Mary's voice rings out from the eleventh- and twelfth-century texts of the anchorhold. She sings the psalms and hears in them the Incarnation, all in concert with enclosed women readers. Within this Annunciation imaginary, contained space (whether the concrete cell or the abstract soul) both protect and liberate devotion to God. The previous chapter explored how male authors set up Mary's containment at the Annunciation to offer a paradigm for female readers, particularly anchoresses, to engage with the psalms like the Virgin: speaking or singing psalms aloud so as to conceive Christ spiritually just as Mary conceived him physically. Their voices are validated as they interpret the psalm verses in relation to themselves and Mary, inhabiting the lyrical ‘I’, connecting the typological power of the Psalter with the transformative power of the Incarnation.

Yet also in the twelfth century, a rival tradition came to dominate representations of the Annunciation from the medieval period to the present: Mary engages not the psalms, but rather reads the Old Testament prophecies foretelling the Annunciation, specifically Isaiah 7:14, ‘Ecce virgo in utero concipiet et pariet filium’ (Behold a virgin shall conceive in her womb and bear a son). This apocryphal tradition probably originated with Ambrose of Milan (c. 337–97), who first claimed about Isaiah that ‘legerat hoc Maria’ (Mary had read this) in his commentary on Luke. Three centuries later, Bede (c. 672–735) adopted Ambrose's theme in his own commentary on the gospel; around the turn of the millennium, Fulbert of Chartres and Odilo of Cluny likewise refer to Mary reading Isaiah's prophecy in their sermons. The verse had long been linked to the Annunciation through the liturgy; in England the Sarum Mass for the Feast of the Annunciation, 25 March, featured Isaiah 7:14 in the Introit, the Epistle and the Communion chant.2 But the belief that Mary was reading this Old Testament prophecy only truly took off when it became a part of the widespread late medieval genre of ‘lives of Christ’, or ‘gospel meditations’, prose narrative biographies of Christ and his family – many featuring the Annunciation as a prominent scene, as the moment of Christ's conception.