On November 21 the Church keeps the Memorial of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary — the feast that commemorates, according to the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James, the moment when the child Mary, at the age of three, was brought by her parents Joachim and Anne to the Temple in Jerusalem and presented to God. The feast is a memorial of dedication — Mary's own dedication of herself, from childhood, to the God who would later ask of her the fiat of the Annunciation.
The Protoevangelium, a second-century text, gives the scene: Anne, after long childlessness, vows that if she has a child she will dedicate it to the Lord. When Mary is born, Joachim brings her, at three, to the Temple, where she is received by the high priest and placed among the virgins. The story is not in the canonical Gospels, but it shaped Marian devotion from the earliest centuries — and the feast itself, first kept in the East in the 6th century, was introduced to the West by a Crusader-era French nobleman, Philippe de Mazières, who brought it from Constantinople and obtained its approval from Gregory XI in 1373. It was extended to the universal Church by Sixtus V in 1585.
In Jerusalem, the traditional site of the Presentation is marked by the Church of St. Anne, near the Sheep Pool — the same 5th-century basilica that marks the birthplace of Mary, where the crypt is associated with her parents' home. The feast has no single pilgrimage site of its own, but the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Temple that the child Mary entered, is the geographic centre of the devotion.
