Marian Literature

Abstract

Devotion to Mary was central to medieval spirituality. Mary was worshipped in a variety of guises including virginal Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, and Intercessor. The details of her life were familiar from the Nativity Gospels of Matthew and Luke, the apocryphal stories that grew up around her childhood and the manner of her death, and the popular collection of saints lives, the Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend).¹ By the later Middle Ages numerous Marian feasts were celebrated: her Purification (2 February), the Annunciation (25 March), the Assumption (15 August), Nativity (8 September), her Presentation at the Temple (21 November), and her Immaculate Conception by St Anne (8 December). The Mother of God was venerated in public homilies and the liturgy, and privately praised in the Offices of the Virgin in Books of Hours. Marian sites of pilgrimage in England were many and held in high regard, most notably Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk. They were visited frequently by women or benefited from their donations. In 1443 Margaret Paston wrote to her husband, John, that she sought Mary’ said in curing him of an ongoing illness by promising to go on pilgrimage to Walsingham.²