‘Ark of the Covenant’ is one of the names of the Blessed Virgin Mary given in the Litany of the Virgin. It is also a fitting description for the essentially Jewish Mary, portrayed as ‘cunning and bookish’ by Adrienne Boyarin following her trawl through ‘little scattered narratives’ of Marian miracles in English medieval miracle collections. In these, Mary is not merely God's passive instrument. She is, rather, the confident and powerful successor of Moses: a mediatrix who bridges the Old Law and the New, a legislatrix and confident advocate for sinners who beats a legally expert Satan at his own game (and also, sometimes, physically to boot, according to Boyarin's interpretation of one illustration in the spectacular Hours of William de Brailes). Mary is also judgemental where necessary, rebuking the nun Eulalia for saying her rosary without thought, and the woman who, having murdered her child, refused to believe that Mary's intercession could save her.

The survival of Marian miracle stories in England, writes Boyarin, is surprisingly patchy, perhaps because of their paucity, perhaps because of their subsequent suppression (as at Walsingham) following the Reformation. They are very miscellaneous – scholars, merchants, the religious, misguided women, all figure – but the dominant characters are often wily and sometimes murderous Jews, and unwise clerks who make Faustian pacts with the Devil. Boyarin relates these stories vivaciously, noting where their details reflected contemporary legal developments and antisemitic views. She analyses their selection, and notes the way in which the presentation of the legend of Theophilus, in particular, varied between the ninth and late fifteenth centuries. She notes that, in the selection of Marian miracle texts, Paul the Deacon was perhaps too credulous, Aelfric more selective, William of Malmesbury more conscious of historical background. Chaucer (whose Prioresse refers to the Jewish murder of Hugh of Lincoln, a Christian boy) was concerned to tell a good story as well as to edify, and Mirk, in his Festial of the early fifteenth century (a sermon-cycle), was supremely conscious of the significance of the Annunciation. She also notes that illustrations became increasingly important in books of Hours, and that some later miracle collections had became so comprehensively illustrated, for maximum impact, that the illustrations effectively became the text, sometimes portraying Mary as only second, in terms of her size, to God. Finally, Boyarin assesses the significance and fate of these English collections, concluding that their aims, insofar as one can be certain of their impact on contemporary readers, were to teach, to encourage meditation and to warn.

Boyarin is refreshingly concerned to view Mary from a Jewish point of view. Although her prose style is not always transparent, her research into the primary sources is scholarly and extensive, and she has also read an impressive number of secondary books. If her Latin translations are at times slightly loose, her telling of the stories that they portray is always lively and compelling. Perhaps she is a little too inclined to see Mary through the eyes of a literary historian, when more knowledge of diplomatic and of actual historical detail would have further supported her arguments. For instance, in Paul the Deacon's version of the Theophilus story, the Devil's use of a chirograph rather than a mere charter is not mentioned: yet this is a crucial detail. If the portions of a chirograph fitted, the document was genuine and could not be refuted. In other words, for poor Theophilus, there was no hope of escape, which made Mary's intervention the more necessary and her victory as legislatrix the more remarkable. Boyarin also makes a most interesting reference to plans (perhaps never executed) for ‘the late fourteenth-century Lady Chapel of the Cathedral Church of York’, as illustrated in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, ms 132. These plans included a Marian tabula, perhaps intended as an altar-frontal. Might she also have noted the existence of Archbishop Roger's Chapel of St Mary and the Holy Angels? This was founded at the Minster during the second half of the twelfth century, contained its own ‘canons of the chapel’, and continued until at least the reign of Edward vi.

Finally, Boyarin observes that, in contrast with continental Europe, there survive only vague and implied accounts of the numerous miracles which occurred at English Marian shrines. She refers, in particular, to the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham. Founded on the site where, in 1061, Richeldis de Faverches received a vision from the Virgin Mary of the Holy House at Nazareth, it was an important centre of Marian devotion throughout the Middle Ages. Given that Walsingham remains to this day an ‘active’ shrine, an epicentre of Marian pilgrimage and prayer, the absence of a substantial corpus of recorded miracles from there is particularly ironic. What a contrast with the tomb of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, where active devotion has long ceased yet countless written accounts of his miracles remain.