In The Virgin Mary's Book at the Annunciation, Laura Saetveit Miles marshals a generous and diverse collection of evidence and perceptive critical attention to make an important contribution to the history of reading, the study of affective devotion in late medieval England, and feminist approaches to medieval literature and culture. Miles presents Mary and her “book at the Annunciation as a symbol not only of the divine Logos made flesh in a woman's womb, but also as a symbol of how each Christian could access God through the Word” (p. 225). Miles deftly trains our attention on instances of Christian representations of and interactions with the Annunciation scene in England (and the continent) from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries, crossing over briefly into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ultimately, Miles leads her reader through a nuanced assessment of interactions with and imitations of the Virgin Mary, all coalescing in one way or another around the Annunciation and Mary's reading, with a particular view to revising previous perspectives on the Virgin and on medieval women that cast a negative light on their bodies, abilities, and power. The various instances show complex and often subtle treatments of readers’ potential and realized imitations of the Virgin as an authoritative pray-er, meditant, contemplative, and interpreter of Scripture, supported and enhanced by (rather than despite) the female body. That Mary brought forth Christ in the flesh in her womb is intimately tied up with her ability to read (and read well) the Word of God. And her disciples and devotees, in reading about and modeling themselves on this literate and hermeneutically astute woman, become capable of bringing forth Christ in effective ways spiritually in their hearts.Chapter one lays the groundwork for the hermeneutic lens Miles employs throughout the rest of the work, one based in the polysemic nature of Biblical interpretation from the Church Fathers and taken over into medieval hermeneutics. Miles explores the ways in which Christ and Mary become books and readers in different authors’ thought and works, emphasizing that “the medieval Christian belief system is dependent upon the ability of signs to take multiple significations without cancelling out each other, and upon the ability of signs . . . to have simultaneously a universal as well as a very personal meaning for each individual” (p. 26). The abundance of simultaneously valid valences when meditating and praying with the Biblical narrative, along with the individual's participatory role in universal narrative and structures, anchors Miles's exploration in the rest of the chapter of the various significances and moral dimensions of the imitation of Mary (imitatio Mariae) in which the medieval subjects under consideration engaged. Particularly of note in this chapter is Miles's move to implicate her historical project explicitly in presentist concerns regarding contemporary theological and feminist treatments of the Virgin Mary as a religious figure, framing her work as not only a study of the past but a recuperative history for the present of Mary “as an empowered, active interpreter” (p. 36).Chapter two begins the chronological march through the shifting valences of the Virgin's reading at the Annunciation. As one might expect when handling an exemplary woman's reading in the western medieval world, Miles begins the specific purview of her study in the long twelfth century with women's anchoritic texts. Covering Ancrene Wisse, Goscelin's Liber Confortitorius for Eva, and The Life of Christina of Markyate (as well as images of the Annunciation relevant to Goscelin's and Christina's milieux), Miles focuses on the paradoxically situated openness of the enclosed anchoritic life. In particular, the ways in which the enclosed spaces of Mary's womb, Mary's room, and Christ's tomb are still porous to angelic and divine activity and presence are set up as a model by the chapter's authors for the women who make up the three texts’ audiences. In keeping with the revisionist trend of the study laid out in the introduction and chapter one, Miles opposes the disparagement of women's voices found at times in these texts and emphasized by some scholars to the ways in which the texts’ presentations of the Annunciation serve as models “for specifically female readers to claim the efficacy of their voice” (p. 55).Chapter three advances Miles's study into the “lives of Christ” texts from Aelred of Rievaulx's De Institutione Inclusarum to several later works from the “post-Arundelian decades of complex political and theological controversies surrounding biblical reading” (p. 99). Drawing on scholarship on affective devotion, Miles argues that Mary's activities at the Annunciation and the texts’ positioning of the reader vis-à-vis Mary's activities shape the reader's relationship to the lives of Christ texts themselves through their relationship with Mary, creating various configurations of reader-text-mimetic figure. The fact that some of the texts considered here also fall in the Ambrosian tradition of having Mary read the Old Testament prophecies concerning the Virgin Birth (esp. Isa 7:14) leads to Mary being a model not only of reading but also “of interpretive, exegetical reading” (p. 113).Chapter four shifts from a direct interpretation of textual representations of the Annunciation as scenes presented to women to scenes written and presented by women. The “virtual textual community” (p. 174) engendered by the visionary and textual production of Elizabeth of Hungary and Naples, Birgitta of Sweden, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe is examined for the ways in which women learned directly from the Virgin Mary in visions and imitated the Virgin's authority in their own texts (whether written for them by secretaries or produced on their own). In these visionaries’ texts the Virgin's book is conspicuously absent (though general reference to Isaiah's prophecy is present), which Miles utilizes to expand her approach to the Annunciation scene by moving away from readings focused squarely on the textual scenes themselves to the embodiment of the textuality of the Incarnation in Mary as well as the women visionaries.Chapter five shifts focus back to a text's representation of the Annunciation scene and Mary's own reading (and prayer) as a model for devotion, though with an expansion into multimedia and multisensory works that move beyond text. The first part of the chapter analyzes a relatively unnoticed text, Of Three Workings in Man's Soul, for its explicitly instructional approach to showing the reader Mary's own reading as a way to begin understanding thought, meditation, and contemplation. Miles also suggests new claims for Richard Rolle's authorship of this text, but this is not essential to her primary argument. The instructional employment of the Annunciation found in Of Three Workings is then presented as illuminating the techniques and desired effects of the major contemporary Marian devotions, the Marian Psalter/rosary and the recitation of the Book of Hours.Chapter six extends the study's focus on extratextual works to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, reading the shrine's interior space as a means for dramatically inhabiting the scene of the Annunciation that has only been imagined mentally and viewed visually in the works analyzed up until this point. Ranging through pilgrims’ reports, official documents regarding gifts to the shrine, and the Pynson ballad, Miles argues for the capacity of this English shrine to allow pilgrims not only to enter a represented space (as shrines commemorating the Holy Land or Calvary might) but also to connect “their personal, book-based devotions to the shrine in a way unique among pilgrim destinations” (p. 233). Treatment of the shrine's interior space itself leads to a view of “how imitating [Mary's] role in the Incarnation could transform the self” (p. 234), and treatment of the Pynson ballad leads to a highlighting of Mary as model interpreter, both of which contribute to the study's larger revisionary project, lifting Mary up through these sources as not simply a powerful intercessor (though she was) but as a powerful model of an intellectual and contemplative devotion.A brief coda surveys responses and changes to the cult of the Virgin during and after the Reformation. While representations of the Annunciation endure due to the scene's scriptural basis, much of the authority associated with the figure of Mary reading is stripped away due to Mary's role in the Catholic religious power structure. Miles notes the misogynistic tenor of treatments of idolatry generally and Mariolatry specifically among the Reformers, drawing out a particular historical basis for the misogynistic and diminished view of Mary (and women more generally by extension) that Miles has been arguing against throughout the book.The clarity of Miles's voice and structure throughout made what is a long and intricate argument a pleasure to read, and the use of not only textual evidence but visual evidence (with full color reproductions) and treatment of material culture in pilgrimage badges and nascent rosary beads added texture to the argument, only bolstering its compelling nature. In The Virgin Mary's Book at the Annunciation, Miles has done a service for all those interested in medieval devotion, medieval reading practices, feminist readings of medieval literature and culture, and the understanding of the medieval world as not simply a past era but as one that has shaped and continues to shape our own.