The Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation, and Devotion in Medieval England by Laura Saetveit Miles (review)

Laura Saetveit Miles’s The Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation turns on a familiar image, Mary reading when Gabriel appeared to her. This iconography was so ubiquitous in later medieval art, Miles argues, that we cannot fully understand Marian devotion without accounting for the Virgin as a model for study and prayer. Scholarship has, however, neglected this learned aspect of Mary’s medieval persona, focusing instead on Mary as intercessor, especially for the unlettered (as in The Prioress’s Tale). From this premise, Miles builds a longitudinal study of Mary-as-reader that is also a deep dive into how medieval readers learned to pray meditatively. While Miles’s book is valuable for attending to this form of imitatio Mariae, it also models an interpretation of medieval meditative practices useful to other approaches to devotional culture.

Miles opens her book by developing its core hermeneutic principle: the polysemous nature of Scripture enabled layered, participatory meditative practices. This hermeneutic integrates common approaches to scriptural interpretation—typological figuration, fourfold exegesis, the anamnetic collapse of “past” into “present” within a performed “now”—to unpack how medieval participatory meditation operated. “Conceiving” Christ in the devout mind is a spiritual echo of Mary’s bearing of Christ in her body. The private chamber in which Mary was reading when she conceived Christ is simultaneously her private room, her womb, the anchorhold, the nun’s enclosure, the layperson’s closet, the shrine at Walsingham. These figurative ripples allow believers, especially women, both to model themselves on Mary’s prayerful reading and to fulfill an equivalent conception of the divine within themselves through their literate devotions. Those of us who study religious culture will be familiar with these analytic approaches, yet rarely have they been articulated with such precision as Miles provides.

Subsequent chapters build their longitudinal study on this interpretive foundation, demonstrating how imitatio Mariae developed variously across medieval England, but always with the assumption that Mary should and could model productive study and fruitful prayer. Chapters 2 and 3 consider the question of what Mary was reading at the Annunciation and how her reading material shaped this imitation. Post-Conquest texts produced for and about anchoritic women drew on the tradition that Mary was reading the Psalms. This semi-liturgical form of prayer, also enjoined for anchoresses such as those addressed in Ancrene Wisse, collapses the distance between the solitary chanting of Psalms in the enclosure and Mary doing the same in her room. This collapse authorizes the anchoress’s vocalized prayer to conceive Christ in her soul much as Mary conceived Christ in her body. The more long-lasting tradition that Mary was reading Isaiah’s prophecy about herself—that a virgin should bear the son of God—broaches the question of lay and female access to holy writ. Tracing this tradition through later Gospel meditations, Miles provides localized snapshots of the way medieval (often but not always female) readers were encouraged, or not, to imitate Mary by reading the Bible. This thoughtful survey refuses to homogenize female or lay experience, focusing rather on the diversity of positions around the question of whether laypeople and women should read Scripture themselves.

Earlier Latin writers such as Goscelin of Saint-Bertin and Aelred of Rievaulx, writing for their enclosed female audiences, characterized the pre-Annunciate Virgin as nearly an anchoress herself, skilled in the meditative arts. Later medieval female contemplatives developed this aspect of Mary in their writings, as Miles details in her fourth chapter. The four writers she examines here turn Mary into a “paradigm for [women] channelling the divine” (173), even when they do not portray her as reading. For Elizabeth of Sweden, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe, imitatio Mariae becomes imitation of she-who-conceives-Christ, spiritually and/or in the body...