the Virgin Mary. Mary's conception is free from sexuality and thus free from the Original Sin with all that it entails, including painful childbirth. Eve, on the other hand, is a woman of shame and sins. Eve, to all Christians, is the earliest woman rebel, one that led all others.

Eve was created out of the Old Adam, but the new Adam, Redeemer of the Old, was produced out of Mary.

Eve is figured as a secondary and derivative creation, the daughter, as it were of her husband Adam, and like an ungrateful child or disobedient wife, she holds responsibility for his great loss, the loss of paradise of the one from whom she drew her origin. Mary on the other hand figures as the mother of Christ who is both her bridegroom and son.

The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden as a result of a woman's disobedience and man's redemption through Christ who was born of a spotless virgin.