Lives of Christ texts like Aelred's De Institutione Inclusarum, the MVC and Love's Mirror transformed how meditation worked in medieval Europe. Readers were encouraged to respond to the scriptures by imagining themselves as part of scriptural stories, as witnessing first-hand Christ's life, transported there by the power of the imagination – a cognitive power itself enabled by the Word made flesh. Seeing Mary see herself in the psalms or Isaiah's prophecy offered the perfect impetus to this new kind of participatory piety. Just as Mary imagined herself part of a prophetic future, so could readers imagine themselves part of a biblical past. The Annunciation scene likewise appears in some medieval visionary accounts, where instead of the devotee going to a book to read about Mary and the angel, Mary herself often appears to the visionary to relay the miracle of the Incarnation from her point of view. Such immediacy was exactly the goal of the imaginative meditation. The textual genres fed off each other, with visionary accounts influencing devotional treatises and vice versa. Both types of mystical re-visioning of the scriptural story, can, in their own ways, offer ‘a kind of direct access to God that sometimes bypasses – or at least supplements – clerical structures, reminding the reader of the extra-liturgical presence of the divine’. Both the visionary and meditation genres take the opportunity to present the Virgin as a powerful authority in her own right, independent of – and sometimes superseding – male authority figures.

While in the previous chapter I argue that the Virgin's role in the Incarnation is formative for the reader of devotional texts, in this chapter I demonstrate how her role is equally formative for the visionary who produces a text to be read. Chosen because of the unique centrality of their representations of the Annunciation scene, the visionary accounts of four late medieval holy women are the focus of this chapter: Elizabeth of Hungary, the nun of the Dominican house in Naples (c. 1260–1322), Birgitta of Sweden (c. 1303–1373), Julian of Norwich (c. 1342–after 1416) and Margery Kempe (c. 1373–after 1438).