The multitude of monasteries, churches and altars dedicated to the Virgin that form the outward geography of the efflorescence of Marian devotion in Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had its inward counterpart in a metaphorical web of spatial references, which helped to articulate the salvific role of Mary and to imprint it on the religious imagination of Latin Christendom. It is to the exploration of this symbolic ‘sacred’ space, as it emerges from the liturgy and vernacular literature of thirteenth-, fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Spain, that Lesley Twomey dedicates the bulk of her book: to the enclosed garden, the field and the sealed fountain in ‘Places of Growth and Irrigation’ (chs ii–iv); to the closed door, the Temple, the lion's den, the furnace, the tabernacle, the Ark of the Covenant, the home, the bedchamber, the nuptial chamber and the palace in ‘Places of Entry and Exit’ (chs v–vii); and to the castle and to perfumed spaces in ‘Spaces of Protection’ (chs viii–ix). Most of these spaces were extracted from the Old Testament and interpreted as types or prefigurations of the Virgin and her miraculous powers. Their presence in Hispanic literature and liturgy as well as their biblical roots and theological ramifications are painstakingly reconstructed. The work of research, juxtaposition and exegesis that underpins this reconstruction commands admiration, not only for the impressive range of materials on which it draws – from the thirteenth-century Milagros de Nuestra Señora of Gonzalo de Berceo to the fifteenth-century Vita Christi of Isabel de Villena, in addition to various liturgical books – but also for its original (and generally persuasive) contention that the Marian proclivities of peninsular poets were shaped in part by liturgy. In this connection, students of Berceo (arguably the central character of this book) will likely find Twomey's reading of the Riojan priest's poetry stimulating, while students of liturgy and Marian devotion more broadly will be particularly grateful for the collection of peninsular hymns to the Virgin Mary that she includes as an appendix (pp. 385–428). Like this reviewer, however, they may be disappointed that this book, having so thoroughly described how Iberian poets used spatial metaphors to define the Virgin, fails on the whole to explain why they did so, beyond mere biblical and liturgical emulation. This is especially the case whenever certain spatial images, such as the castle or the palace, tempt the author out of the scriptural realm where she is clearly most comfortable. For example, Álvarez Gato's comparison of the Virgin to a ‘palacio de refrigerio’, which she translates as palace of refreshment, prompts the following conjecture: ‘His plea to the Virgin as “palacio de refrigerio” may be intended to contrast with King Enrique [iv]'s palace, for, during his reign, the court was a hotbed of rivalry, intrigue, and dispute’ (p. 277). Given that Álvarez Gato also mentions the peace of the kingdom (‘sosiego del Reyno’) in the same plea, solace might be a more accurate translation than refreshment, but that would make Twomey's subsequent digression on the sanitary conditions of royal dwellings ‘and their importance for the nation's health’ (p. 277) entirely irrelevant. It is doubtful whether any insight is gained into the mental and social resonance of representations of the Virgin as a castle or as a protective element in battle by claiming that ‘[projects for the construction of castles] were costly for nobles to finance, and, for that reason, occupied all their attention … [influencing] their leisure time too, when they turned to writing courtly verse’ (p. 290); or that ‘the physical presence of castles on frontiers … readily symbolized how evil was constantly on the prowl, ready to attack humankind’ (p. 292), but at the same time ‘those who lived in castles and those who saw them from the towns and villages where they worked could see them as an emblem of the body of the Virgin’ (p. 293). Such a halftone, stylised and sometimes maladroit depiction of medieval realities – where lords provided goods and services (pp. 293–4) and their castle walls ‘were so imbued with the persona of the lord, that, if he were to die in a siege, it meant the defences would fall because the defenders lost heart’ (p. 294); where the hinged doors of churches and its Marian bodily counterpart, the birth canal, presumably inspired poetic visions of the Virgin as a doorway to heaven (pp. 198–9); where the ‘concept of water as a valuable resource’ was ‘very real’, contrary to what present-day northern Europeans might think, used as they are to accessing water ‘via public supply’ and building decorative rather than utilitarian water features (p. 128) – such a depiction is a substitute, in this book, for a serious attempt to connect the intangible ‘sacred’ space of the Virgin with the growing place of Marian devotion in medieval society (treated in passing in ch. i) and its very tangible transformation of the inner as well as the social lives of individuals and the institutions that they embodied. This higher view might have given the book what it fundamentally lacks: a thesis, a unifying idea. Instead of this, we have descriptions, analyses, erudite parallels, tidily and conveniently summed up at the end of each chapter. This is a book for Marian scholars and Hispanists, especially those interested in Berceo. The neophyte, however, would do better to ease into these subjects by turning first to Mireille Lamy (whose main work is strangely absent from an otherwise extensive bibliography), to Marie-Louise Savoye (whose 2009 doctoral thesis, ‘De Fleurs, d'or, de lait, de miel: les images mariales dans les collections miraculaires romanes du xiiie siècle’, is available online) or to Miguel Ibáñez Rodríguez. This is, in short, a useful, learned, at times engaging, very often perceptive book, regrettably marred by an occasional lack of historical judgement and by a modesty of design that ultimately falls short of both the scholarship of its author and some of the complex questions that she raises.