It should come as no surprise that when the monks of Cîteaux turned their attention to the task of illuminating their earliest surviving luxury codices, they drew on the passages most familiar to them, those they heard and sang in the liturgy. Whether or not these books were intended for choir use, the events and personages mentioned in the texts they contained sometimes prompted the monks to decorate them with motifs drawn not from the words immediately adjacent to the images but rather from lections and chants they remembered from associated feasts, as we have already seen with the Pseudo-Jerome sermon in the Jerome Epistles manuscript (Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale MS 135, fols. 182r and 185v). We can also see this in illuminations depicting the Virgin Mary. Two manuscripts from early Cîteaux were outfitted with miniatures that portrayed the Virgin in innovative ways, compiling preexisting motifs inspired by the Matins lections and chants with which the monks celebrated Advent and Christmas.

Liturgy was not the sole driver behind the larger phenomenon of Marian devotion, yet the liturgy of an individual monastic house shaped the spiritual environment in which Cistercian theologians such as Bernard of Clairvaux developed and worked. Therefore it is worth tracing the links between the ways Mary was described and celebrated in the liturgy in the first decades of the New Monastery, the ways she was depicted in art, and the ways she was treated in Bernard's spiritual writings. These connections reveal how the aural experience of chant and Scripture lections read during the seasons of Advent, Christmas, and the Nativity of the Virgin inspired Cîteaux artists to apply Trinitarian and sacramental iconography, the virgo lactans formula, and images of the biblical foreshadowings of the virgin birth to texts associated with, but not read, during those feasts. Bernard's writings show that once he left Cîteaux to guide his own monastery as abbot, he may have recollected either the chants or the images when he composed his own meditations on the Virgin.