In this chapter, I examine how Old Testament longing for a homeland is reimagined as Mary's body as it becomes a place for a new beginning, because within it, for nine months, Christ dwelled. Because it is where Christ cast aside his divinity to ‘take the form of a slave’, it is a place of humility. When the Virgin's body becomes Christ's resting place, it is imbued with the qualities of places where the Ark, which held God, rested. When filled with the presence of God as his resting place on earth, it is where God's power overcomes darkness. I examine the theology of home and the metaphor of the Virgin-home.

Subsumed within the architectural place, home, there lie a number of different places of varying qualities: house, dwelling place, hall, or palace. Many of these places have interior spaces within them, such as the bedchamber, bridal chamber, or banqueting hall. Each has its biblical and liturgical antecedents, and each its own particular meaning. Each, like any other sacred space, has its point of entry. I re-examine home imagery in medieval Marian literature, evaluating concepts of domestic space and how it is constructed. Just like the Temple, home has its threshold, a place of supreme importance with its own ritual functions.

However, home can also represent the idea of safety and comfort for exiled people, and it is where those lost and in exile return to when they have strayed. Home may mean homeland, with its sense of permanence, to which God's people return. Home is also a place of refuge and may be an expression of hope for the future.3 Places where God stays and rests, such as God's tabernacle, his tent, and his pavilion, may demonstrate short-term occupancy, prefiguring the nine months in Mary's womb. For authors writing about the Virgin, she may, therefore, be both a constructed space and a conceptual place of shelter.

The Virgin, a Resting Place for God in the Loores de Nuestra Señora

Gonzalo de Berceo in his Loores is the first poet in Hispanic literature to turn the Virgin into a domestic space, referring to her as God's ‘cambariella’. ‘Cámara’, from which ‘cambariella’ and ‘camarilla’ derive, has a number of meanings: ‘Commonly it is taken to be the bedroom, set apart, where the Lord sleeps.’