There are many desiderata at the conclusion of this study. From some angles it seems as if all paths of inquiry lead to these texts. But any reader attuned to a single miracle or group of miracles, or to a particular century or language or genre, will be struck by what has not been said. There is important work to be done on the possibility of Marian miracles in English drama, on gender issues within and around these tales, on associated reading habits and patronage of royalty, on further source work and continental comparisons, on the relationships between local and general miracles, on the many English illustrations of Marian miracles, and especially on the Anglo-Norman collections. I have focused on what struck me many years ago as some conspicuous organizing features of the supposedly disorganized English examples, and on one through-line of development traceable from the earliest iterations of the Theophilus legend in England and down to the end of the Middle Ages. But there is much more that might be said, and I hope that it will be said.

The presence in the medieval consciousness, however, of a Marian figure of ferocity and learnedness and usefully ambiguous Jewish-Christian religious identity is an important corrective to the often too-easily accepted notion that the object of Marian devotion was either consistently gentle and maternal or somehow (simply) all-meaningful. I do not think that Mary could be all things to all people. Rather, surviving Miracles of the Virgin show that she could fulfill very specific functions in the English imagination, and that those functions could shift with regional and temporal conditions. The sign ‘Mary’ had a range of possible meanings, yes, but these are the kinds of texts that hold up mirrors. Mary's legal and Jewish embodiments in these miracles are a performance of English and Christian law, made flexible and accessible. Her unstable and potentially infinite performances mark her as a flashpoint, a creative and paradoxical sign, in some of the most familiar medieval English literary and theological negotiations. The figure that stands out at the end of this study – the figure of Mary legislatrix – is also a figure of English desire and identity.