From its earliest elaborations the scene of Mary at the Annunciation has been defined by her enclosure. In the fourth century, Ambrose insisted that the Virgin was inside alone when Gabriel arrived; by the twelfth century, this aspect of the story had strongly shaped what the scene meant, and how and in what ways the Annunciation scene facilitated devotion. Much more was at stake than simply setting the stage: Mary's enclosure came to symbolize the necessary intactness of her womb, her unassailable virginity. The miraculously sealed room and womb merge to help prove the miraculousness of God made man. Simultaneously, however, the room must be porous to angels, her womb porous to the Holy Spirit and the whole event porous to the imaginative prayers of devout Christians. No longer private at all, the space of her roomwomb is so public as to be the business of God and all humankind; it is the site of the Incarnation, the moment when the hope of salvation opens to the world. The concurrent containment and porosity of the Annunciation straddle the same paradoxical ambivalence as God and man in Christ.

The ambivalent sacred space of the Annunciation room and the historical spaces with which it metaphorically overlaps in medieval texts can be productively theorized by means of Foucault's idea of the heterotopia, discussed in a 1967 lecture and subsequently published posthumously. As a kind of heterotopia the space of the Annunciation can be seen to ‘presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates [it] and makes [it] penetrable’ (Foucault's fifth principle). Mary's private room can be inhabited by God and the angel, approaching from heaven, and yet also inhabited by the meditant, approaching from the future. Its contained penetrability extends across time, as does its relevance to Foucault's third principle of the heterotopia: ‘The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.’ The texts I examine in this chapter combine together the historical space of the Annunciation room with the very real historical spaces of enclosed female readers – Mary's room merges with the anchorhold or the recluse's room. Early medieval sources consistently describe Mary as praying alone and enclosed when Gabriel arrives, and often they identify her as following a religious life.