When Anselm wrote his influential prayers to the Virgin Mary, he was not yet in England. Anselm of Bec could not have known, in the decades before William Rufus made him Archbishop of Canterbury, what importance he would have for England, for the growth of medieval private devotion, and for the development of Marian devotion in particular. Anselm's personal and conversational appeal to Mary, and especially his consciousness of Mary's doubleness – the simultaneity of her mercy and judgment, and the sinner's inability to know which he may provoke – anticipated what R. W. Southern called the ‘caprice’ of later medieval Marian literature, wherein Mary could intervene with cure or curse for ‘the just and the unjust alike’. When Southern commented that ‘[o]f all Anselm's prayers there can be no doubt that the most important and original are those to St Mary’, he surely had in mind his earlier work on the English origins of the Miracles of the Virgin.

St Anselm's indirect influence is everywhere evident in Southern's arguments concerning the earliest Latin collections of tales of Mary's miraculous intervention. It is St Anselm's nephew, the younger Anselm, who is responsible for the earliest gathering of such stories, and, according to Southern, the nephew's endeavor was in great part due to ‘his long association with St. Anselm and his friends’ and his resulting ‘enthusiasm … [for] the propagation of the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary in all its branches’. The younger Anselm was a Norman, educated in Chiusa, and later Abbot of Bury St Edmunds, where he compiled his collection of Marian miracles. He had traveled frequently with his uncle in the early years of the twelfth century, and he, along with Eadmer of Canterbury, was among the earliest public proponents of the celebration of the feast of the Conception of Mary in the West.