Part of the tale of the three spindles, Solomon's prophecy in Malory's ‘Tale of the Sankgreal’ looks to the coming of the Virgin Mary as the hallowed woman who can redress and make amends for the sins of womankind. Framed by the King's lamentations of marriage to an ‘evil wife’, the inheritor of Eve in more ways than one, the prophecy alludes to a much wider phenomenon in Christian theology. Far from unique to Malory's Grail Quest, the typological juxtaposition of the first woman with the Holy Virgin has long been, and continues to be, ubiquitous to Christian writing. Scholars have long noted, for example, what Gibson refers to as the ‘Eve-Ave reversal’,3 explained so eloquently in the fifteenth-century Middle English lyric poem ‘Heyl, levedy, se-stoerre bryht’:

In name and deed, according to tradition, the Virgin Mary quite literally reversed the sins of Eve. Most significantly, as the lyric illustrates, this reversal began at the Annunciation, the moment of Christ's conception. This moment, the miracle of the Incarnation, is the primary focus of this chapter. We persistently find this alignment of Ave and Eva, Mary and Eve, centred on the Incarnation within the corpus of medieval English Marian literature, as the Virgin follows her predecessor as a clothworker in birthing Christ. Clothwork becomes another alternate exegetical hermeneutic, a means of reading and interpreting Christ's incarnate body, as Mary spins and knits, sews and weaves, her son's flesh.