Interest in understanding the Virgin Mary among British and North American scholars is growing, as a recent spate of books on aspects of the Virgin Mary reveals. Yet, in many ways, there has always been a place for Marian studies, and interest in the Virgin has never dissipated among European scholars. Mary is the ‘nurturant’, ‘omnipotent’ other, the mother figure whose cult has never diminished and whose all-enveloping power lies in her ‘self-abnegation, suffering, intercession, and virginity’.

The principal aim of this book will be to re-examine typology about place for what it tells us about the Virgin Mary. To do so, I will seek to draw close to major trends in theological thinking, but also to give importance to place, as authors chose the places they believed best represented aspects of the Virgin's nature: garden, fountain, Temple, dwelling, or fortified stronghold. I will do this by re-evaluating how those metaphors are used in vernacular literatures, setting my findings alongside those from liturgy, to determine whether there was any influence from liturgy upon poets and, if so, how it might operate. In this I build on the work of James W. Marchand and his study of the hymns of Gonzalo de Berceo and their Latin origins, although without examining localized variants of the hymns that he studies.

There were strong literary traditions in both Castile-Leon and Aragon by the fifteenth century, and study of religious prose and poetry will not only provide further evidence of the way in which the newest Marian feast, the Conception, was becoming embedded in the kingdoms but will also evaluate what ordinary clerics or lay people understood about the various doctrines celebrated in the range of Marian feasts in the calendar: the Purification, the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Assumption, and the Nativity.

This book has a secondary, but equally important, purpose. It is the fruit of a desire to arrive at a deeper understanding of aspects of the beliefs about Mary that poets and authors absorbed, in the late medieval period, from the way religion was practised in public worship or through private devotion.