The collective label ‘Miracles of the Virgin’ implies an easily gathered body of work, but it is unclear whether it was ever such a thing for readers of English. Paul Strohm has claimed that, by the late Middle Ages, the English term ‘miracle’ probably suggested not miracle stories generally but writings on the Virgin specifically: ‘We learn to expect that a miraculum of the early Middle Ages will probably involve miraculous cures at the tomb of a saint and that a miracle of the fourteenth century will more likely involve the Virgin.’ But he readily admits that it is difficult to tell whether this had generic force, for it is rarely clear whether the term refers to the miraculous event or to the narrative. There was an acknowledged category: Marian legends inserted into sermons or found among religious miscellanies often begin with phrases like ‘i rede in þe myraculs of oure lady’, and, in a series of tales, a phrase like ‘also in þe same boke’ might be repeated. The authors who claimed this great source volume recognized some corpus of appropriate stories, and they expected their audiences to do so as well. These narratives do tend to fit a certain mold – a character performs some special devotion but later commits some horrendous sin, or falls in with horrendous sinners, and Mary intercedes, often in extremis – but a search for any book to which authors advert yields no sure results. While numerous Latin collections of Marian miracles and copious compendia of general Marian materials were circulating in England, no surviving collection or grouping seems definitely linked to another, and attempts to trace the sources of Middle English versions of individual tales are often futile. Any story of Mary's intercession – heard or read, old or new – could fit into the notional book.