As the Protestant Reformation reached England – bringing with it the rejection of the cult of saints and attacks, rhetorical and real, on shrines, pilgrimage, and associated miraculous events or items – belief in the kinds of Marian intercession described in Miracles of the Virgin could epitomize Catholic ‘superstition’. As Ælfric had insisted centuries earlier, the glut of Marian apocrypha that had developed independently of scripture had to be suppressed in favor of biblical accounts (in which Mary features only minimally), since false or unverifiable narratives posed a threat to the honor due to God alone. Marian feasts with apocryphal bases, which had been so central to early English devotion, were to be invalidated. Visual depictions of Mary shifted to meeker and softer representations of Luke's acquiescent maiden. Images and sculptures associated with long-popular shrines and miracles were attacked with words, hammers, and flames.

While I have been advocating for a view of English Marian miracles – particularly the Middle English corpus – that embraces their miscellaneity as representative and thereby reveals visible developments of sets and subsets of miracle narratives like the ones explored in this book, I cannot deny that the complex history of reform attitudes toward Mary and the equally complex history of the English Reformation seem to create a basic evidentiary problem for me. Could it be that the English corpus looks the way it does because the sixteenth-century eradication of ‘superstitious’ texts and images means that the genre is now so badly represented that any traces of development, whether in the whole or in thematically related subsets, are accidental?