Mary Beth Long takes advantage of the fifteenth century’s intense interest in the Virgin Mary, the best-documented mother of the medieval period, to examine the constructions and performances of maternity in vernacular religious texts. By bringing together texts and authors that are not often discussed in tandem, this study offers a rich examination of the multiple factors at play as Marian material circulated among experienced devotional readers. Long employs a matricentric feminist approach to discern how readers’ devotional literacies inform their understanding of the Virgin’s maternal practice. Long attends to internal cues in the texts, to manuscript contexts, and to the evidence and content of readers’ multiple literacies. She discerns the goals as well as the practice of literate Marian devotion. The result is a book that explains late-medieval perceptions of Mary’s maternity and sets them against real maternal practice.
