Laura Saetveit Miles: The Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation and Devotion in Medieval England. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020.

• Helen Cooper

If readers of this review have a clear mental image of the scene of the Annunciation, it is likely to be based not on the Gospel account but on one of its many artistic representations. The Gospel of St Luke gives only minimal detail for the scene – ‘ingressus angelus ad eam’ – but even that implies more than the words state, and the artists added more details. The ‘in-’ of ‘ingressus’ was taken to imply an indoor scene, of the Virgin within the private devotional space of her chamber; and she is frequently provided with a book, either on a reading desk or on her lap. Laura Saetveit Miles’ study is a history of this iconography. She explores when and how the book became part of the scene; what text it might be thought to have contained; and how that text might have engaged the picture’s viewers, to the point where they can themselves participate in what it shows, whether imaginatively or literally. Key among those viewers, Miles suggests, would have been the women who could identify most closely with the Virgin and who set out to model themselves on her: the virgins who had themselves chosen enclosure as anchoresses, and who had thus committed their lives to a form of contemplative devotion analogous to the Virgin’s study of her book.