Walsingham and the English Imagination

Citation preview

Walsingham and the English Imagination

For Katie, Philip, and my many students who have helped me explore the diverse imaginings of Walsingham. Also in memory of Fr Kenneth Prebble (1914-2008), priest, actor (Xena: Warrior Princess), and father to many scholars, artists, and public servants

Walsingham and the English Imagination

Gary Waller Purchase College, State University of New York, USA

© Gary Waller 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Gary Waller has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Waller, Gary F. (Gary Fredric), 1945– Walsingham and the English imagination. 1. Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham (Little Walsingham, England) 2. Religion and literature – England – History. 3. Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages in literature. 4. Sacred space in literature. 5. Christian shrines – England – Little Walsingham. 6. English literature – History and criticism. 7. Little Walsingham (England) – Religious life and customs. I. Title 820.9’3826304242612-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Waller, Gary F. (Gary Fredric), 1945– Walsingham and the English imagination / by Gary Waller. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4094-0509-2 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4094-0510-8 (eBook) 1. Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham (Little Walsingham, England) 2. Religion and literature—England—History. 3. Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages in literature. 4. Christian shrines—England—Little Walsingham. 5. Sacred space in literature. 6. English literature—History and criticism. 7. Little Walsingham (England)—Religious life and customs. I. Title. PR145.W34 2011 820.9’3826304242612—dc22 2010048251 ISBN: 9781409405092 (hbk) ISBN: 9781409405108 (ebk)

Contents List of Figures   Preface   1 Historical Imagination: The Invented Tradition of Our Lady of Walsingham  

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2 Gynotheological Imagination: The Virgin’s Body and the Alternate Mariologies of Late Medieval Walsingham  

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3 Walsingham’s Chaucer: Erasmus’s Peregrinatio Religionis Ergo  

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4 “As You Came from Walsingham”: Walsingham in Poetry and Music after the Dissolution   

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5 The Protestantization of Walsingham  

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6 Walsingham’s Victorian Chaucer: Agnes Strickland’s The Pilgrims of Walsingham  

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7 Re-Catholicization: Walsingham in Literature from Hopkins and Waterton to A.N. Wilson   

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8 Alternate, Post-modern, Feminist Mary(ies)? Imagining Walsingham Today  

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Works Cited    Index  

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List of Figures 1.1 Map of Little Walsingham. From The Archaeological Journal, June 1856. By permission of the Archivist, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

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1.2

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Friary ruins, Little Walsingham. Photograph by permission of John Twyning.

1.3 The Knight’s Gate, Little Walsingham. By permission of John Twyning.

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2.1

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Window of the Anunciation, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. By permission of Graham Howard, Official Photographer, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

3.1 East window, Augustinian Priory. Photograph by permission of John Twyning.

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3.2 Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham: Altar of The Holy House. By permission of Graham Howard, Official Photographer, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

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3.3 The “Abbey,” Little Walsingham. Photograph by permission of John Twyning.

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3.4 Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham: the Holy House. By permission of Graham Howard, Official Photographer, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

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4.1 The Common Place, Little Walsingham. Photograph by Gary Waller.

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5.1 The holy wells and modern pilgrims, Little Walsingham. Photograph by permission of John Twyning.

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7.1 Priory excavations, 1853–1854. By permission of the Archivist, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

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8.1 The Slipper Chapel, Houghton St Giles. Photograph by permission of John Twyning.

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8.2 Shrine Garden, Anglican Shrine. Photograph by permission of John Twyning.

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8.3

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“The Age of Miracles”: High St, Little Walsingham.  Photograph by permission of Ian Seymour/Luminousowl.

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8.4 The “Enigma,” Anglican Shrine garden. By permission of Graham Howard, Official Photographer, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

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8.5 Modern protestors, Common Place, Walsingham. By permission of Dominic Janes.

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Preface Walsingham and the English Imagination is intended to be a scholarly book, but it is rooted in a personal, though (like Walsingham itself) rich and contradictory complexity of subjective and local experiences. Walsingham has been a recurring fascination of mine since my student days when I first indulged in and then firmly, though with some regret, abandoned the mysteries and contradictions of AngloCatholicism. In attempting to discover and speculate about why I have renewed that fascination some decades later, in what I hope is an Erasmian spirit, skeptical but intrigued, I have found it necessary to go back and forth across the uneasily navigated, and multiple, boundaries among literary scholarship and criticism, historical research, psychoanalytic and cultural studies, and also adventure with not a little awe and (hopefully) humility into the vast and tangled and understandably contested field of Mariology, though not just with scholars in one or other Christian tradition, but with those working on the Jewish-Christian and Islamic-Christian relations such as Miri Rubin, as well as “post-Christian” (or in Julia Kristeva’s term, “Christian atheist”) points of view. In other recent studies, I have pursued this fascination with the Virgin Mary in literature and popular culture within late medieval and early modern England. In the present book, my focus is very different: it moves for the most part into later historical periods and tackles one manageable topic, the cultural significance, what (graciously prompted by Erika Gaffney at Ashgate) I term the English “imagination” (a sometimes all-too-easily reified term also used, less tentatively than I, by Peter Ackroyd in his quirkish but stimulating study, The English Imagination) and (adapting Hobsbaum and Ranger’s famous term) the “invention of traditions,” surrounding the Priory and Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, the most important pilgrimage site in medieval England dedicated to the Virgin. But just as this book is not a broad account of Mariology but concentrates on one identifiable place, so it is by no means a standard history of that place. In Walsingham’s case, there are many of those, although many of them are acts of enthusiastic pious devotion rather than intellectual or historical analysis, and while I am grateful to draw on them at times, my focus is very different. This book is an acknowledgement that the “imaginings”—mainly literary, though in the case of the so-called “Walsingham ballad,” reaching out to both the words and music of popular culture—occasioned by Walsingham and its shrine are multiple, contradictory, and go well beyond the narrow orthodoxies of the dominant patriarchal traditions that have tried to control its meanings. I start from the time when stories of Walsingham’s founding were “invented,” or at least given shape, in the mid-fifteenth century, and I show that since then there has been a rich imaginative tradition that includes poems, fiction, songs, ballads, musical compositions and folk legends. Most were composed after its destruction during



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the dissolution of the monasteries and other religious institutions in the late 1530s, including one of the most poignant and widely adapted ballads in early modern England that was rediscovered during the eighteenth century’s re-invention of medievalism, and in what I term (with a little irony) Walsingham’s second Chaucer, Agnes Strickland’s nineteenth-century romantic novel, The Pilgrims of Walsingham. I take the ‘imaginings’ of Walsingham into the late nineteenth century with an analysis of what I term the “re-catholicization” of Walsingham, including some analysis of Edmund Waterton’s remarkable Pietas Mariana Britannica, an antiquarian collection of myths, legends, historical documents and nostalgia, more imaginative story-telling than history, and very indicative of the later nineteenth century fascination with Walsingham, and the need to construct or invent traditions for it. I move then to the twentieth century, to the modernist engagement with Walsingham—marginally but importantly in the work of the Anglo-Catholic writers, T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, and Charles Williams, whose “theology of romantic love” articulates for the twentieth century the “way of affirmation” that keeps recurring part in the Walsingham tradition; and, in a different genre, a number of both serious and popular novels, most especially those of A.N. Wilson, in which Walsingham is a frequent background, and in some a rich setting for provocative social comedy. In my final chapter, in what I hope is at least partly in the spirit of Erasmus (and indeed some of Wilson’s fiction), I describe the multiple, contested, “post-modern” Madonna the shrine honors, and look at the complex “text” of early twenty-first century Walsingham, once more a place that brings to itself thousands of pilgrims, visitors, sentimentalists, skeptics—and multiple imaginings, made all the more interesting in the light of new challenges Walsingham faces following Pope Benedict XVI’s announcement in October 2009 that the Roman Catholic Church would, under special circumstances, welcome traditional Anglicans, particularly Anglo-Catholics, back into full communion with Rome. How that is received by the authorities at the Anglican shrine, and whatever “imaginings” and stories may follow from that landmark, remains to be seen, especially in the light of further moves in the Church of England to allow the ordination of women bishops, a matter to which most Walsingham Anglican authorities have strong opposition. My story pauses in 2011, just as the “Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham” receives a small but well-publicized number of Anglo-Catholics, with no doubt more to come. Paradoxically, at the same time as the traditional patriarchal images of the Virgin (and ecclesiastical hierarchies) are being upheld by Walsingham’s authorities, feminist theology, with its focus on developing alternatives to patriarchy, has become a vigorous presence in early twenty-first century religious and philosophical thought, not least among Roman Catholics, and especially in the final chapter I relate Walsingham to that movement—and, not incidentally, raise the issue of how men’s desires, including my own, do or might become active in that struggle. Among many contemporary feminist theologians from whom I

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have learnt, I want to single out for special thanks the writings of Tina Beattie, whose work (both scholarly and popular) in has been profoundly influential on my thinking in this book, as it has upon my other recent scholarly explorations of Mariology and literary and popular culture. In this project, as always, I have been helped by many colleagues, friends, and loved ones. In particular, in 2008 I was one of a group of scholars who met at Walsingham to share their research interests in the place and its many stories. The essays that emerged from that meeting, edited by Dominic Janes and myself, were published by Ashgate in 2010 under the title of Walsingham in Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to Modernity. I am deeply grateful for the insights of the participants and contributors, who have influenced much of the thinking that went into this book. They include Simon Coleman, whose many pioneering investigations, singly and with co-authors, of Walsingham’s combination of orthodox and “subversive” possibilities opened up for me the possibility of exploring the multiple experiences in earlier pilgrimage; Carole Hill, for her work on St Anne and the Holy Kin across medieval Norfolk; Dominic Janes, for his spirit of collaboration and his sharp insights into Victorian idolatry and iconoclasm, and for the use of one of his photographs; John Twyning and Amy Murray, also for photographs, as well as fellowship; Bradley Brookshire, for his work on Byrd and his inspired musicianship which kept me humming variations of the Walsingham Ballad while hunting elusive footnotes. I thank Susan Morrison not only for her groundbreaking work on medieval women pilgrims to Walsingham and, most recently, on waste theory, but for many helpful comments on many early drafts of chapter two. I want to express special gratitude to Michael Carroll, for his providing a model of bold analyses of popular Catholicism and the application of psychoanalysis to the history of religion, as well as for his and his wife Lori Campbell’s continually stimulating companionship. I also owe a substantial debt to Alison Chapman, who not only illuminated me with her incisive essays on material on key parts of this work, but generously read some chapters at early (and very naïve) stages and so saved me from further (though no doubt potentially chastening) embarrassment. Michele Osherow has frequently reminded me of the biblical backgrounds I would have otherwise overlooked; Miriam (or Mariam) of Nazareth was Jewish before she was christianized, allegorized, and acquired titles, shrines, and devotees. In different but no less valuable ways Craig Dionne and Alison Shell helped me to realize and articulate some of what I was saying along with Erika Gaffney, Whitney Feininger, Seth Hibbert, and their production team (frequently showing great patience), as well as Ashgate’s anonymous external readers. There are also a number of people associated with present-day Walsingham to whom I owe thanks, who have for some years indulged me, more or less happy to hear my more extravagant ruminations. These friends include Guide Extraordinary Scilla Landale and her tireless colleagues; as I started work on this book, Scilla was being fêted for 20 years of guiding visitors around Walsingham and surrounding villages. I thank our frequent hosts at The Old Bakehouse in

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Little Walsingham, Kay and Richard. Tessa Hobbs, the designer of the Anglican shrine’s wonderful gardens, was very helpful in providing information on the process by which the garden was developed and nurtured. I am appreciative of the staff, clerical and lay, of both the Anglican and Roman Catholic Shrines of Our Lady of Walsingham, and especially those at the Anglican shrine for their hospitality at our conference in 2008, for permitting me to reproduce photographs from their archive, and their continuing friendliness towards one who remains an extremely fond skeptic. They exemplify the generous expression of the Shrine that Walsingham is for all people. I thank the staffs of the University Library, Cambridge, the Pepys Librarian at Magdalene, Dr Stephen Lucket, who permitted me to consult the Library’s unique copy of the Pynson Ballad, and the persistent and tolerant interlibrary loan and visual resources staff at Purchase College and the College’s Librarian, Patrick Callahan. Mary Ellen Lamb, editor of the Sidney Journal, characteristically generously, solicited an essay from me on Robert Sidney’s encounter with Our Lady of Walsingham, and an early version of parts of chapter four appeared there. Some parts of chapter five appeared in my contributions to Walsingham in Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to Modernity, co-edited with Dominic Janes, published by Ashgate, and some of the examples in chapters two and four, in abbreviated form and with a different focus, are discussed in The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture, published by Cambridge University Press. Some of the research for the book was undertaken with the help of grants from the Purchase College Foundation and the Greenwood/Labadorf Faculty Support Award fund in the School of Humanities, whose office staff, Rosalie Reutershan and Stephanie Acton, were always helpful. I appreciate the kind offices of Jennifer Clarke, sometime Provost at Purchase College, and the College’s Associate Provost Bill Baskin. My greatest debt is to my wife Kathleen McCormick, in admiration of her own extraordinary explorations, in her life and writings, of what I have studied largely from the outside. Like Julian of Norwich, who appears briefly in chapter two, she works in her study usually accompanied, like Julian, or so the Ancrene Riwle would permit, by our cat, Katerina Puck, and is a generous and wise giver of advice and support to a continual stream of visitors, especially her students, and including me.`Walsingham’s Holy House has become a meditative and imaginative focus for her in remarkable and creative ways. Our son Philip also helped, pointing out with his characteristic incontrovertible (then 16-year-old) authority when taken on yet another visit to Walsingham that, for 500 years after the Dissolution, everyone there seemed to be treating Henry VIII with unnecessary leniency. I try to live up to the inspiration I receive from him as well as from his Lady Mother.

Chapter 1

Historical Imagination: The Invented Tradition of Our Lady of Walsingham In the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge, is the only known copy of a printed tract, consisting of just four leaves, without title page or authorial ascription. Published by the prominent Tudor printer, Richard Pynson, whose characteristic mark—described ecstatically by Thomas Waterton, the nineteenthcentury antiquarian and Mariologist as “the monogram of our Blessed Ladye,”— appears on the first and last pages. It consists of a poem of 27-line ballad stanzas with a four-line introduction. The type and printing devices suggest the poem was printed between 1496 and 1499, although from internal references its composition is usually dated around 30 years earlier. Conventionally referred to as the “Pynson Ballad,” no other copy, printed or in manuscript, is known to exist—although it has been reprinted many times since the nineteenth-century revival of interest in its subject. It purports to tell the origins of the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, a chapel dedicated to the Virgin and known later as the “Holy House,” built, the ballad asserts, by orders of an aristocratic lady in Walsingham, Norfolk, Richeldis de Faverches, with the help of angels (and at least initially by local East Anglian craftsmen) in obedience to a thrice-repeated vision or dream of the Virgin Mary: A noble wydowe, somtyme lady of this towne, Called Rychold, in lyvynge full vertuous, Desyred of Oure Lady a petycyowne Hir to honoure with some werke bountyous, This blyssed Virgyn and Lady most gracyous Graunted hir petycyon, as I shall after tell, Unto hir worschyp to edefye this chapell.  Edmund Waterton, Pietas Mariana Brittanica. 2 vols (London: St Joseph’s Catholic Library, 1879), I, 65.  Magdalene College, Cambridge, Pepys Library, 1254 (STC 25001). No other publication is recorded. The Pynson Ballad was mentioned early in the nineteenth century in C.H. Hartshorne, The Book Rarities in the University of Cambridge Illustrated (London, 1829), 237. J.C.T. Oates records the existence of what was likely a second copy in the late seventeenth century, most likely not the copy acquired by Pepys, and now no longer extant: see “Pynson and the Holy Blood of Hayles,” The Library 5th series, 13 (1958) 269–77. J.C. Dickinson’s survey of Walsingham’s history, The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), hereafter cited as Shrine, still remains the most reliable and, unless otherwise noted, details of my account of pre-Reformation



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Today, sitting at one’s desk and zooming rapidly on GoogleEarth into the village of Little Walsingham in north-west Norfolk perhaps provides an experience akin to what medieval men and women might have envisioned as an angel’s eye view. If Walsingham’s Holy House, like its sister santa casa at Loreto, in Italy— ‘older’ or ‘younger’ sister has been a matter of occasional but sometimes intense debate—had not been constructed on the site but had been flown to Norfolk by angels, the angelic transport of delight would have seen a landscape not unlike that which we get today from our computer, or from a low-flying plane, or even (presumably) the patrolling stealth bombers that every few hours regularly disturb the tranquility of surrounding villages. As we approach on whatever our transport, virtual or physical—perhaps coming north-east from London, east over the fens from Cambridge and Ely, or west from Norwich—we can see a spoke of A and B roads and (as we get closer) by-roads and paths, all converging on this remote village. Walsingham seems to draw these multiple pathways towards itself as if, because of its very isolation, it had been chosen as the tantalizing end of many, perhaps difficult, but certainly deliberate, even obsessive, journeys. For Googlevoyager or angel, such a journey may not involve a huge effort, but for a visitor on foot (or today even by car) it can seem to take a surprising amount of time. The Walsinghams—Great and Little, named not for size or importance but date of settlement—are still relatively isolated. The nearest large towns are Kings Lynn (25 miles away), Norwich (40) and Cambridge (70), with London about 120. The nearest bank and supermarket are in Fakenham, six miles away, reached by navigating narrow lanes and one B-road before reaching the A148 and heading into the Fakenham roundabout. One of the Village websites tells us pointedly under the heading “Banks” that “there is no bank in Walsingham,” and under “Petrol” warns that the nearest source is at the roundabout. The still perceivable pattern of multiple paths converging upon Walsingham suggests, however, that it was once a popular destination. In fact, in the sixteenth century, the route from London to Walsingham was listed first on authoritative lists of England’s main roads, and some of the road remained known as the “Walsingham Way” even after the Dissolution of England’s religious houses in the late 1530s removed any reason for most people to make the journey. Nor has Walsingham are drawn from there. Also helpful are the Anglican Colin Stephenson’s jaunty blending of history and legend, Walsingham Way (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1970; reprinted Canterbury Press, Norwich, 2008), and the Roman Catholic Elizabeth Ruth Obbard, ODC, The History and Spirituality of Walsingham (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1995). Many relevant documents are also collected and modernized in the more partisan accounts by Leonard E. Whatmore, Highway to Walsingham (Walsingham: The Pilgrim Bureau, 1973), and H.M. Gillett, Walsingham: The History of a Famous Shrine (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1950). The Catholic Michael Rear’s Walsingham: Pilgrims and Pilgrimage (London: St Paul’s, 2011) is praised by the Anglican Administrator as a story of “triumph and tragedy.” See also the shared website: www.walsingham.org.  http://www.newdawn.org.uk/village.htm. For the village website, see http://www. walsinghamvillage.org. Accessed March 1, 2011.

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access improved greatly in recent years. A railway station in the village was closed over 50 years ago and is now, with an Onion added to the roof and some other renovations, an Orthodox chapel. On the edge of the village the little Stiffkey River was, in the Middle Ages, navigable by barge, but now can in places almost be leapt across. Trains run from London Kings Cross via Cambridge to Kings Lynn, and from London Liverpool Street to Norwich. Scheduled coaches from London come only as far as Fakenham. Local buses (with at least one change) meander through the north Norfolk countryside and can, after some time, connect visitors from the train or coach to the village. A quaint narrow gauge steam open-carriage railway rattles five miles northeast and joins the village to Wells-next-the-Sea, a seaside town among the sand dunes, clogged muddy inlets, and souvenir emporiums of the north Norfolk coast (miles of golden sands, as local tourist brochures somewhat euphemistically put it). Nearby Holkham Beach does have expansive sands (and more mud) and provided the windswept setting for the final scene of the film Shakespeare in Love, in which it was meant to represent the uninhabited and not entirely welcoming coast of the New World. Walsingham, local villages, and the big-skyed countryside provide the background for some of the novels of A.N. Wilson (which are treated in some detail in Chapter 7), while Wells and other nearby towns, particularly Swaffham and Castle Acre, are strikingly glamorized in seductively attractive and (when one looks at the ‘real’ settings) highly-selective village and sea-front scenes in the popular ITV series Kingdom (2006-2009), starring Stephen Fry, and idealizing the seemingly untouched landscape of north Norfolk, which is now one of Britain’s most popular venues for second homes. Let us cast our imaginings a little further afield to the whole area. East Anglia was England’s most prosperous region in the fifteenth century. Remnants of that affluence are seen today in the large churches in wool towns like Lavenham or Sudbury, the cathedrals of Ely, Bury St Edmunds, Norwich, and Ipswich, the apparently innumerable village churches, at least one of which seems always in sight, and the ruins, often every few miles, of medieval priories, monasteries, nunneries, chapels and other religious buildings. Facing Europe, and particularly the Low Countries, the region was open in the late Middle Ages to trade and other European influences as well as to the cold winds from the steppes, and eventually to the sharp gales of religious change. It was also from East Anglia that many Protestant exiles came to settle New England, and it was where, in the 1640s, an especially determined purging of the remaining trappings of popery occurred, overseen by the clumsy brutality of Parliament’s appointed regional iconoclast, William Dowsing. Little Walsingham’s official population is now under 1,000—smaller than in the 1530s—although it is now annually swollen, as was the case for 400 years before the dissolution of the monasteries, by hundreds of thousands of visitors, tourists, and, most remarkably, pilgrims. This book is not a history of that transformation of a decaying village into picturesque and busy modern Walsingham, although in the final chapters, some reference is made to that striking revival in the past hundred and more years. It is rather a study of the conflicting ideologies that have



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attached themselves over hundreds of years to this intriguing place. I trace how the “imaginings” produced by Walsingham, especially in literature and popular culture (which includes pilgrimages and ballads in the late medieval and early modern period and collections of legends and popular fiction more recently) reveal something of the complex process by which England, on the surface, and even ambiguously below its surface (a metaphor the importance of which will become evident in later chapters), became a partly Protestant, and eventually partly secular and multi-religious, society and how remnants of many older magics (to adapt C.S. Lewis’s overused but apt cliché in Narnia) have contributed to and ambiguated that process. Between the mid-twelfth century (the date of its origins is a matter of controversy, as will shortly be revealed) and 1538, when it was closed and largely wrecked, Walsingham grew in popularity as a pilgrimage site, rivaling and even at times surpassing the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury; and, before the rise in the fifteenth century of the shrine of Our Lady of Loreto, it was probably the most important center for the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Europe. It was, of course, only one of hundreds of shrines and pilgrimage sites dedicated to the Virgin Mary across late medieval England—but, at least by the mid-fifteenth century, it was the best known and the most visited. Its mystique was centered on the Holy House, reputedly a replica of Mary’s house at Nazareth; it also possessed twin holy wells and a number of relics, including the knuckle of St Peter’s hand and a vial of the Virgin Mary’s milk. It was a site (at least according to the story in the Pynson Ballad) of both a visitation by and miracles of the Virgin. In the Holy House was erected a statue of the Madonna and child, the “Image” of Our Lady of Walsingham, which over the centuries became the primary objective of pilgrims’ veneration. The shrine accumulated a history of visits by Kings, Queens, lords, and pilgrims from all over England and Europe, along with lands, bequests, jewels and other riches. If (as the common saying, supposedly dating from before the Norman conquest, though documentable only back as far as Edward I, is true), England was described as the “dowry” of the Virgin, then by the mid-fifteenth century, when the Pynson Ballad was written, Walsingham was its most glittering jewel. Its great lack, then as in later centuries, was not having had a poet or grand chronicler of Chaucer’s ability to write a collection of “Walsingham Tales.” The  For Walsingham’s reputation among English shrines, see Anne Vail, Shrines of Our Lady in England (Leominster: Gracewing, 2004), 177. For a comparison of Walsingham and Loreto, see Michael P. Carroll, “Pilgrimage at Walsingham on the Eve of the Reformation: Speculations on a “splendid diversity” Only Dimly Perceived,” in Walsingham and English Culture: Landscape, Sexuality, and Cultural Memory, (eds) Dominic Janes and Gary Waller (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 35–48. I provide a broader context for Walsingham among Marian shrines in England in The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), chapter four.  Mark Elvins, The Origin of the Title “Dowry of Mary” and the Shrines of Our Lady at Westminster (Wallington: ECBVM, 1989).

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closest Walsingham comes to having a Chaucer is Erasmus: in the 1520s, the great humanist published a witty colloquy in latin, the Peregrinatio Religionis Ergo (usually translated as A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake) based on a visit (possibly two) to Walsingham a decade earlier. As I shall show in Chapters 3 and 4, the Peregrinatio did have significant political impact when it was translated into English in the 1530s, but it never had the literary cachet of The Canterbury Tales. In the mid-nineteenth century, Agnes Strickland ‘penned’ (the appropriate term for a work of such high-blown rhetoric) The Pilgrims of Walsingham; or, Tales of the Middle Ages: an Historical Romance (1835), which, as I shall suggest in Chapter 6, does capture something of the Victorians’ romanticized re-imaginations of the allure of Walsingham only a decade or two before its revival started. Throughout its history (including its renewal in the past century), Walsingham has drawn adulation and reverence, skepticism and revulsion. In the 1530s, when Henry VIII, who had been twice a pilgrim to and remained a generous financial supporter of the shrine, decided to break from Rome and eventually to abolish all the religious foundations, Walsingham was a particular target of the reformers’ hostility. Seemingly at its zenith—when all roads on the weblike network of East Anglia seemed to lead there—it was singled out for intense verbal attack as well as physical devastation. The goal of the reformers was to get the “image” of Our Lady of Walsingham “out of … their heddes,” so that “the people should use noe more idolatrye unto” it. Even more than 20 years after the wrecking of the shrine and the Holy House, and the ceremonial burning of the statue or ‘image’ of Our Lady of Walsingham in London in 1538, the Elizabethan Homily, “Against Peril of Idolatry,” was still reminding pious Protestants that Our Lady of Walsingham had been a dangerous heathen idol. Today, the results of the iconoclasm of the sixteenth century and the gradual crumbling and removal of the great priory and its shrine over, now, nearly five centuries, can only be sensed from the neatly manicured lawns and well-tended walls of what since the seventeenth century—as part of what I term in Chapter 5 the “protestantization” of Walsingham—has been termed the “Abbey” and its grounds. The dominating feature is the twin-turreted arch of the east window of the priory church, dating from the late thirteenth century. To the south are some cloisters and an undercroft that abut onto the largely eighteenth-century manor house, which was a major setting for the 2009 film Glorious 39, directed by Stephen Poliakoff. Along with various outcrops of walls and paving, this is all that remains of medieval England’s greatest shrine to the Virgin Mary. From its beginnings, Walsingham has been a repository of powerful and contradictory stories. My title, Walsingham and the English Imagination, uses Thomas Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England during the Reigns of the Tudors, from A.D. 1485 to 1559, (ed.) William Douglas Hamilton (London, Camden Society, 1877), I, 83; Sir Roger Townsend to Thomas Cromwell, in Gillett, Walsingham, 65–6; Certain Sermons Or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1855), 209. 

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an historically ambiguous term “imagination,” not to reify some metaphysical principle of “imagination” as Enlightenment and Romantic theorists like Coleridge postulated, but to point, as Aristotle does, to the imitative, palimpsestical, storymaking capacity of human beings. In De Anima, Aristotle speaks of phantasia as the process by which we say an image is presented to us; in the Poetics, mimesis means, in part, the creative imagination and is associated not just with observation and understanding, but with desire—mimesis involves not merely clear and distinct mental content but risk and passion. Mimesis is therefore also associated with story; humans, says Aristotle repeatedly, are story-telling animals. It may in fact be, as the feminist Catholic theologian Tina Beattie argues, that “creativity is a more fundamental attribute than rationality,” with our stories acquiring our loyalty and embodying our desires more easily than rational arguments, thus becoming the means by which, argues A.N. Wilson, we persuade ourselves that our “drift through time actually has a shape.” In a world characteristically experienced as discontinuity, with change and unpredictability “at our backs,” as Andrew Marvell puts it, it is our capacity “to draw out shapes, stories, significance” that gives us something to live by. Even though it uses the same heavily ideology-laden key term, Peter Ackroyd’s study, Albion: the Origins of the English Imagination (2002) has a far broader scope than the present book, but it also has a more static, ahistorical conception of the imagination and the interaction of locality and story-making. Ackroyd sees the “English imagination” as consisting of a motley of recurring, even atemporal, paradoxes—it is at once local and yet epic, both ideal and pragmatic, tolerant and exclusive, ostensibly Protestant yet continuing a pre-Reformation Catholic sensibility in its love of ritual in ballads, folk songs, or pantomime. Terry Eagleton comments that Ackroyd’s Englishness is about “muddle rather than metaphysics, amiable anecdotes rather than grand narratives.” But above all, according to Ackroyd, the “English imagination” has no history: “Like heaven, England is a land unafflicted by mutability.” My approach is more historical, acknowledging that patterns recur, or disappear and reappear in an “endless recapitulation of For the imagination in Aristotle, see Malcolm Schofield, “Aristotle on the Imagination,” in G.E.R. Lloyd & G.E.L. Owen (eds), Aristotle on the Mind and the Senses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 99–140. For the “imagination” as the historically and ideologically driven capacity to “image” stories that reverberate, as Marx said, across history, see e.g., Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Ideas of Creativity in Western Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (1988). For a humanistically oriented cognitive view, see N.J.T. Thomas, “Are Theories of Imagery Theories of Imagination? An Active Perception Approach to Conscious Mental Content.” Cognitive Science (23) 207–45.  Tina Beattie, The New Atheists: the Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion (London: Continuum, 2009), 164; A.N. Wilson, A Watch in the Night (New York: Norton, 1998), 19; Daughters of Albion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 186.  Peter Ackroyd, Albion: the Origins of the English Imagination (London: Vintage, 2002). 

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patterns and constant interplay of opposing forces”; and that, as Eagleton puts it, the present is a complex “palimpsest through which the spectral lineaments “ of many pasts are “dimly visible”10 and, indeed, may go in and out of focus,even disappear and reappear. Ackroyd’s is therefore a symbolic rather than a social or ideological history. Where I agree with his approach is in seeing its roots in community ritual and in the cultivation, often from the margins of the culture, of the surprising and recurring, the intuitive and the anecdotal, the uncanny rather than the rational, and the paradoxical connections between the local and the apparently universal. But as the history of Walsingham will show, we need also to acknowledge, as he does not seem to, the place of violence, exploitation, exclusion, class, economic, and gender conflict, and disappearance and re-imagining within the “English imagination.” So, although I draw on the historical researches of many recent historians, my study of Walsingham is not primarily an ‘empirical’ history; it is concerned rather with the history of ideologies, with the “imaginings” of history, the “invention” of its changing stories, the reasons they were created, and how, particularly in the centuries after Walsingham’s destruction, they continued, fragmentarily but powerfully, to give voice to complex yearnings, desires, losses, and fears in popular devotion, literature, music, and other cultural forms. Shared stories are the means by which ideologies shape individual subjects through, as Louis Althusser put it, the process of “interpellation,” the calling or binding a community together within a dominant ideology while attempting to exclude alternative accounts of reality.11 Here I am in sympathy with Ackroyd: it is in cultural artifacts like poems, plays, paintings, architecture, where the emotional and underlying ideological history of a culture is often most powerfully accumulated and may capture the feelings of a society much more intimately than official documents or other seemingly solid historical records. That is particularly the case when it wrestles with figures, like the Virgin, that evoke powerful and contradictory emotional allegiances. “Marian art,” Beattie claims, has been an “enduring and revealing” creation of the human imagination, like the Incarnation itself, “bringing something new into the world,” with Mary herself as “the sublime artist of the new creation in Christ.”12 Elizabeth Johnson, also writing from a Catholic feminist perspective, argues that theological statements about Mary might best be read as “imaginative creations, given birth in the course of faith-filled reflections,” and so belonging less to the field of theology than to meditation and poetry. Most Christians, of course, understand “statements about Mary” in creed and dogma to be “primarily historical … giving information 10 Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others (London: Verso, 2003), 216, 219. 11 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 174. 12 Tina Beattie, “Let Nature Leap for Joy, and Let Women be Honoured: The Place of Mary in the Christian Traditions,” Paper at a Conference at Sarum College, 5–7 December 2008, 23: tina.beattie.googlepages.com/Sarum_College_longer_paper.pdf. Accessed June 1, 2010.



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of a literally factual nature about this unique person,”13 but one need not share such literalism or even the more sophisticated, but still narrowly-focused perspective as Johnson’s or Beattie’s to recognize the power of stories of the Virgin that have been embodied in Walsingham’s rich imaginative history. Julia Kristeva offers a different perspective on how a culture’s stories of the Virgin throughout history may contribute to understanding how we are constructed as human beings. Even if, she argues, religion may be “nothing less than illusion,” an “unrealistic construct,” nonetheless through its stories it can nevertheless give us accurate representations of the “reality of its subjects’ dreams” as we “destabilized” human subjects search for stabilization. The stories of the Virgin Mary constructed by the Church may, Kristeva acknowledges, have been a primary means by which it tried to keep the potential power of women under paternal control, and in doing so, helped to “infantalize half the human race by hampering their sexual and intellectual expression,” but we should nevertheless consider that the stories embodying such religious beliefs are projections of fantasies which reveal “the primal bedrock of our identities,” and therefore should be listened to with care.14 Stories, however, change, especially when laden with significant cultural meanings: the history of any community contains multiple, contradictory stories, and even its foundational stories may be re-imagined or re-invented as they fail to meet the felt needs of their community. Some stories may cease to be told except out of nostalgia. There are stories that cannot, at certain periods, be told at all, and there are stories that may be imposed, often brutally. One of the most intriguing of Walsingham’s stories is the Shrine’s sudden destruction in the sixteenth century and how that precipitated the ‘loss’ or ‘disappearance’ of the Virgin Mary from the spiritual life of England—“the national abandonment” of Mary, as a nineteenthcentury Catholic put it, describing it as “the story of the English schism in miniature,” with the new life at the Roman Catholic and Anglican shrines in the twentieth century being seen (at least according to this story) as a belated “expiation of the sins of the Reformation.”15 Today, one of the most moving stories on the tour of the grounds of the “Abbey” is learning how in 1961 an archeological research team uncovered a layer of ash where the Holy House had stood—almost certainly the remains of its incineration in 1538 by Cromwell’s henchmen. These are stories of loss, abandonment, and renewal. There are alternative stories: in fairness, for example, we should not overlook the perspective of modern Protestant iconoclasts who, in the tradition of their sixteenth century ancestors, continue even today to protest in the streets of Walsingham—though without the devastating effects of four hundred years ago—that the Shrine’s revival is blasphemous and idolatrous (see Figure 8). Nor to be neglected is the Orthodox Christian perspective. It is a 13 Elizabeth A. Johnson, “The Symbolic Character of theological Statements about Mary,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 22 (1985), 316, 319. 14 Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning was Love, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 19, 42. 15 Daniel E. Hudson in Ave Maria, 26 (Feb 11, 1888).

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somewhat different story from the standard narrative, which asserts that the shrine’s founding occurred at the start of the Great Schism of 1054 between Western and Eastern Christianity—a story, therefore, of a Walsingham founded under, and therefore in some sense belonging to, Orthodoxy, an allegiance which was swept aside in England by William the Conqueror, who invaded England with papal approval, “almost,” as one Orthodox account puts it, as if he were “a Crusader.” Today the Orthodox presence in Walsingham is conciliatory and ecumenical, with a chapel upstairs in the Anglican shrine church, and its own church created from the village’s disused railway station.16 And finally, another story rarely picked up in the history of Walsingham is the possibility it was a place of spiritual power long before the shrine emerged, and even before the site became a Christian one. Some Anglo-Saxon remains can be found about half a mile southwest of the Shrine, and there is the site brooded over by the early seventeenth-century Norfolk author Sir Thomas Browne in Urn-Buriall: “ In a field of old Walsingham, not many months past, were digged up between 40 and 50 urns, deposited in a dry and sandy soil, not a yard deep, nor far from one another.”17 The name “Walsingham” itself is probably Saxon in origin, and earlier still, there are signs of both Iron Age and Roman settlements. Today, self-styled pagans, who occasionally and somewhat vaguely find affinities with Walsingham’s pre-Christian history, add to the richness of the atmosphere of Walsingham by setting up their tents and camper vans on nearby roadsides and fields, and discussing where ley lines—including one supposedly between Binham priory, a few miles east, and Walsingham itself—cross and create a ‘thin’ space at the shrine where the force of the supernatural can supposedly be especially accessible. In casual conversations in the congenial pubs of the village, one also encounters the occasional goddess worshipper or druid. Walsingham, as a mid twentieth-century guidebook put it, is a place for all people.18 On its materiality—stones, lawns, wells, relics, pubs, the paths taken by pilgrims—are inscribed multiple stories which may be read in multiple, contradictory ways. They are “anachronistic assemblages … inhabiting a moment but also alien to it.”19

16 For the Orthodox viewpoint, see http://www.westernorthodox.com/western-rite (accessed September 1, 2009). 17 Sir Thomas Browne, Hydrotaphia, or Urne-Buriall, Works, (ed.) Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber, 1964), I, 140. 18 Claude Fisher, Walsingham: a Place of Pilgrimage for all People (Walsingham: Salutation Press, 1983). For ‘pagan’ remains, see Charles Green and A.B. Whittingham, “Excavations at Walsingham Priory, Norfolk, 1961,” Journal of the Royal Archeological Society 125 (1968), 266. For the Walsingham area’s supposed ley lines, see Brian Short, The English Rural Community: Image and Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 163. For Binham, see http://www.ghost-sighting.co.uk/ghostly-events/binhampriory-in-norfolk-history-and-hauntings/Binham Priory in Norfolk–History and Hauntings. Accessed October 1, 2010. 19 Jonathan Gil Harris, “Untimely Mediations,” Early Modern Culture, Issue 6 (2007): http://emc.eserver.org/1-6/issue6.html. Accessed June 1, 2010.

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What were the origins of the shrine, with its multiple stories? The Pynson ballad is the only detailed ‘source’ of the particular powerful and oft-repeated story of Walsingham’s purported origins. A.N. Wilson comments in one of his novels on the “almost universal tendency to rewrite and readjust” the past rather than “uncovering” it,20 and the standard modern accounts of Walsingham’s origins in a miraculous appearance of the Virgin are largely glosses on this short and not altogether competently written or coherent poem. There are certainly a number of documented references to the priory from as early as the mid-twelfth century, but the Pynson Ballad, written in the fifteenth century, is the only source for what is claimed to be the story of the origins of the Holy House. Significantly, there are no other references to its ‘miraculous’ origins before the Pynson Ballad, a fact that dismays some historians (or at least provokes quietly ironical comments), but does not seem to embarrass pilgrims, guides, or modern shrine authorities who may note that historians date and describe the shrine’s origins differently, but confidently continue to assert the accuracy of the story that was actually constructed in the fifteenth (and in some senses in the nineteenth) centuries. In short, as Simon Coleman has argued in a number of studies, Walsingham therefore provides a striking variation of what Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger term “the invention of tradition,” defined as “a set of practices” or accounts of “values and norms of behavior” which are confidently created for ideological purposes and and thereafter are assumed to “have continuity with” and authority of the past.”21 The essays in their celebrated collection demonstrate that many beliefs and practices which are presented as “traditional” or “historical” are in fact later inventions, deliberately constructed to serve particular ideological ends. The “invented traditions” discussed in Hobsbaum and Ranger’s collection were mainly about the construction of nation states and national cultures, or the formation of the ethnic or religious identity of emergent groups, predominantly in the nineteenth century. But the concept has received far broader application. In the A.N. Wilson, Incline our Hearts (New York: Viking, 1989), 19, 21. Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger, (eds), The Invention of Tradition

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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–2. Dominic Janes and Gary Waller, “Introduction: Walsingham and English Culture: Landscape, Sexuality, and Cultural Memory,” in Janes and Waller, Walsingham, 1–20. Coleman was the first scholar to apply the Hobsbawm/Ranger concept of “invented tradition” to contemporary Walsingham. My indebtedness to his and his colleagues’ painstaking and imaginative work on Walsingham and its pilgrims will be evident throughout this study. See e.g., Simon Coleman and John Elsner, “Tradition as Play: Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth,’” History and Anthropology 15 (2004), 273–88; Simon Coleman, “Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth’: Landscapes of Myth and Memory at Walsingham,” in Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, (ed.) Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman (Bloomington: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 52–67; “Mary on the Margins? The Modulation of Marian Imagery in Place, Memory, and Performance,” in Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World, (eds), Anna-Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen and Catrien Notermans (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 17–32.

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case of Walsingham, a regional shrine with a local image is transformed, through a deliberate construction of ancestry and authority, into a place of national and international devotion, and provided with a story of an authoritative supernatural sanction. Some of the accounts of the Ballad stress how it links Walsingham to a pre-Conquest origin and argue that appeals to a sense of Englishness (or, sometimes, more broadly, Britishness) rather than simply to a sense of regional identity; or the story of the Virgin’s appearance is linked special divine visitations directed at England, even giving an affirmative and pious yes to Blake’s question in the famous prefatory poem to his epic Milton, “And did those feet in ancient time/ Walk upon England’s mountains green?”22 In the case of the Virgin, her appearance to Richeldis confirms England’s special status as the new Nazareth and, the Ballad asserts, there is a tradition of continuing miracles as proof of her continuing oversight. The details in the Ballad are chosen to demonstrate the crucial importance of being able to point to recognizable material objects as proof that this “invented tradition” is based on fact: it makes reference to objects that pilgrims would have been able to see at the shrine as legitimating the tradition it claims to reproduce. In her study of the Redemptrist Fathers’ “invention” of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in the nineteenth century, the Norwegian folklorist Anne Eriksen notes that “the mere existence of a particular artifact, preferably of some age, and placed at the center of a ritual or practice, seems to contradict any suspicion that the tradition in question might be new or “non-authentic”—a practice (as I shall discuss in Chapter 3) Erasmus mocks when in his early-sixteenth century account of a pilgrimage to Walsingham, his pilgrim Ogygius is shown an ancient bearskin as ‘proof’ of the authenticity of the Shrine. It appears to prove that the tradition has not been merely “constructed by human action,” a process sometimes described as traditionalization, the “act of authentication, akin to the art or antique dealer’s authentication of an object by tracing its provenience.”23 Walsingham’s history, in fact, includes a number of invented traditions, often interacting and contradicting one another, right up to the present—and given changes in the Christian Churches evident in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the habit of continual re-invention is likely to continue. The authorities at Walsingham desire that today’s faithful pilgrims should believe they find continuity with those whose traditional patterns of devotion and belief were regrettably, even tragically, interrupted by Henry VIII, Cromwell, Latimer and their agents, wreckers, and supporters, and which are in fact embodied in the Pynson Ballad, which was, in its turn, itself an exercise in inventing a tradition. Curiously enough, Erasmus did not seem to know, or did not think it worthwhile mentioning, the William Blake, “Milton,” The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, (eds), David V. Erdman and Harold Bloom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 95. 23 Anne Eriksen, “Our Lady of Perpetual Help: Invented Tradition and Devotional Success,” Journal of Folklore Research 42 (2005): 295–320; John Elsner, “Replicating Palestine and Reversing the Reformation: Pilgrimage and Collecting at Bobbio, Monza and Walsingham,” Journal of the History of Collections, 9.1 (1997), 117–30. 22

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supposed origins of the shrine, although he mentions or invents other legends which in turn have become included in accounts of Walsingham’s history. What, then, is the ‘history’ that was constructed in the fifteenth century and which has been re-instituted in the past century? And why that particular story that is palimpsested into the Pynson Ballad? Unfortunately, we cannot recreate the experience of pilgrims visiting Walsingham in, say, 1496, with a copy of the newly printed ballad in hand; nor—as Coleman and his colleagues have done so effectively with his contemporary subjects in his ethnographic research projects on Walsingham—can we ask a selection of past pilgrims to sit in hostelries like the Black Bull or the Old Bakehouse and report on their experiences, and deduce from their words and gestures something of their inner lives. Any conventional historian has, of course, the same frustration with trying to recreate what the past was like— and the dominant empirical tradition of historians, even of such an emotionally charged event as England’s Reformation have, with rare exceptions, stayed away from theoretically based cultural analysis. However, Walsingham is unusual in that in the early twentieth century, and continuing enthusiastically into the twentyfirst, there has been a determined and self-conscious attempt to re-create, in a sense to re-imagine, what its adherents believe to be its former spirit and much of its physical nature. The Anglican shrine in particular has surrounded its chapels, colleges, accommodations, and dining halls with a landscape reminiscent of the medieval magical universe: a charmingly symbolic garden setting, with wells, curving paths, outdoor altars, and celebratory flower gardens; on a raised mound, it has three stark crosses on a green hill to direct pilgrims firmly to the ‘true’ meaning of the Walsingham experience, in an iconic gesture intriguingly more emphatically christocentric than its medieval predecessor might well have been. Its gardens, as I shall suggest in Chapter 8, have been constructed, partly consciously, to embody Marian and broader female symbols. To further emphasize its continuity with a particular reading of the presentness of the medieval past, the Anglican shrine has been overseen by a College of Guardians who, at the insistence of its founder in the 1920s, Fr Hope Patten, dress on ceremonial and many administrative occasions in elaborate quasi-medieval garb. In fact, what Wilson refers fondly as the “Waltzing Matildas” of Walsingham,24 with their smells and bells, are actually far more prominent in their inventiveness (in Hobsbaum’s sense) than were the Roman Catholics who, when they built their shrine, had available nothing in the village itself, but did have (by virtue of a bequest by a convert from the Church of England) the fourteenth-century Slipper Chapel a mile south of Little Walsingham. The Catholic shrine presents itself as far less flamboyant than the Anglican, with two chapels, a Way of the Cross, a well, bookstore, tidy but minimalist garden, but conveying an atmosphere of restraint and dedication, reflecting perhaps some of the minimizing of ritual that followed Vatican II which paradoxically, as Beattie puts it, led to a “more

A.N. Wilson, A Watch in the Night (New York: Norton, 1998), 77.

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Protestant understanding of worship and ministry” in the Catholic Church.25 For many years there was undisguised hostility between the two shrines, even rising to the level of scatological abuse, but since the 1960s, there have been frequent supportive interactions, currently represented by the jointly-shared website. As if trying to give the pilgrims who were coming across land and sea to Walsingham a justification for their voyage by telling “howe by myraccle it was founded in dede,” the Pynson Ballad states that the miraculous events of Walsingham’s foundation took place in 1061: “Of this chapcll se here the fundacyon, /Bylded the yere of Crystes incarnacyon,/A thousande complete syxty and one.” It recounts how a “noble wydowe” in Walsingham Parva, Richeldis (or Rychold[e]) de Faverche, “in lyuynge full virtuous,” had three visions or dreams in which the Virgin Mary instructed her to build a replica of the Holy House of Nazareth. She was given the choice of two sites, miraculously (as in the story of Gideon in the Book of Judges) kept dry while the surrounding ground became wet. Richeldis chose one, but the workmen found themselves unable to erect the building there. Richeldis, we are told, was in a dilemma: Whan it was al fourmed, Than had she great doute Wheer it sholde be sette and in what maner place, In a smoche as tweyne place, were found oute Tokened with miracle of Our Ladyes grace.

Perhaps predictably, she had made the wrong choice, for next day she was amazed to find that the building material for the house had been removed and miraculously assembled in the second space, over 200 feet away: Arerid this sayd house with aungellys handys And not only reyrd it but set it theer it is, That is, two hundred fote and more in dystaunce From the fyrste place bokes make remembraunce. 26

One modern re-imagining of the Pynson Ballad adds a charming detail, that Richeldis “rushed out and saw angels departing” from the now completed structure. In another of the many modern accounts—illustrating how the originating legend does not cease to grow even today—she hears the angels singing as they leave their work. Yet another muses that the House was “better constructed than any craftsman of the period could build. Angel carpenters had visited Walsingham (or could it have been St Joseph?).”27 And, of course, in the spirit of the Walsingham Tina Beattie, “How Far Can You Go?: Reflections of the Catholic Theology of Priesthood,” Paper to the AGM of the Movement For Married Clergy, London, 28th June, 2006. tina.beattie.googlepages.com/how_far_can_you_go.pdf. Accessed June 1, 2010. 26 Quotations from the Pynson Ballad are taken from Dickinson, Shrine, 126–8, checked with the original in the Pepys Library. 27 For the “angel carpenters,” see www.religiouswriting.com/walsing.htm. Accessed September 1, 2009. 25

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canons showing Erasmus (or his fictional pilgrims) an ancient bearskin as ‘proof’ of the authenticity of the chapel, today’s visitors can be shown exactly where the two dry spaces between which Richeldis had to choose were located. Dickinson comments that one can only “assign this account of the transference of the chapel to the foolish passion for the spectacular which dogs guide-books perennially.” Nevertheless, even today, relatively reputable histories as well as (more predictably) guide books and the accounts by tour guides accord the story some basis in fact.28 Religious (and one adds, scholarly) communities have been, as Michael Carroll comments, “as much predisposed to invent tradition as the general public”: even so insightful and well-researched a history as Gail McMurray Gibson’s The Theater of Devotion states that Richeldis herself “claimed visions showing her the Nazareth dwelling” where the Annunciation occurred. The “claim,” of course, is made not by the legendary lady but by the Pynson Ballad. What Richeldis said, if she existed at all, we have of course no idea.29 Once printed, some 30 years after the likely date of its composition, Pynson’s four-page poem might well have been designed as a kind of guidebook. It is an example, in Diarmaid MacCullough’s phrase, of “hagiographical tourist literature”; he comments on a similar publication on the Shrine of the Virgin of Altotting that it is “worthy of a modern popular novelist, and with about as much historical content.”30 A few years after publishing the Walsingham Ballad, Pynson was responsible for a similar introduction to another great English pilgrimage site that was centered its devotions on another striking physical relic, the Abbey of Hailes, which possessed a vial of Christ’s blood, the so-called Blood of Hailes. Like the account of Walsingham’s origins, the Hailes guide attempts to justify the relic’s origins and authenticity, telling visitors who wanted “to knowe how it was brought about/take heed and read over this.”31 Pynson, who was appointed a royal printer in 1507, had a long career in the rapidly developing printing business. Another of his 28 I am grateful to the wonderfully-knowledgeable guides to the shrine in contemporary Walsingham, not least for not being disconcerted by my frequently taking notes during their accounts of the Pynson Ballad’s story of Richeldis and other Walsingham stories, where, along with the many Walsingham-related blogs currently on the internet, we can watch the ongoing “invention of tradition” occurring. The impressive new (2009) introductory film shown in the refurbished welcome centre at the Anglican shrine is itself, through compression and suggestion, an instance of how invented traditions may be reinforced and legends merge into history. Additionally, for some delightful self-parody by the contemporary Shrine authorities concerning the Richeldis story, see the earlier video “Walsingham—the Naked Truth”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyXIY-XI-XbLzk. Accessed June 1, 2010. 29 Dickinson, Shrine, 26; Michael P. Carroll, Irish Pilgrimage: Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 8; Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 139–40. 30 Diarmaid MacCullough, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 414, 456. 31 Dickinson, Shrine, 26.

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shrine guidebooks with strong Marian (though more Christological) associations, was one for Our Lady of Glastonbury. His work also included prestigious editions of Chaucer and, in 1521, Henry VIII’s Assertio septem sacramentorum adversus Martinum Lutherum (1521), which earned the king the title “Defensor fidei,” and on a more mundane level, Books of Hours and thousands of copies of indulgences for those making pilgrimages to shrines like Walsingham. So, what can we say with any historical accuracy about this particular “invented tradition”? Nicole Marzac-Holland, somewhat speculatively, claims that “the de Faverches,” a “family of Norman origins,” had settled in the prosperous and peaceful East Anglian countryside in the twelfth century (unusually for a work in which Richeldis is celebrated, even designated a “Norfolk mystic,” the Ballad’s 1061 date is quietly avoided), and that Richeldis had been named, more plausibly, after Empress Richelda, a ninth-century saint from the family of Charlemagne.32 There is certainly a documented reference around 1130, some 70 years after the date claimed in the Ballad for the ‘miracle’ of the apparition (or dream) of the Virgin to a Geoffrey de Favarches, when a William de Hocton agrees to marry Geoffrey’s widow. The name “Richelde” is also noted in the Pipe Roll for 1130 as a widow of the village. By 1153, there are other firm historical references to a charter to Ralph, the first prior of the Regular Augustinian order (the Austin or Black Canons) and the establishment of what becomes Walsingham Priory when Geoffrey de Favarches gives permission “and perpetual alms” to his clerk Edwy to found an order and support “the chapel which my mother founded in Walsingham in honour of Mary, ever Virgin.”33 So there are documents which seem to establish the existence of a Richeldis, probably Geoffrey’s mother, and her chapel. But if that person was the lady of the ballad, and Pynson’s date was accurate, she would have been approaching her centennial year, at the very least. So a Rychelde, Richelde, or Richeldis may have actually existed, although probably some threequarters of a century after the date claimed in the Ballad. Arguably, she received more substantial life and activity in the fifteenth-century ballad, eventually to be echoed in modern guidebooks, sermons, tourist tours, wall plaques, teaspoons, fridge magnets, coffee mugs, DVDs, blogs, websites, Facebook pages, brochures, and information to visitors and pilgrims than was probably, historically, the case. There is no evidence from, say, Domesday Book, that a family with such a name had held land in the area in the previous century. But invented traditions typically do have some relationship with material fact. In his archeological study of pre-Norman monastic sites, Tim Pestell has argued that while there is no evidence for an attribution regarding Walsingham to any Richeldis or Faverches, in Domesday Book some of the lands held by the Nicole Marzac-Holland, Three Norfolk Mystics (Burnham Market: C.J. and M. Isaacson, 1983), 1. 33 A translation of the foundation document may be found in Women of the English Nobility and Gentry, (trans. and ed.) Jennifer Ward (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 198–9. 32

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Norman Ranulf Peverell include what appears to be a well-established Augustinian community in or near Walsingham, dating from an earlier period, which may have been eliminated or assimilated by the new Norman aristocracy, when one Ketel, son of Wulfgyth, had his manors confiscated at the same time that the Saxon bishops and priests were replaced by Normans.34 Most historians (as opposed to pious readers of the Pynson Ballad eager to substantiate its claims) therefore tend to date the beginnings of what became the Walsingham shrine in the mid-twelfth century rather than the eleventh. One historical guide suggests that someone reading “the original documents” could have mistaken MCLIII for MLXI and so dated the founding a century earlier.35 As the 1961 archeological survey put it, the recorded evidence, “as opposed to ballads and later pious wishes,” points to a founding date for a private chapel early or in the middle of the twelfth century, a view backed by the most recent Catholic historian, Sister Elizabeth Obbard, and the art historian Richard Marks, whose meticulous survey of medieval religious imagery suggests that a small chapel may have been built in Walsingham around 1130, later being incorporated into the Augustinian priory.36 The date asserted in the Pynson Ballad, then, is problematic at best. Why did it seem important to invent such a tradition in the mid-fifteenth century? It may have seemed politically important to date the Virgin’s appearance in England to a year before the Norman Conquest, and so affirm Walsingham’s native English origins. That would tie into the rising sense of English nationalism that is readily observable in the fifteenth century. The date of the mid-eleventh century may also have been chosen to preempt another invented tradition which was also taking shape in the mid-fifteenth century, that of the miraculous appearance of the Holy House of Loreto. Quite apart from the ambiguous date, there is no historical record of any claim regarding the Virgin’s appearance, or any other miraculous event, before the fifteenth century. Again, the founding of Loreto was likely the stimulus for the Pynson Ballad’s claim. According to Loreto’s founding legend (first recorded in Italian in 1472), the ‘real’ house of Nazareth was transported in 1265 by angels from Bethlehem, first to the Balkan town of Tersato in Illyria (modern Serbia); and then, 34 Tim Pestell, Landscapes of Monastic Foundation: the Establishment of Religious Houses in East Anglia c. 650–1200 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), 195–6, 220, 223; Father Gilbert O.S.C., What to See in Walsingham: An Historical Guidebook (Walsingham: Greyfriars, 1939), 72–3. 35 Gilbert, What to See in Walsingham, 11. Gilbert’s “historical guidebook” is one of the few popular extended guides with a degree of authority to acknowledge the shaky evidence for the date, and remarks carefully, 9, that “in its original form it may have been something more simple, and the story may have been improved in the telling.” Nonetheless, Gilbert’s account then generally proceeds to assume its veracity. 36 Green and Whittingham, “Excavations at Walsingham Priory,” 268; Obbard, History and Spirituality, 15; Richard Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (Stroud: Sutton, 2004), 193.

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because of threats of Muslim attack, to the safety of first one, then another, site in Catholic Italy. One might be forgiven (in what I trust will emerge throughout this study as an Erasmian spirit, at once fond and skeptical) for asking why the angelic transport did not receive better advance forecasts of the movements of infidels, but the legend recounts that the final heavenly flight into Italy was witnessed (and thereby authenticated) by some Italian shepherds, who are usually depicted in pious representations of the miracle as looking into the sky with appropriate amazement. During the modern revival of Walsingham, in what Michael Carroll terms “a nationalistic flourish,” the Catholic historian A.M. Gillett affirmed that while, of course, “there can be no doubt” of the “sanctity of the Loreto shrine,” there was in fact no tradition, let alone record, of any ‘real’ House disappearing from Nazareth or even of prior pilgrimages to such a house. He therefore concluded that the events of Loreto occurred two centuries after Walsingham’s miracle, and speculated that “pilgrims from Italy may well have taken the Walsingham story home with them.” The Anglican Fr Stephenson’s predictably more skeptical comment is that “the implausibility of every detail” in the Loreto story “makes, in comparison, the story of Walsingham’s origin seem simple and straightforward,” and he too goes on to wonder if the “already famous” shrine at Walsingham did not influence the founding of Loreto. Italians, as we know from football, movies (and not to mention scholarly studies of popular Italian Catholicism like Carroll’s) are somewhat prone to exaggeration. And vulgarity. More seriously, Carroll points out that it is far more likely that the Walsingham story was modeled on that of Loreto: Loreto was given strong papal support, and there is simply no evidence that the Walsingham story was known on the continent. In 1476 Loreto was declared by Pope Sixtus IV to be a sacral transfer, and in 1507 it was a given papal approval as a pilgrimage site.37 Whether the legend of its founding—Richeldis, the Virgin’s appearance and intervention, and so forth—was known or at least complete in its “invented” details, by the mid-fifteenth century, is also open to speculation. Walsingham’s fame had grown slowly over the centuries and the Ballad demonstrates both its sense of having arrived and, as I shall suggest later, a degree of anxiety about its future. Traditions get pieced together and consolidated under pressure of status or survival and the mid-fifteenth century clearly provided an opportune moment to solidify Walsingham’s reputation. For the story of the apparition of the Virgin, there is of course no corroborating evidence—nor, more significantly, any references before the Reformation to any such event outside in the Pynson Ballad itself. There are no other ballads, tales, recorded accounts, or references in chronicles to the Virgin’s appearance. As I shall indicate in Chapter 3, even Erasmus, with his nose for gossip and for raising a scholarly eyebrow at implausible if pious stories, does not mention such an 37 Gillett, Walsingham, 5; Stephenson, Walsingham Way, 22, 24; Carroll, “Pilgrimage at Walsingham,” 39–40. For Loreto, see also G.E. Phillips, Loreto and the Holy House (Fitzwilliam: Loreto Publications, 2005).

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event; though he adds (characteristically tongue in cheek) a story of the shrine’s wells springing up under the Virgin’s feet, a detail that is also often picked up and repeated in modern accounts of the Shrine as part of its recorded history, and not simply a detail invented by Erasmus in the early-sixteenth century. If believed before the fifteenth century, it is hard to imagine the Virgin’s appearance not being set down or mentioned somewhere: it is hardly the kind of event to have been kept as a secret tradition. Coleman observes that all pilgrimage shrines have such originary stories: they typically claim miraculous origins, often in an obscure holy place that is difficult of access; they possess a famous and powerful devotional object, image or statue; there is often some ongoing material connection with the forces of natural magic in the environment, like wells, mountains or caves; and there is typically evidence of a continuing divine presence in the form of a succession of miracles.38 The first recorded royal pilgrimage to Walsingham, that by Henry III, which he made as an extension of a pilgrimage to revere the fragment of the True Cross at Bromholm Priory, about 25 miles east, was in 1226. As a result, Henry gave the Walsingham priory the right to hold a weekly market and a seven-day fair but, as Dickinson comments, since it was to be celebrated on the feast of the Holy Cross, the designation suggests that had the Walsingham Shrine already been well-known for its mariological significance, it is likely that the fair would been established on one of the Virgin’s own feast days. That implies that Walsingham’s pre-eminence as a Marian shrine was not instantaneous as an alleged apparition of the Virgin might suggest, and that its reputation grew quite slowly. Around 1300, a new church in perpendicular style started to be built, possibly because of Walsingham’s increasing popularity as a pilgrimage site, but that too may be part of the invented tradition since revenue records before the fifteenth century do not support any unusual fame, and the period was generally one of massive priory and abbey building. By the mid-fifteenth century, the Augustinian priory church was comparable in size and style to many East Anglian religious establishments, like Bromholm, or the elaborate and rich Cluniac establishment at Castle Acre, about 20 miles further inland, where the long church nave was used to accommodate pilgrims on their way to Walsingham. By the mid- or late-fifteenth century, then, the Walsingham Priory church was an impressive but by no means unique establishment. William of Worcester provided an architectural description in 1479, by which time what he termed the “noui operas” or “new work” was well under way. It was about 230 feet long and 80 feet wide, and was surrounded by many outbuildings, including the Chapel of St Laurence near the holy wells just to the east, close to the river. The remnants we see today are those of this second phase of building. William gives us concrete evidence about what in the fifteenth century becomes known as the “Holy House,” the private chapel dedicated to the Virgin. He gives the chapel’s internal 38 Coleman and Elsner, “Tradition as Play,” 274–9; Coleman, “Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth’,” 54–5.

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Fig. 1.1 Map of Little Walsingham. From The Archaeological Journal, June 1856. By permission of the Archivist, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham

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dimensions as approximately 23 feet six inches by 12 feet 10 inches, measurements which were subsequently closely reproduced in the twentieth-century Anglican shrine across the street to the north of the Priory ruins but which have no other authentication. It may not have had any connection with an ‘original’ Holy House, which had probably been erected originally as a wooden chapel with a thatched roof, a distinctive East Anglian rather than a Palestinian touch which does not seem to have affected its authenticity.39 The “new work” made the Holy House “double-skinned,” protected by an enclosing stone chapel, and was completed between 1450 and 1470, only a few years before William’s visit, and coinciding with the likely date of the Pynson Ballad—which therefore may have been occasioned as a celebration of the “new” work as well as a means of raising funds for it. Archeological investigation in the nineteenth and (more firmly) twentieth centuries confirmed that the chapel was at a slight angle to the priory church, connected to it by a small passage and three steps, and on a raised platform (which can still be observed today as a slightly elevated rectangular piece of lawn). A supposition by the twentieth-century Anglican Shrine’s enthusiastic founder, Hope Patten, that the modern structure he developed across the street from the original Priory grounds was on the “real” site of the original, the very site to which the Virgin had the original chapel moved, was for a time an exciting possibility, at least for some Anglo-Catholics. Hope Patten’s speculation was in part motivated by a ‘vision’ like that (he implied) of Richeldis herself, but was not met with same approbation: as the 1961 archeological report tactfully put it, “of Hope Patten’s even wilder suggestion … Nothing more need now be said.”40 Erasmus’s account—witty, fictionalized, but not necessarily entirely inaccurate in its details, as I shall suggest in Chapter 3—gives us some other details. He notes that the Holy House had two doors, on the north and south sides, so visitors might pass through without crowding.41 In 1512 Henry VIII commissioned his glazier (who was also responsible for the glass in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge) to install windows in the chapel, which had still not been completed when Erasmus had made his visit, probably early that year. The statue of Our Lady of Walsingham, he tells us, was at the east end of the chapel, to the right (or south) side of the altar. It was, according to him, lit by many candles—one of which ironically may have Dickinson, Shrine, 36. For a detailed description of William’s visit, and a summary of the architectural developments of the fifteenth century, see Dickinson, Shrine, 77–8. 40 Green and Whittingham, “Excavation at Walsingham,” 166, 201–2. See also Marks, Devotion and Image, 195. 41 For the Franciscans at Walsingham, see Dickinson, Shrine, 36, 76–8; Gilbert, What to See, 60–64; Walsingham, (ed.) Peter G. Cobb (Bristol: White Tree Books, 1990), 23; Colin Platt, The Abbeys and Priories of Medieval England (New York: Fordham University Press, 1984), 125–6. For Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Clare, see June Hall McCash, The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women (Athens, GE: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 279–80. 39

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been Henry VIII’s, which he paid to have lit permanently until 1538—and decked in jewels and ex-votos. For four centuries the Augustinian priory was at the centre of the life of medieval Walsingham, but in 1346, a second religious establishment was founded in the village. Supported by a local aristocrat, Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Clare, whose family had been strong supporters of the Augustinians, and with papal and royal approval, the Franciscans (the Friars Minor or ‘grey’ friars) built a friary for 12 brothers a quarter of a mile away from the Priory, near where the road from Fakenham and London, the end of the “Walsingham Way,” entered the village. The Augustinians at the priory complained, most likely with some justification, that the arrival of the newcomers would shrink their own income from pilgrims coming to the shrine. The matter went to Rome for a decision, and the result was that the friars stayed. As mendicants themselves, they probably provided poor pilgrims with basic accommodation, no doubt catering for those who could not afford the reputedly exorbitant rates of the Village’s many inns. As was their fundraising practice elsewhere in England, the friars established a toll road for travelers passing by; in retaliation, the town had a new road built on the other side of the friary, where it is today. The friary itself was demolished in 1538, after the Augustinian canons and properties had been dealt with by Cromwell’s agents; its goods were similarly confiscated and it became part of the property given to Sir Thomas Sidney, whose descendants and their activities in or about Walsingham will recur throughout the next few chapters. Today the friary’s ruins, which are not open to the public, partly out of safety considerations, constitute the fullest “domestic part” of the ruins of any Franciscan House in England, and includes the ruins of a chapel, cottages, and an enclosed garden. By the mid-late fifteenth century, then, this little Norfolk village, perched on the edge of East Anglia, could advertise what Coleman terms all the “appurtenances of a successful pilgrimage destination”: an invented tradition of an originary vision, relics, miracles, holy wells, badges, rival religious establishments, hostelries, wayside chapels, the holy image in the Holy House, and the atmosphere created by thousands of pilgrims. But as Rachel Fulton puts it, “we must move beyond statistics, beyond numbers of ‘Aves’ and registers of pilgrims, beyond the fact of devotion to its interior rationale.”42 We should also ask: why Walsingham? In what way was it distinctive? What led Walsingham to accumulate such powerful legends and attract such devotion? In what sense was it sacred for the thousands of men and women, royalty, nobles, others who, by the middle of the fifteenth century, were visiting each year? And how do we account for the vigorous opposition to Walsingham—from Lollards, who like the Protestant reformers after them, often

Simon Coleman and John Elsner, ““Pilgrimage to Walsingham and the Re-Invention of the Middle Ages,” in Pilgrimage Explored, (ed.) J. Stopford (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1999), 201–02; Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 202. 42

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Fig. 1.2

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Friary ruins, Little Walsingham. Photograph by permission of John Twyning.

sneered at “Falsingham” and “the wych of Walsingham,” and warned that it was “foolishness to go on pilgrimage to the image of our lady of … Walsingham”? 43 These are questions that (as later chapters will show) will lend themselves to speculation, and thus to using perspectives—not only from anthropology, sociology but from less empirically based discourses like cultural psychoanalysis and feminist theory which many conventional historians of the period have traditionally avoided. But there, in fact, some reassuringly empirically based observations to make. Carroll points to an elementary but crucial factor in Walsingham’s gradual prominence as a place of pilgrimage visit—that it gained, and over the centuries kept, the support of the authorities, both ecclesiastical and political. Its repute grew largely because of the support of a number of monarchs, starting with that initial one, perhaps undertaken as an afterthought, by Henry III. Henry was, in fact, to pay many visits to Walsingham, repeatedly donating oak trees, funds for wax and tapers, and in 1246, 20 marks to make a golden crown for the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham, which is the earliest mention of the statue which eventually becomes a major focus of the reformers’ hostility. Henry’s son Edward I continued his father’s visits, motivated by a belief that he had avoided death from a collapsing ceiling because of the intervention of Our Lady of Walsingham. Edward came to 43 John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of the Church Containing the History and Sufferings of the Martyrs, (ed) M. Hobart Seymour (Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 395; Stephenson, Walsingham Way, 27.

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the Shrine at least a dozen times, even choosing it as the site for signing a treaty with Flanders on the feast of the Purification (February 2). Later kings continued to visit, including Edward II, Edward III (who gave King David of Scotland a safe passage in 1364 to make a pilgrimage, accompanied by 20 knights), Henry V, Henry VI (who came almost annually) and Henry VII, who made a number of pilgrimages, including before and after his victory over the Simnel rebellion in 1487. Last, and at least initially with seemingly great enthusiasm, Henry VIII visited Walsingham—and, according to yet another legend, first recorded, perhaps with an element of nostalgia, in the 1630s, walked the last mile barefoot (although at least three villages claim the honor of being the place where he took off his shoes)—while Katherine of Aragon visited regularly until she was divorced by Henry and debarred from travel in 1534. In her will she requested that someone go on her behalf to Walsingham and to distribute alms amounting to 20 nobles along the pilgrimage route. 44 These are well-documented visits by the great and famous over hundreds of years. But as well, by the mid or late fifteenth century, when Pynson’s ballad was written and then 30 years later printed, Walsingham seems to have become a favored site of pilgrimage for men and (especially) women of all classes. There are records, for instance, of Margery Kempe from Lynn visiting in 1433, and in 1443, Margaret Paston writes to her husband John that his mother has gone to Walsingham to pray for his recovery from illness. Walsingham steadily increased its wealth through gifts, land, rents, and through the acquisition of subsidiary benefices and priories. By the late-fifteenth-century and certainly by the reign of Henry VIII—despite battles with the crown over revenues, and inspections that occasionally revealed irregularities in finance as well as behavior—Walsingham is estimated to have become the most prosperous and popular site in England except for Canterbury, and its income immediately before the Dissolution was larger. Part of the allure of Walsingham was its geographical position. It was both domestic and so not requiring dangerous and expensive foreign travel, and yet it was relatively remote. Such a location in rural countryside is common in the originary legends of pilgrimage sites. A medieval sacred space was typically established, James Bugslag explains, in a “position between the ‘human’ space” of a settlement, like a town, and the “‘savage’ space of the open land.” By controlling and sanctifying forces of nature that might otherwise be regarded as threatening, even diabolical, a hostile or ‘pagan’ landscape would become Christianized. Typically such sanctification of threatening natural forces is focused on trees, caves, holy wells, rocks, or springs that may have often had pre-Christian spiritual significance. So, in yet another process of inventing tradition, largely originating after the Reformation and especially in the neo-medievalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was commonly asserted that as England was Christianized 44 See Robert Hutchinson, The Rise and Fall of Henry VIII’s Most Notorious Minister (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), 298.

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in the centuries following the disintegration of Roman Britain, hundreds of ‘pagan’ springs which dotted the country became “holy wells”; associated with sacred or miraculous events, they would be sanctified and continue to be used for petitions, healing, rescue, even divining the future. Water is part of the ‘otherness’ of the magical universe: life-giving, sometimes unpredictable and destructive, emerging from within the earth, and often associated with the female, reflecting the mysterious flow many cultures have seen as defining women’s sexual nature. One of the recurring founding stories of pilgrimage sites involves springs that miraculously gush up at a sacred spot. By situating the Virgin’s chapel on such a site, so this story goes, the landscape and its demons or other potential threat were Christianized and thus overcome for the benefit of those who could then journey to venerate her; she has overcome the threats and made safe what would otherwise be an alien, pagan landscape.45 At Walsingham, as the Ballad mentions, there were (and are) “tweyne wells” providing such an intimate connection to the forces within the local landscape. Erasmus comments that the water from Walsingham’s wells was excellent for curing headaches and stomach pains—though he coyly leaves it ambiguous whether the water’s effects were miraculous or simply medicinal, his tone anticipating that of A.N. Wilson’s treatment in his novel, The Healing Art (1970), which will be discussed in Chapter 7, of a possible miracle brought about by sprinkling and drinking from the Anglican shrine’s well, located across the street from the priory’s original twin wells. The water was also used for bathing: a breviary owned by the Shrine’s last prior sets out the rules by which pilgrims would be permitted to bathe in water from the wells. They would also fill their ampulae with water for drinking—one hopes not quite from exactly the same source as the bathing well. For the reformers, of course, such beliefs in the miraculous powers of wells were a residue of idolatrous paganism, although in fairness, medieval ecclesiastical authorities had sometimes warned against the improper veneration of springs and wells. In 1102, the Council of Westminster made all wells subject to the control of local bishops, and in 1258 the Bishop of Bath and Wells warned that stones, rocks, trees, and springs should not be venerated as holy on the pretext of “any dream or illusion,” a warning which, given the different diocesan jurisdiction, would not have directly affected Walsingham but which suggests a current concern among the ecclesiastical authorities. Today, the twin wells and the bath (disappointingly small, with a capacity for maybe three or four standing people at most) can still be visited though it is now covered over with wire meshing. Across the street, however, is the Anglican shrine’s well from which holy water is dispensed daily for sprinkling, drinking, and taking away in (usually plastic) bottles. The closeness of the sluggish, though once ebullient, little Stiffkey river, only a few yards from

45 James Bugslag, “Local Pilgrimages and Their Shrines in Pre-Modern Europe,” Peregrinations, 2.1 (2007): http://peregrinations.kenyon.edu/vol2-1/ SpecialSection/ Local_Pilgrimage. Accessed January 1, 2010.

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these wells, may of course had (and have) something to do with water springing up (or just being present) in these areas. An important aspect of Walsingham’s location, then, was its combination of ‘natural’ forces with Christian holiness. Another was that Walsingham was experienced as a spiritual gateway, or perhaps a signpost, to a particular place elsewhere. The quintessential medieval pilgrim site was of course the Holy Land, where Christ’s divinity had been made concrete, where the Virgin had actually lived, and where relics of her could be seen, touched, and venerated. Chaucer’s parson reminds his fellow pilgrims that Jerusalem should be their ultimate goal, but few people were able to make such a long journey; Margery Kempe, from nearby Lynn, was one of the rare laywomen who left records of having done so. As what the Pynson Ballad terms “England’s Nazareth,” Walsingham served as a substitute for the Holy Land. It was therefore both local and exotic, with domestic and patriotic assurances, and yet connected to a wider spiritual universe, a reminder that religious power could be touched in a local landscape far more practicable to reach than its original.46 The draw of a moderately distant shrine was the time and commitment that it took to reach, the discoveries, the dangers and temptations on the way, the proof that one was dedicating oneself to a worthy goal for which one would receive spiritual benefits both in the present and to come. A question posed by one version of the sixteenth century Walsingham ballad—not the Pynson one, but a poem and a tune associated with it that emerged after the Dissolution—had to do with access to this remote part of England: “Gentle herdsman, tell to me of courtesy I pray/ Unto the town of Walsingham/Which is the right and ready way?” The Elizabethan ballad goes on to tell us, with heavy-handed allegory, that “unto the town of Walsingham/ the way is hard for to be gone.”47 But hundreds of thousands of pilgrims made the journey, religious and lay, singly or in groups, on their own behalf or for others, accompanied by friends, family members, and (as the Lollards claimed and Langland’s Piers Plowman comments acidly), prostitutes and swindlers of various kinds. So, despite its relative remoteness, Walsingham was the convergence of many well-traveled roads: even after the Reformation, when Holinshed incorporated William Harrison’s The Description of England in his Chronicles (1577), the route from London to Walsingham was still first in the list of twenty major highways in the country. We can trace in some detail the journey that pilgrims would have typically taken to the Shrine although, as I show in Chapter 6 in my discussion of The Pilgrims of Walsingham, a number of variations on the routes were available. The early seventeenth century “water poet” John Taylor noted that a pilgrim from London would likely set out from Holborn, where a number of inns, including the Chequer, the Bell, and the Crosskeys, were, every second Thursday, starting points 46 Eilan Bar-Josef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 25. 47 Thomas Percy, Reliques of Old English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs etc. (New York: F. Warne & Sons, 1887) 183.

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for carriers to Walsingham: “The Carrier of Walsingham in Norfolk doth lodge at the Chequer in Holborn. He cometh every second Thursday … There doth a Post come every second Thursday from Walsingham to the Bell in Holborn. There is a Foot Post from Walsingham that doth come to the Cross Keys in Holborn every second Thursday.” The carriers would likely leave by Bishopsgate, which Stow records as the usual start of the route into Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire. Inns, bridges, tolls, wayside crosses, shrines, and chapels—places for both bodily and spiritual and refreshment—all marked the route. Harrison describes the stages through Barkway, Puckeridge, Newmarket, (and then, more or less following the modern A1065), Brandon Ferry, Swaffham, and Fakenham. At Barkway a route to Cambridge branched north; and one could travel directly from Cambridge, as Erasmus did, either through Newmarket or via Ely, to Fakenham, and then on to Walsingham. At certain points, the road to Walsingham was popularly known as Walsingham Way, the Palmers Way, or the Milky Way, a reference to both the Virgin’s milk at the Shrine and to the constellation of stars that were seen as guiding pilgrims there. Blomefeld’s eighteenth-century History of Norfolk recorded that the “superstitious country folk” still remembered the Milky Way was in the sky to point out to palmers “the particular place and residence of the Virgin beyond all other places, and was on that account generally in the age called Walsingham Way.”48 By Blomefield’s time, the belief that that the stars signified the Virgin’s protection had long became an archaic superstition. By then, an alien landscape dotted with reassuring chapels and hermits had been replaced by inns and coach stops, to be in turn replaced by the highways and traffic-clogged towns of today. There were many churches and chapels dedicated to the Virgin on the way. East Anglia, and Norfolk in particular, is reputed to have still the highest concentration of medieval churches in Europe.49 There were special pilgrim chapels on the route—at West Acre, South Acre, Hillsborough, Southam, Lynn, Stanhoe, and Caxton for example. Erasmus’s friend John Colet had at one point in his career been in charge of the pilgrim chapel of St Margaret at Hillsborough, though he probably hired an incumbent to carry out the duties. Hermits often tended bridges, ferries, or fords, as at Brandon Ferry. Other roads converged in the William Harrison, The Description of England (ed.) Georges Edelen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 399; Francis Blomefeld, An Essay towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk (London, 1739), 8,102; 10, 243; John Taylor, The Carriers’ Cosmography [1637], reprinted in An English Garner, (ed.) Edward Arbor (London: E. Arber, 1877–1897), I, 242. In the 1970s, Leonard Whatmore lovingly recreated the inns, bridges, stopping places along a version of the most likely route, indicating what place names could still be found. There are, for instance, Palmers Greens near Enfield and Ware; there are e.g., Walsingham Ways in Hemel Hempsted, in Weeting, just north of Newmarket, in Ely, and elsewhere. See Whatmore, Highway to Walsingham, chapters 1–13. For a variant on that route, see the discussion of Agnes Strickland’s The Pilgrims of Walsingham, Chapter 6 below. 49 For Norfolk churches, see D.P. Mortlock and C.V. Roberts, The Guide to Norfolk Churches (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2007), 7. 48

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same area: east from Norwich, where the Priory had a pilgrim house; southwest from Cambridge and Newmarket; from the Midlands and the North, the route probably came through Lynn, where continental pilgrims would also land, and perhaps past Castle Rising, where Edward I stayed on his 1277 pilgrimage. Lynn also contained the Red Mount chapel (built 1485), where there was an image, Our Lady of the Red Mount, which was likely a copy of that at Walsingham. As they approached Walsingham from the south, most pilgrims (like visitors today) eventually came through or near Fakenham, after which a number of routes led into Walingham. Some travelers went by Houghton St Giles, only a mile to the south of Little Walsingham. There stood the Slipper Chapel built in the fourteenth century as a wayside chapel for pilgrims and dedicated to St Catherine, patron saint of mothers. Legends about the chapel abound. Traditionally, visitors are still told, it was called the slipper chapel because the pilgrims (most famously Henry VIII!) took off their shoes there and walked to Walsingham. But other villages in the Walsingham area claimed the notoriety, and more likely it was simply the “slype” or way onwards to the Shrine. Alternatively, pilgrims might proceed to the shrine through East Barsham, another of the claimants, perhaps the strongest, since he is recorded to have stayed at the Manor, for the starting-point of Henry VIII’s legendary barefoot walk. And so, with or without shoes, just like today, pilgrims would finally enter Little Walsingham, alongside the Stiffkey River, now a narrow stream but in the Middle Ages wide enough for barges carrying building stone to float up to Walsingham. By the early-fifteenth century there were probably a dozen inns in the village. Many were on the present High Street, some closer to the river. At Easter 1431 four burnt down, probably torched by pilgrims protesting exploitative charges. The Franciscans catered for more impoverished pilgrims. There were (and still are) two open spaces within the village in which pilgrims congregated: Friday Market, referring to the day on which Henry III had granted the friars permission to hold a market, and the Common Place, where the Priory held its weekly market. The Common Place in particular is a space that would have lent itself to the performance of religious drama associated with the Virgin, as well as assemblies of pilgrims, a possibility I explore briefly in Chapter 2. Support of the authorities, especially the Crown, and different aspects of its locality, both mystical and geographical, then, were important factors in Walsingham’s growth. But a pilgrimage site’s reputation also rested to an important extent upon the miracles it supposedly generated. Pre-Reformation Christians expected what Ethan Shagan terms “frequent spontaneous eruptions of the divine,”50 and they understood all human history, as the Pynson Ballad demonstrates, in terms of such interventions. The Pynson Ballad places great emphasis on the shrine’s miracles. Above all, it celebrates the central miracle of medieval Christianity, the Annunciation: 50 Ethan H. Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 64.

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Walsingham and the English Imagination Where shall be hadde in a memoryall The great ioy of my salutacyon. Fyrste of my ioys grounde and orygynall Rote of mankyndes gracious redempcyon, Whan Gabryell gaue to me relacyon To be a moder through humylyte. And goddys sonne conceyue in virgynyte.

In addition to this originary miracle, for 400 years, Pynson’s ballad tells us, Our Lady of Walsingham had “dayly” displayed her power in the “many miracle”s she performs, as signs to those who come specifically on “this notable pilgrimage” to “visyte thys hir habytacle.” Hovering in the background of such assertions concerning the Virgin’s recurring miraculous powers is the threat of punishment or retribution for skepticism or ingratitude. Erasmus, in a typically gleeful sideswipe, amusedly criticizing yet at the same time expressing a degree of indulgence for what he views as harmless enough folk religion, has one of his interlocutors comment that all “the sayntes haue theyr weapones or myschefues, whiche they send apon whome they liste.” While not malicious—not brandishing any “weapons” or perpetrating any “myschefes”—the Virgin in Pynson’s story certainly seems a little capricious, setting what appears to be a test or puzzle for Richeldis, who fails it, thus allowing the Virgin to step in and assert her power. In the Ballad, she is a tease rather than a dominatrix: perhaps, Carroll remarks, a whimsical English Virgin as opposed to a flamboyant Italian one, or (as I shall suggest in Chapter 3) Erasmus’s slightly superior, testy, and overworked one.51 The Pynson Ballad goes on to enumerate miracles attributed to Our Lady of Walsingham. Curiously, its language is general rather than specific: the miracles include the “Many seke” who have “ben here cured by Our Ladyes myghte,” and even (assuring us “of thys is no dought”), the “Dede agayne reuyued.” Less drastically, we are told, there have been: Lame made hole and blynde restored to syghte, Maryners vexed with-tempest safe to porte brought Defe, wounded and lunatyke that hyder haue sought And also lepers here recouered haue be By Oure Ladyes grace of their infyrmyte.

To this list of un-“dought”ed miracles, the Ballad adds those “Folke that of fendys haue had acombraunce / And of wycked spyrytes also moche vexacyon.” So far, 51 For stories of the Virgin’s vindictiveness, see Benedetta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record, and Event, 1000–1215 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 141; Michael P. Carroll, Catholic Cults and Devotions: a Psychological Inquiry (Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1989), 176–9. For Erasmus’s remark, see Pilgrimage of Pure Devotion, 26, hereafter cited as Erasmus, Pilgrimage, with page citations in-text.

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it is a list more general than particular, and Walsingham’s recorded list of more specific miracles is surprisingly small. The most prominent recorded examples are Edward I’s escape from death from falling masonry which he attributed to Our Lady of Walsingham and motivated his annual pilgrimages, the rescue of a boy from one of the wells; and—a little closer to what we might expect from an active Virgin’s repertoire of miracles—that of a mounted Knight, Sir Ralph Boutefort, who in 1314 was reputedly pursued by an enemy and, calling on her to rescue him, was given miraculous entry to the Shrine through a low entrance that was far too small for him to pass through. The miracle is commemorated in an entrance through the priory wall known as the Knight’s Gate (visible today, although constructed in the 1800s, as Gilbert puts it, as “a memorial to the original gateway”), and in the name of an adjoining modern street.52 In their special examination of Walsingham, Cromwell’s Commissioners expressed open skepticism about such miracles, though the stories are often still repeated in modern guidebooks and on tours— sometimes with the concession that they may be legends. Carroll has argued that the miracles in the Pynson Ballad are reminiscent of those associated with Christ in the New Testament and that the Ballad reflects a new Christological emphasis in mid-fifteenth century devotion rather than those traditionally associated with Marian shrines. Most of the miracles attributed to the Virgin by the Ballad are, according to this view, based not on what Ward terms the “traditional” shrine miracles of vengeance, protection, and healing, but on specifically Gospel-based miracles: what the Pynson Ballad does, Carroll argues, is “associate Walsingham with a formulaic list of miracles that are thoroughly Christocentric.”53 But in the Ballad—if it is a reliable guide to the devotional focus of mid- and late- fifteenth century Walsingham—these miracles are attributed not to Christ, but quite explicitly to his Mother. The poem constitutes a striking claim for the power of the Virgin, one that would have appalled the reformers. She is, in an emphatic (though for the fifteenth century, an unexceptional) phrase, the “Chyef pryncypyll and grounde of oure saluacyon.” In return for her favors, pilgrims are instructed to desire “hir helpe in your trybulacyon” and “serve her with “humble affeccyon.” For medieval Christians, then, miracles were a guarantee of divinity manifested in the world. Another such guarantee (and often the vehicle for the miracles) were holy relics, material tokens of the miraculous within history, physical objects observable to the senses but embued (exactly how and to what extent was a matter of recurring controversy) with supernatural force. In viewing and venerating Walsingham’s relics, pilgrims would breathe in the atmosphere of a special place Gilbert, What to See in Walsingham, 34. For examples of typical Miracle stories, see e.g., Johannes Herolt, Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary, The Middle English Miracles of the Virgin, (ed.) Beverly Boyd (San Marino: Huntingdon Library, 1964). The Walsingham knight’s Virgin miracle story may be found in Gillett, Walsingham, 41, or Whatmore, Highway to Walsingham, 90–92. 53 Carroll, “Pilgrimage at Walsingham,” 40. 52

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Fig. 1.3 The Knight’s Gate, Little Walsingham. By permission of John Twyning. chosen by God and graced by the Virgin—as well as, most likely, noisily complain about the cost of hostels, meet old friends, make assignations of various kinds, and then continue their journeys, whether to their homes or on to another shrine, probably vowing to return, a pattern that has been resumed by millions of visitors over the past century. The material experience of staying at Walsingham for a few days—as today’s pilgrims and visitors characteristically do—should not be underemphasized. Pilgrimage is, in important senses, an incarnational experience: its very materiality reinforced the belief that bodily activities like walking, kneeling and prostrating before the image of the Virgin and holy relics were all part of an opening of the self to new possibilities as well as reinforcing existing beliefs and practices. Pilgrims were led to acknowledge the possibility of personal intimacy with the Virgin, not merely as a distant historical figure but there, in the details of the village, at the priory and its shrine, in the material as well as the spiritual accoutrements of a particular place. The materiality of Walsingham was inscribed by layerings of stories, the most important of which were no doubt pointed out, as they are today, by guides. Interpellation into the recesses of ideology functions by the repetitive interventions of authoritative persons who look to the visible evidence seemingly shared by expert and novice alike. It was this overall aura of materialistic holiness, divinity expressed through observable realities and experienced by the senses, to which the reformers were eventually to object and provide strikingly different readings. The Church affirmed that veneration of relics was not directed at the objects themselves but

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(in Walsingham’s case) the Virgin and thence to God. But popular piety and even some theologians found it difficult to make such discrimination: relics were widely accepted not just as reminders but actual conduits of divine power, and the belief that they could effect cures, protect the weak, and succor the needy was part of what Carroll terms the “folklorisation of Christianity,” uniting the material and the magic, at once serving local need and redolent with universal significance, fusing the visible world and the world of fantasy and yearning. Coleman speaks of relics having a “prophylactic” effect, their magical power generated by physical contact with objects that had themselves touched the holy, even at a distance from the holy place. As Leigh Ann Craig comments, “the belief that a saint’s physical remains, tomb, or personal possessions formed a bridge between the earthly and the divine lay at the very heart of the veneration of saints.” Parts of a saint’s body—blood, bones, hair, or (with the Virgin) milk—would increase physical connectedness with the holy personage.54 In the case of the Virgin because, at least according to the widespread belief, though not yet dogma, her body had been assumed to heaven, secondary or tertiary relics would necessarily have to predominate. In the late nineteenth century, touchingly dedicated to justifying virtually every medieval devotion to the Virgin, Edmund Waterton instanced samples of the Virgin’s hair as relics to cherish reverently: he explained that “it is natural to suppose that some portions of our Ladye’s hair” would fall and “be treasured up carefully,” and therefore the hairs found in many shrines “have been venerated for centuries.” In the Peregrinatio, where his pilgrims proceed after Walsingham to Canterbury, Erasmus mocks such bodily excrescences being treated as relics; he ridicules the pieces of linen that contain the snot or sweat of St Thomas Becket, “or other lyke fylthines with whyche mannes bodye dothe abounde” (84).55 The exposure of pig and other animal bones claimed as saints’ relics was a frequent reformist tactic to discredit the veneration of relics. Walsingham had a number of relics on display for its pilgrims. Erasmus (always a little tongue in cheek on such matters) mentioned St Peter’s knuckle, which was kept in St Laurence’s chapel, which was near the wells; one of his interlocutors speculates that judging by its size, Peter must have been a very large man (despite the ‘information’ in the Golden Legend, the standard account of saints’ lives, which stated that Paul’s bones were smaller than those of Peter, with whom he was allegedly martyred). Erasmus also mentions (or invents) the reception by his pilgrim of a gift of a particular beam of wood on which the Virgin had sat, rested, or leaned (the latin will bear all of these, which have been offered in 54 Michael P. Carroll, Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 30; Coleman, “Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth’,” 54. For a moving contemporary exploration of “touched-to-the-relic-of-ness,” see Kathleen Zamboni McCormick, “Holy Cards,” Witness 21 (2007), 136–43. 55 Waterton, Pietas Mariana Britannica, I, 88; Desiderius Erasmus, The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. and annotated Craig R. Thompson, Collected Works of Erasmus in English, 40 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 301, 303.

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various translations). Some modern accounts go on to fantasize that Mary landed, rested, sat, or leaned on this “beam” while giving her orders in the appearance to Richeldis. But there was at Walsingham a more important relic. Just as the Abbey at Hailes had its prestigious Blood of Christ, so the Shrine at Walsingham had its vial of the Virgin’s milk, allegedly transported to England through a tortuous series of sales and journeys during the Crusades from Nazareth itself. Calvin claimed (in sentiments echoed, though far more gently, by Erasmus) that there was “not perhaps a town, a convent, or nunnery” where the Virgin’s milk “is not shown in larger small quantities,” with “virtually every town and village across Europe claiming to possess a portion.”56 The Virgin’s milk will be a matter for Chapters 2 and 3 where I look at what the reformers denounced as the eroticization of the Virgin. It is notable that her milk is one of the relics neither of the modern shrines have attempted to replace. Finally, dating from quite early in its history, probably from the late twelfth or thirteenth centuries, what brought thousands of pilgrims to Walsingham was the statue or ‘image’ of the Virgin. Erasmus described it as standing on the right of the altar at the eastern end of the Holy House. It was made of wood, with a gold crown paid for by Henry III, a gold circlet given by Henry VIII, and, when visited by pilgrims, would have been decorated in jewels and trinkets, surrounded by ex votos and other tributes, including, after Erasmus’s visit, a poem he wrote in praise of the Virgin. It was taken away and burnt in London in 1538, along with other images of the Virgin. In the twentieth century the statue’s probable design has been reconstructed from descriptions like Erasmus’s and the many representations related to Walsingham on medals, badges and seals found over ensuing centuries. Brian Spencer’s compilation of pilgrim badges from Walsingham shows that the shrine had a “busy involvement in the pilgrim souvenir trade,” even to the extent of having on the premises, at least in the 1530s when Cromwell’s investigators noted it, what amounts to a souvenir factory. From the many badges listed by Spencer and from surviving priory seals, we can construct an image of Our Lady that was characteristic of medieval Walsingham. She would typically be seated upright on high-backed throne in stern Romanesque style (suggesting the twelfth- or thirteenth-century origin or inspiration, a style presumably referred to in Pynson’s phrase, “Heavenly Empress”). The chair posts of the throne holds seven rings, three on the right, four on the left, probably representing the seven sacraments. In her left hand Mary holds a lily-like scepter. She has the Christ child across her lap, pointing to him with her right hand. He holds a book to indicate the Word of God. Beneath the Virgin’s feet is an East Anglian toadstone, a regional representation of her stamping out evil as prophesied in the traditional Catholic reading of Genesis

John Calvin, A Treatise on Relics, trans. Valerian Karinski (London, 1854), 249; Erasmus, Pilgrimage, 40. For the size of St Peter’s bones, see Carroll, Veiled Threats, 166. For the speculation about the Virgin’s alighting on the beam of wood, see Stephenson, Walsingham Way, 27. 56

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3:15 and the subject of some amused remarks in Erasmus’s colloquy.57 It reflects a common design among Marian shrines: it is very similar to that of Our Lady of Rocamadour in Aquitaine, which like Walsingham, may have originated in the eleventh or twelfth century, but for which, likewise, no reliable historical records existed until some centuries later.58 A major reason for pilgrims to come to Walsingham was to earn indulgences for themselves, their relatives, or those departed. The earning of indulgences started slowly and then accelerated in the later Middle Ages. Initially sought after for an individual’s benefit, gradually—“when and by whom … is unclear,” R.N. Swanson notes, indulgences eventually became transferrable to those in the afterlife. Their availability to the dead in purgatory was first officially approved in 1476, and the number of years of remission offered in return for both charitable donations and devotional acts like going on pilgrimage was increasingly inflated. Walsingham was not exceptional: as it became systematized and bureaucratized, it simply became part of the international indulgences industry. There is, for example, a 1493 record of the Bishop of Ely granting purgatorial remission for those saying or hearing mass at Walsingham. The advent of printing meant that pilgrimage sites could expand their offers of indulgences: they could advertise their availability aggressively, and developed what Swanson terms “almost packagetour pilgrimage,” with the indulgence documents becoming more elaborate and “more consciously a marketing device.” A significant part of Pynson’s business was printing indulgences for pilgrims. In the 1520s, he was printing up to at least 10,000 a year. Exorcisms would also be carried out at Walsingham: Pynson mentions that pilgrims were “delivered” from “wicked spytes,” and Carroll suggests that such ceremonies would most likely be carried out in a “shed,” as Erasmus calls it, near or over the holy wells. 59 Ecclesiastical and royal support, which in turn led to the financial security of accumulated riches; a combination of relative remoteness and ease of access; 57 Brian Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges (London: Museum of London: The Stationery Office, 1998), 135. The Walsingham seal is reproduced in Dickinson, Shrine, 112, and Gillett, Walsingham 75. The Douay-Rheims Bible reads: “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.” Tina Beattie gets around the controversy nicely by noting that “at least since the second century there has been a tradition in Catholic theology of interpreting God’s promise to the woman in Genesis 3:15 that she or her offspring (depending on which translation one uses) will crush the serpent’s head, as the protoevangelium, the first good news of the coming of Christ, in a way that creates an association between Eve and Mary”: Tina Beattie, God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate (London: Continuum, 2002), 47. 58 For Rocamadour, see Marcus Graham Bull, The Miracles of Our Lady of Rocamadour: Analysis and Translation (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999). 59 R.N Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 14, 9, 21, 53, 172–3, 246–7; Carroll, “Pilgrimage at Walsingham,” 39–40.

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associations with the Holy Land; deep roots in medieval popular religion, including miracles, relics, holy wells, indulgences, exorcisms, as well as standard Marian devotions, her prominent place in the daily hours of prayer, and the liturgy—all these contributed to the aura Walsingham had achieved by the time of the Pynson Ballad’s publication around 1496 or Erasmus’s visit in 1512. But as the faithful affirmed, and the reformers’ hostility confirmed, it was the figure in whose honor the Shrine was erected and by whose power they believed it had been built and was sustained, which was the core of Walsingham’s appeal. The Pynson Ballad is firmly in the popular mariocentric tradition that is so prominent in the fifteenth century. It makes no direct mention of Christ. Its focus is entirely on his Mother. The development of the cult of the Virgin over the first 1500 years of Christian history has been documented and discussed innumerable times. Today, most nonCatholic bible scholars accept that both the anonymous author of the Gospel of Matthew late in the first century C.E. and St Jerome in the fourth century deliberately chose to (mis)translate almah, young woman (not bethulah, virgin) into Greek as parthenos, thus giving emphatic emphasis to profoundly important orthodox Christian “invented tradition” of the virgin birth.60 But the mariological tradition of virginity cannot simply be dismissed as a mistranslation. Its elaboration clearly answered (and answers) an enormously rich substratum of human experience. The paucity of references to Mary in the Gospels was supplemented through the following centuries by legends, mostly derived from the late secondcentury Protevangelium, or Gospel of James, which elaborated biblical incidents and other related narratives to fill out details of the Virgin’s life. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, all across Europe, the figure of Mary dominated Christian devotion and theology: as Kim Philips notes, “the very timetable and calendar of worship emphasized the centrality of the Virgin in Christian life.” England was no exception. It is sometimes asserted that a “theatre culture” like Italy’s was more demonstrative about the ubiquitous power of the Virgin, but as Gail Gibson comments, “the Marian fervor that we associate today with Italy or Spain” was then just as much “of English renown,”61 sentiments that will be emphatically articulated by Edmund Waterton in the nineteenth century. Just as today Italian or Latin American religiosity is strikingly mariological, so it was in England in the mid-fifteenth century. Our evidence is, of course, severely limited by a century of Reformed iconoclasm after the Reformation, but the research of Richard Marks For a useful overview of the linguistic (as distinct from the theological) issues at stake, see Katharina Reiss, Translation Criticism: the Potentials and Limitations Categories and Criteria for Translation Quality Assessment, trans. Errol F. Rhodes (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2000). For a glimpse at the enormous literature on the origins of the Virgin Birth stories, see e.g. R. E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (Garden City: Doubleday, 1977) or Jane Schaberg, The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987). 61 Kim M. Phillips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270–1540 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 78; Gibson, The Theater of Devotion, 138. 60

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on English churches, shrines and pilgrimages has shown that, especially in the development of empathetic imagery of the Virgin as mediatrix, England was “both extensive and, in certain respects, distinctive” in Europe. Marks instances the remarkable development of lady chapels, the amount of Marian antiphonic music, the development of new cults and local shrines, popular devotions, liturgical offices, Church decorations, paintings, sculptures, all of which placed an extraordinary emphasis on the Virgin. In East Anglia, where the greatest concentration of mariological culture in England was situated, major and minor shrines were thickly distributed across the landscape. They included Our Lady of Grace at Ipswich, which may have been founded as early as 1152, around the same time as the probable (historical) date of the original chapel at Walsingham and which was centered, like Walsingham, around an image of the Virgin, the fate of which would be eerily linked with that of Our Lady of Walsingham at the dissolution in the 1530s.62 By the time the Pynson Ballad was printed in the late 1490s, then, mariological devotion at Walsingham was at or near its peak, and the publication of the Pynson Ballad shows the priory’s concern to legitimate its present by an affirmation of its miraculous origin and history. Why, over the next generation, did it fall with apparently so little protest? Was it simply through the brutal and disruptive intervention of the Tudor state in the 1530s? In part, that is probably so. England became a Protestant nation against the felt wishes of most of its inhabitants. But there were, in fact, other signs within the rapidly changing political situation of the late fifteenth century. As the Wars of the Roses petered out and the Tudor monarchy stabilized, there developed a significant degree of tension between national and regional pride. The Pynson Ballad likely shows early signs of the Tudors’ move to centralize rather than regionalize not just political power but also religious devotion. As Stella Singer notes, there is an attempt in the final stanza in what (given the fractious state of England in the 1460s) she terms an “ambitious gesture” to set Walsingham in a nationalistic rather than a regional or universalist context: “O Englonde, great cause thou haste glad … to be called in euery realme and region/The holy lande, Oure Ladyes dower; Thus arte thou named of olde antyquyte.” Walsingham is hailed as the “Newe Nazareth”: the Holy Land, it is being claimed, has been brought to this Holy House built in remote north Norfolk. Was the Ballad, therefore, Singer asks, an early acknowledgement that Walsingham’s distinctive identity was coming to be at odds with what in the 1460s might have been seen as a power vacuum? For by the accession of the Tudors, there develops a desire to centralize power. Just as East Anglian economic and cultural independence, so notable in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is crushed by the new Tudor hegemony, so Walsingham itself, so this argument goes, became subject to centralized religious control. James Simpson supports this viewpoint when he observes that the relative autonomy of local jurisdictions that 62 Vail, Shrines of 0ur Lady, 105–9. For a broader discussion of the cult of the Virgin in England, see Waller, Virgin Mary in Literature and Popular Culture, Chapter four.

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were so central to the medieval understanding of local saints became at odds with the Tudor centralization.63 Another potential weakness lay, paradoxically, in the greatest apparent strength of Walsingham’s position, its very explicit mariocentricity. What Erasmus terms the “new learnynge, whiche runnyth all the world over now a dayes” (19), with its new evangelizing christocentrism, was gradually being assimilated into devotional culture all over Europe. It is significant that the writer of the Ballad, as he approaches his peroration, appeals to both learned and popular audiences, the “letterd” as well as those “halt” in “eloquence.”64 Walsingham was very much part of an older world, where the Virgin was at the centre of devotion, where her roles as queen, mother, miracle-worker, and intercessor were still paramount. It was the “letterd” who embraced the new learning who would put increasing emphasis on a renewed christocentrism. Walsingham’s peak popularity in the latefifteenth century was therefore built upon increasing contradictions. It was at once nostalgic and avant-garde, regional and nationalistic, popular and elitist. Those contradictions emerge in open controversy and eventually violence in the 1530s. 1538 is the key year for Walsingham, an ominous date for those in later centuries still feeling its loss, and certainly a date a little more definite than that of its founding. Sometime in the summer or autumn that year the “Image” of Our Lady of Walsingham was taken—“mustered” is the term the Protestant Bishop Hugh Latimer uses—with other statues of the Virgin, and burnt. In one of his sermons, Latimer describes a group of pilgrims, and in his reformist zeal vows that their “running hither and thither” across the land must be made to cease. God was to be found in a believer’s heart, he asserted, not in allegedly special places like Walsingham. The reformers saw the Gospel as having overthrown the self-deceptive fantasies of papistry and attacked the previous 1500 years of church history as a gradual degeneration into blasphemy, idolatry and corrupt self-serving. They moved vigorously and at times viciously to destroy shrines, and images, since they were convinced the superstitions of papistry had brought untold millions of souls to damnation. Thomas Cromwell’s attack on the country’s religious institutions in the 1530s expressed not only the royal will, but the reformers’ crusading beliefs against superstitious practices like pilgrimages and the veneration of relics as well as (not entirely coincidentally) enriching the royal coffers. Yet in their iconoclasm, their radical ‘re-imaginings,’ and their desires to return to an older, more patristic and as they saw it christological (albeit, no less “invented”) tradition, the reformers were seemingly unaware of the deeper significance of what they were reacting so strongly against. Essentially it was that Walsingham was centered on the experience of the female, the experiences both Stella Singer, “Walsingham’s Local Genius: Norfolk’s “Newe Nazareth,” in Janes and Waller, Walsingham, 23–34; James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 399, 402, 404. 64 Hugh Latimer, Sermons, (ed.) George Elwes Corrie (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1855), 142. 63

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of and by women. That was so in the obvious sense that seems to be a simple truism—Walsingham was a shrine dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. But more: it was a shrine centered on multiple female experiences— which included male constructions of women and women’s experience, but also specifically female experiences, including pregnancy, motherhood, nurturing, and the uniquely embodied spirituality and physicality of women. That, too, may seem obvious. But both the Virgin and “women” or “women’s experiences” were and today remain deeply contested concepts within Christianity, not least in early twenty-first century Walsingham as its traditionalists, both Roman and AngloCatholic, face (or try to avoid) the issue of women and the priesthood; and these concepts are by no means straightforward matters in the history of the “English imagination.” In fact, I will argue that it is their very contested nature and the existence of alternative traditions of women’s religion from early in the Church’s own history that helps account for Walsingham’s deepest appeal. The womancentered nature of Walsingham and specifically what I term its gynotheology, will be the subject of the next chapter.

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Chapter 2

Gynotheological Imagination: The Virgin’s Body and the Alternate Mariologies of Late Medieval Walsingham In his powerful, rambling, allegorical poem, Piers Plowman, written a century before the Pynson Ballad and, when it was first printed in 1550 interpreted approvingly as a Wycliffite or Lollard satire on the corruptions of the medieval Church, William Langland mocks the conventional dress and accoutrements of pilgrims—the badges they wear on coats and hats, their ampulae, and the universal sign of the pilgrim (though especially associated with pilgrimages to St James of Compostela), their scallop shells. When the poem turns specifically to Walsingham, it refers to it not so much as a place of pilgrimage, but rather as a symbol of corruption and sexual immorality: I saw some that said they had sought saints: Yet in each tale that they told their tongue turned to lies More than to tell truth it seemed by their speech. Hermits, a heap of them with hooked staves, Were going to Walsingham and their wenches too; Big loafers and tall that loth were to work, Dressed up in capes to be known from others; And so clad as hermits their ease to have.

A little later Envy decides (hypocritically) to repent, vowing to “make my way to Walsingham, and my wife with me,” again suggesting that, at least in Langland’s view, Walsingham attracted charlatans, hypocrites, and the sexually corrupt. Langland’s is a very different perspective on medieval Walsingham from that of the Pynson Ballad. It anticipates the hostility of the sixteenth-century reformers, giving us a glimpse of the commercial and irreligious side of medieval pilgrimages to Walsingham, and, above all, hinting at an aura of sexual scandal. One of the recurring criticisms of Walsingham, especially from the Lollards, was that it encouraged sexual immorality, that pilgrimages there took men and women not so much into a liminal space where the pious pilgrims could petition the Virgin, venerate relics, and pray for miracles, but rather a licentious space where corruption and sexual adventures were rampant. The 1562 homily against William Langland, Piers Plowman, (ed.) Terence Tiller (Ware: Wordsworth, 1999),



4, 46.

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idolatry, a touchstone for the official Elizabethan view of pilgrimages, thundered that “it is too well known, that by such pilgrimage-going, lady Venus and her son Cupid were rather worshipped wantonly in the flesh, then God the Father, and our Saviour Christ his Son truly worshipped in the spirit.” The Fantassie of Idolatrie, a polemical ballad written in the 1530s by one of Thomas Cromwell’s protégées, expressed a similar opinion more graphically. In the course of attacking those who go “to Walsingham a gaddying” and “to Canterbury a madding,” the author, Gray of Reading, imagines a sexual liaison between Our Lady of Walsingham and the Rood of Grace, the supposedly miraculously moving crucifix from Bexley in Kent, which was also seized and destroyed in 1538. He depicts the relationship in crude sexual terms with the Rood’s “shaftes” going “up and down, ” until he was destroyed so that “he can not her wed,” and so “has lost hym his wyfe/The rychest of all Northfolke.” Now, Gray gloats, the two idols “can not aryse / Not onse, to helpe them selves,”  a taunt echoed by many of the reformers as they burnt or desecrated statues, relics and images throughout the century-long surges of iconoclasm following Henry VIII and Cromwell’s destruction of religious houses and idolatrous objects and acts in the 1530s. Nor was the association of pilgrimage and sexual license confined to Lollards and reformers. In the 1520s, in the course of vigorously defending “the veneration & worship of images & relics, praying to saints & going on pilgrimage,” Thomas More made a not dissimilar remark, that “our lady was a vyrgyn and yet at her pylgrymages be made many a foule metynge.” In his Dialogue concerning Heresies, he echoes a traditional story—what might perhaps be termed an ‘old husbands’ tale’—and warns “you men of London” that they should accompany their wives on pilgrimage “or keep them at home with you! Else you’ll be sorry.” More’s remarks view pilgrimages and shrines as encouragements to idolatry and sexual immorality, even though in his case he certainly believed that pilgrimages, undertaken for religion’s sake as his friend Erasmus put it, could, and emphatically should, be conducive to piety. The Church authorities were supposed to approve all requests to make a pilgrimage but, however, it was clearly easy to become a pilgrim for less than completely pious reasons. Only 40 years after the publication of the Pynson Ballad, which celebrated the Virgin’s power and her continuing miracles, Walsingham lay in ruins, its pilgrimages forbidden, its iconic statue and relics destroyed as superstitious idols. Why was Walsingham one of the religious institutions singled out by Cromwell’s Certain Sermons Or Homilies, 209. F.W. Dormer, Gray of Reading: Sixteenth-Century Controversialist and Ballad-

 

Writer (Reading: Bradley, 1923), 68, 72, 74.  For More’s view of the potential sexuality of the pilgrimage experience, see Dialogue concerning Heresies, in The Works, The English Works of Sir Thomas More, (ed.) W.E. Campbell et al. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1931), II, 62, 100; Agnes Stewart, The Life and Letters of Sir Thomas More, 29; Frank Mitjans, “Thomas More’s Veneration of Images, Praying to Saints, and Going on Pilgrimages,” Thomas More Studies 3 (2008), 67–8.

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commissioners for special attention to its supposedly false miracles and fraudulent relics? Was sexual immorality particularly rife on pilgrimages there? Or were there more deep-seated reasons for the reformers’ hostility? Furthermore, why, more than 20 years after it was destroyed, was it still felt necessary in the Elizabethan Homily on Idolatry to warn specifically against the image of the Virgin at Walsingham, mentioning it by name along with those of Willesdon and Ipswich, as “indeed very idols” that had been reverenced by a previous generation?  What, if anything, was there about Walsingham that eventually attracted the hostility of the reformers? As my overview of medieval Walsingham in Chapter 1 argued, the initial answer to that question is disarmingly simple: when we look beyond the obvious factors of popularity, gradually accumulated riches, royal support and location, the appeal of Walsingham was built on what the late Middle Ages perceived to be enormous, seemingly limitless, power of the Virgin. Walsingham was a pilgrimage site that was specifically dedicated to a woman, purportedly originating in one woman’s vision of yet another woman, Miriam (or Marian/m) of Nazareth, whose power and authority, according to the legend first invented or recorded in the Pynson Ballad, caused the shrine and its wells, relics, statue, and miracles, to be manifest in the relative obscurity of northern Norfolk. The aura of the Virgin herself constituted both the centre of its power—and was also the reason why the reformers, determined to present salvation as based upon sola gratia, sola fides, sola scriptura, believed they must diminish the role of the Virgin. It is now time to deepen and to some extent critique that answer. Walsingham was, of course, not the only Marian shrine to be the target of the reformers’ hostility. In 1538, the Protestant bishop Hugh Latimer made a determined attack on what he termed the “sisters,” those images or “idols” of the Virgin across England who had “been the instrument to bring many (I fear) to eternal fire.” He called the statue of the Virgin in his own diocese at Worcester a “devil’s instrument.” He gloated that it, along with “her old sister of Walsingham, her young sister of Ipswich,” and statues from Doncaster and Pen Rhys, would together “make a jolly muster” and, he added for good measure, unlike fleshand-blood heretics, would not “be all day in burning.” Latimer’s sentiments, however extreme, speak more for a broader social movement than just his own psychopathology. The reformers were appalled not just by what they saw as the idolatrous elevation of the Virgin in popular devotion, but by what they saw as the sexualization of the Virgin and of the Church generally, believing that pagan forces had for a thousand years increasingly re-inhabited the beliefs and corrupted the practices of the Church. They relentlessly attacked the fetishization of the Virgin, whether of her whole body or its parts, physical objects directly associated with Certain Sermons or Homilies, 209. W.H. Frere, Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation

 

(London: Longmans, Green, 1910), II, 12; Latimer, Sermons, II, 395. For comments on Latimer’s views, see Diarmaid MacCullough, “Mary and Sixteenth-Century Protestants,” in The Church and Mary, (ed.) R.N. Swanson (Rochester: Boydell Press, 2004), 204–5.

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her or even been touched by her. They called such actions blasphemy, superstition, idolatry, just as their nineteenth-century (and later) descendants were to see the revival of Mariology and the renewal of the shrine at Walsingham in similar terms. Appalled, they asserted that the medieval Church had degenerated to worshipping “a creature before the Creator; Mary before her Son,” and warned that “God only is to be worshipped” and that “Mary is not God.” Or, as the early seventeenth century Puritan polemicist William Crashaw claimed, in Catholic theology and devotion, “the paps of a woman” were blasphemously “equaled with the wounds of our Lord, and her milke with his blood,” even though “the holy scriptures speak no more of her, but as a creature,” and, in a significant slur, merely “a woman.” Ironically, and of course without the polemical edge of the Protestant propagandists, some aspects of what the reformers saw as abuses in the medieval Church were to be acknowledged within the Catholic Church itself, even at the Council of Trent and more emphatically over 400 years later at Vatican II and in many Catholic contributions to modern ecumenical documents. Acknowledging the Council’s deliberations on Mary, and with an eye on Catholic and Anglican reconciliation, the 2007 Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) report acknowledged that devotional practices had indeed grown up in medieval popular religion which saw Mary “as an intermediary between God and humanity, and even as a worker of miracles with powers that verged on the divine.” Ultra-conservative Catholic groups—both those who remain firmly faithful within the Church and those sedevacantists who believe that many of Vatican II’s decisions were heretical and that today the papacy remains vacant, such as the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen, as well as such ultra-conservative movements within the Church as the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary— remain deeply suspicious of any such criticism which they see as steps towards the “protestantization of the Catholic Church.”10 At the other extreme, even within  “Fetish” here is not a provocative anachronism but a term used by Reformation polemicists to deride the allegedly superstitious religious practices of both pagans and Catholics. See William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish I,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (1985), 5–17; “The Problem of the Fetish II: The Origin of the Fetish,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (1987), 23–45; “The Problem of the Fetish IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16 (1988), 105–23.  Latimer, Sermons II, 153; William Crashaw, The Jesuites Gospell, (London, 1610), 32. For further discussion of the sexualization of the Virgin in the later Middle Ages and Reformation period, see Waller, Virgin Mary, Chapters 1–3, and “The Virgin’s ‘pryvytes’: Walsingham and the Late Medieval Sexualization of the Virgin,” in Janes and Waller, Walsingham, 113–30.  Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ: The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission Report, 2005, 43, 44, 48. See www.aco.org/ministry/ecumenical/dialogues/ catholic/arcic/docs/pdf/mary_definitive_text.pdf. Accessed June 1, 2010. 10 http://www.ourladyswarriors.org/renew/renprotest.htm. For the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen see http://cmri.org; for the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, see http://catholicism.org/ all accessed June 1, 2010.

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modern Catholicism, and despite strong disapproval by the Church authorities, there is a vocal minority of clergy and laity advocating the establishment of women priests—a development which has gradually occurred in the worldwide Anglican communion without, it should be noted, the support of the authorities at Walsingham who have also expressed the strongest opposition to women priests. Many contemporary feminist theologians, including some Catholics, have argued (in the face of the Vatican’s stern opposition) that such a refusal is indicative of the distorted and perverse exclusion of female experience from Christianity, an issue I will take up in my final Chapter.11 The history of ideologies is rarely if ever straightforward, and that what comes through is inevitably over-determined and contradictory. To adapt a phrase of Regina Mara Schwartz, gods and goddesses may leave the world but can also be reborn, and can be reborn differently, in multiple guises.12 Essentially my argument is that, on the one hand, in both dogma and popular devotion, medieval Christianity’s dominant theological traditions denigrated ordinary human sexuality, especially the bodies and sexual desires of women, thereby contributing to generations of distinctively Christian misogyny. Mary’s body, comments Jennifer Glancy, is configured by Christian orthodoxy “as exceptional in ways that imply other women’s bodies are intrinsically shameful.”13 Yet on the other hand, was the vehemence of the reformers attacking the sexualization of the Virgin merely rhetorical? The Reformation, Rosemary Ruether comments, “was fought in highly sexualized language.” Are we simply seeing the continuation of a millennium-long polemical tradition by which Christians, Jews and Muslims attacked one another through insulting, scatological references to intimate bodily functions? I don’t think so.14 In their attacks on what they perceived as the blasphemous sexualization of the Virgin, the reformers seemed to be picking up on some aspects of mariological devotion and theology that were indeed working to undermine or at least counter-balance that attempted erasure See e.g., Tina Beattie, “How Far Can You Go?: Reflections of the Catholic Theology of Priesthood,” Paper given to the AGM of the Movement For Married Clergy, London, 28th June, 2006. tina.beattie.googlepages.com/how_far_can_you_go.pdf. Accessed May 1, 2010. 12 Regina Mara Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). See also my discussion of the ”splitting” of the Virgin in early modern Europe in Virgin Mary, Chapter 8. 13 Jennifer A. Glancy, Corporal Knowledge: Early Christian Bodies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 108. 14 Rosemary Ruether, “Sex in the Catholic Tradition,” in The Good News of the Body: Sexual Theology and Feminism, (ed.) Lisa Isherwood (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 45. For a study of scatological rhetoric in religious controversy, see Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). I owe some of the wording here to Michael P. Carroll and his ground-breaking hypotheses on popular Catholicism: for a further acknowledgment of the importance of his work, see Waller, Virgin Mary, 23–4. 11

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of sexuality. Like some of the Lollards before them, they were correct in seeing a remarkable bodily and even specifically sexual dimension to medieval Mariology, and it is this powerful undercurrent of sexuality in late medieval mariology that, in part, contributed to the popular appeal of Walsingham. Nor, to borrow Coleman’s terms, does this “alternative” or “subversive” tradition emerge only marginal cultural activities, in Carroll’s “folklorised,” popular Christianity, where from the point of view of Church authorities, ‘distorted’ or ‘heretical’ views might be expected. It constitutes a strand—an emergent possibility, if not fully a tradition— within orthodox theology and devotion.15 My argument is based on an analysis of aspects of medieval mariological practices that have long been known; but an adequate discussion of them has become possible only within recent times—essentially since Freud and, more particularly, since the rise of feminist thought and its ongoing dialogue with theology. For, as Kristeva puts it, it is the meeting of representation and biology in the bodies and the experiences of women that these issues are centered.16 Despite Christianity’s emphasis on the Incarnation—the embodiment of God in human flesh—what Charles Williams terms “the affirmation of the body” has not consistently applied to women’s bodies and especially to women’s sexuality. In the dominant theological tradition, especially from Augustine on, men were identified with metaphors of authority, transcendence, and spirituality; women with the body and its chaotic, threatening desires, with immanence and corruption. God has likewise been traditionally imaged as male in relation to the human race, and the human response characterized as female. As Beattie comments, with some force, the male-authored theological tradition has “regarded the female sexual body as the greatest threat” to men’s “spiritual well-being.”17 The long tradition of historical misogyny within most branches of Christianity has thereby dramatically distorted the potential women had within Christian experience. Unlike (in quite different ways) both the Greek and Hebrew traditions, early Christians did not see, comments Beattie, “the procreative fire in their bodies as an expression of the same divine energy that sustained the cosmos”; they saw overwhelmingly “only shame in their sexual coupling,” seen as activities “separating them from God.” The female body became the symbol of all that prevented men from achieving salvation, and they needed to resist not only what the female body represented in itself but what it represented within themselves, what can “lure” them “away from See e.g., Coleman, “Tradition as Play,” 279; “Do You Believe in Pilgrimage?” 359, 360; Coleman and Elsner, “Pilgrimage to Walsingham,” 192–3; Carroll, Irish Pilgrimage, 11. 16 Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clément, The Feminine and the Sacred, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 15–6: “Woman, a being on the borderline, biology and meaning, is likely to participate in both sides of the sacred, in calm appeasement [and] in spasm or delirium.” 17 Charles Williams, Religion and Love in Dante (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1941); Tina Beattie, “The Catholic Church’s Scandal: Modern Crisis, Ancient Roots”: www. opendemocracy.net/tina-beattie/catholic-church’s-abuse-scandal-modern-crisis-ancientroots. Accessed June 1, 2010. 15

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Christ through the arousal of sexual rather than spiritual desire.”18 The origins of such a pathology may lie deeper than even the conflicted origins of Christianity, but rather in the construction of masculinity, expressed in what Klaus Theweleit categorizes as the predominant “male fantasies,” or simply, as Lisa Isherwood suggests, “springing from a primal need for nurture.”19 Recent feminist critiques of the historical emergence and reinforcement of patriarchal theology have especially focused on examining both the historical and psychoanalytical roots of the orthodox belief in the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. From the pioneering work in the 1970s of many theologians and biblical scholars like Mary Daly, Elizabeth Johnson, Jane Schaberg, or Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, a generation of feminist theologians have both raised historical and textual doubts about the originating story of Jesus’ conception and birth that have challenged the dominant orthodoxy that first took coherent shape in the first four centuries of Christian history.20 It is not my purpose to explore (let alone decide among!) the diverse scholarly readings of the conception and nativity narratives by contemporary biblical scholars and historians, whose ‘stories’ range—on the issue of the Virgin Birth, for instance—from divine asexual conception to redeemed illegitimacy. But it is clear that a great diversity of interpretation of what later hardened into dogma was present for the first four centuries of the Church’s history, and constituted part of the vigorous debate among the various Jewish and Gentile Christian sects that were struggling to define the new religion. There was, Schüssler Fiorenza points out, “never a single, pure, authentic Christian position as later ‘orthodoxy’ would have us believe” in the early Church. Insofar as the writings collected and accepted into the New Testament canon were selected and codified by the patristic church, the canon is a record of the “historical winners” and as a consequence, Schaberg Tina Beattie, Woman (London: Continuum, 2003), 126; “The Baptism of Eros,” Theology and Sexuality 9 (2002), 170. 19 Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Stephen Conway, Chris Turner and Erica Carter, 2 Vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Isherwood, “Our Lady of Perpetual Succour,” 118. Michael P. Carroll’s study of the rise of the cult of the Virgin adds the important social factor of the father-deprived family structure as a contributive, though not determinative, social factor. See The Cult of the Virgin Mary: Psychological Origins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Another factor was the Christian Church’s reaction to pagan sects in the turbulent centuries of its early history—pagan sexuality, argues Beattie, “becomes a source of unresolved terror, a potent threat” that became “deeply repressed in Christian consciousness”: “The Baptism of Eros,” 177. 20 See e.g., Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: the Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975); Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992); Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); Jane Schaberg, The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987); Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1984). 18

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notes, “much of the literature of the Christian ‘losers’ has not been preserved.” But there is sufficient documentation of conflicting views to suggest that Christians heard “competing stories” centered on the body of the Virgin.21 Drawing on both part of Mark’s gospel and other, pre-gospel material, the authors of Matthew and Luke constructed for their different communities stories that affirm the miraculous details of the Messiah’s conception and birth; Matthew’s focus is on the part played by Joseph, Luke’s more on Mary. Modern biblical scholars disagree on the extent to which the stories these Gospels constructed should be “read in a figurative or symbolic, not a literal sense,” but on most scholarly readings, both the Gospels provide didactic and apologetic dimensions to what eventually becomes promulgated as the orthodox doctrine by which, as formulated in the mid-sixteenth century by the Council of Trent, Jesus was “born of His Mother without any diminution of her maternal virginity.” Christ Jesus came “forth from His mother’s womb without any injury to her maternal virginity … Such was the work of the Holy Ghost, who at the Conception and birth of the Son so favored the Virgin Mother as to impart to her fecundity while preserving inviolate her perpetual virginity.”22 Jennifer Glancy’s suggestive study of early Christian bodies, Corporeal Knowledge, provides an analysis of the early Church’s representations of Mary’s body that underlines the multiplicity of the accounts of her bodily nature and functions and the systematic repression of sexuality within the emerging Mariological tradition. Glancy focuses on the crucial centuries during which the early Church was debating the place of the Virgin in theology and devotion, and asks “what stories” were told “by Mary’s childbearing body,” and especially her “laboring body,” constructed to differentiate her “from stories told by other women’s bodies as they labor to bring children into the world,” and which thereby came to impact on the bodies of real women as the Christian emerged from the contradictions and conflicts of its early centuries? And how did they contribute to the understanding of women’s experiences, including childbearing, motherhood and sexuality, for the next thousand and more years, and eventually as pilgrimage became a central part of medieval religious culture, how did that seemingly overwhelmingly tradition impact upon women going to a Marian shrine like Walsingham?23 As the orthodox position developed and triumphed, the physical realities of sexual desire, menstruation, and ordinary human bodily functions were dissociated from Mary; such female experiences were deliberately marginalized and as far as possible eliminated by an emerging masculinist and dualistic theology masking as a very primitive biology or simply indifferent to biological realities. The purveyors 21 Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, 55; Scharberg, The Illegitimacy of Jesus, 178–9.hh. 22 See the discussion in Glancy, Corporeal Knowledge, 81; Scharberg, The Illegitimacy of Jesus, 67. 23 Glancy, Corporeal Knowledge, 82, 108.

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of what became orthodoxy were less concerned with female realities and more with the biological consequences of their theology: hence the obsession with Mary’s virginity, and especially her hymen, which is incessantly repeated throughout the Middle Ages, as if generations of celibate male theologians one after the other were attempting to peer into the mystery and discover “whether her genitalia remained intact and whether the delivery is messy,” as Glancy states it. It is easy to laugh at such primitive and prurient thinking, but as many feminist theologians have pointed out, the result has been not just “the tendency, frequently observed in the history of religions, to take as literal truth” what was intended to be “the language of symbol, poetry, metaphor, midrash, myth,” but the marginalization of any serious theological understanding of women’s experiences. A particular “story” becomes hardened into (what passes for) “history.” The body of Mary was rewritten into a male-created and male-dominated history and theology, which, Glancy comments, “seemed glorious” in its consolidation of the controversies of the early Church, but which, in relation to women, especially today, may well appear “as a poignant denial of maternal knowing.” As Beattie notes, the seeming triumph of the elevation of Mary into Theotokos, the God-bearer, Mother of God, by the Council of Ephesus in 431, may be seen tragically as a “decisive act of curtailment.”24 But, however paradoxical it appears it was, I believe, precisely the multiplicity of stories, the various invented traditions and ‘imaginings’ of the Virgin which the Church attempted to control that did continue; and it was those recurrent stories of sexuality which the reformers sensed had never disappeared and were contributing to her power over the emotional allegiances of late medieval men and women. What to an earlier generation of scholars—and still to many traditional Christian believers—might seem a tasteless or even blasphemous matter, the sexuality and bodily functions of the Virgin, can now be seen from a number of perspectives as the key to understanding her allure and power in medieval Christianity—and well beyond the Middle Ages. Despite the Church’s overwhelming negativity towards sexuality and its attempts to isolate the Virgin from ordinary human bodily functions, there remained (as the reformers pointed out repeatedly) a recurring strand within popular religion, as well as in art and literature, that reflected a debate in the early Church or, as Beattie puts it, “at least in embryonic form” even a “dual theology,” regarding women’s place in salvation history that potentially gave female sexuality a more central and creative place.25 This “dual” or “alternate” tradition may have emerged in groups like the Collyridians that were excluded from the Church. But the impetus for an ‘alternative’ account of Christianity does not necessarily die out. Indeed, part of my argument about Walsingham throughout this book will be that this alternative tradition remains present, even if it is largely unacknowledged;

Glancy, Corporeal Knowledge, 106, 108; Beattie, God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate, 60. Isherwood, “Our Lady of Perpetual Succour,” 123; Beattie, “Queen of Heaven,”

24

25

206–7.

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it is present throughout Walsingham’s history, not least (as I shall argue in my final chapter) at Walsingham today. Among contemporary theologians and religious historians advocating such a perspective, discussions have ranged from the simple statement that we need to ponder that “God entered the world through a woman’s vagina,” to wholesale calls for a re-thinking of the place of the Virgin in a new “prioritizing of the female body, anatomically and symbolically,” and an effort to “give the vagina back to the virgin.” Beattie has repeatedly advocated a “gynocentric” reading of Marian symbolism. While discussing New World Mariology, Marcella Althaus-Reid has analyzed the “vulvic” symbolism of Marian apparitions and representations of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Jane Caputi calls for the “holy sites” of “gynocentrism” to be reclaimed in a revitalized theology of the body.26 In my own studies of the Virgin in late medieval and early modern literature and popular culture, I have used the similar term gynotheology to refer to a high degree of concern, even obsession, within medieval (and later) Mariology, with the gynecological, the female sexual and reproductive apparatus and functions, its assumptions and rhetoric widely shared, paradoxically, by both late medieval Mariology and its Reformation opponents. When in his semi-fictional account of a visit to Walsingham, the subject of my next chapter, Erasmus’s character Ogygius is offered a view of the “secrets” or “pryvytes” of the Virgin (64), and (so he tells his audience) he puzzles over what is meant, Erasmus is not simply making a provocative, even perhaps slightly offcolor, remark but actually raising a serious issue.27 My argument, then, is that the appeal and power of pre-Reformation Walsingham, is not completely explained by, but certainly does include, its embodiment of this largely repressed or “alternate” tradition of women’s experience. Paradoxically, Mary was firmly encoded outside sexuality and yet she was intensely sexualized, as if a residue of the repressed affirmation of women’s sexuality had been officially covered over, yet managed, even in distorted form, to surface. In multiple and contradictory ways Mary’s body, provides, I believe, a significant part of what drew pilgrims to Walsingham—and that body was, despite all efforts by the authorities, a sexualized body. Even if this alternate theology was largely erased, it never completely disappears, and is certainly highly visible in the popular religious culture of the late 26 Lisa Isherwood, “Our Lady of Perpetual Succour: Mother of Phallic Fetishes? [Queering the Queen of Heaven],” in Post-Christian Feminisms: A Critical Approach, (eds), Lisa Isherwood and Kathleen McPhillips (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 126–7; Tina Beattie, Rediscovering Mary: Insights from the Gospels (Liguori: Triumph Books, 1995), 57; Beattie, God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate, 156–8; Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000), 47–63; Jane Caputi, “The Naked Goddess: Pornography and the Sacred.” Theology & Sexuality 9.2 (2003), 186. 27 Erasmus, The Pilgrimage of Pure Devotion, 64. For more detailed discussions of “gynotheology,” see Waller, “The Virgin’s “‘Pryvytes’,” in Walsingham, (ed.) Janes and Waller, Chapter 9, and Virgin Mary, Chapter 2.

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Middle Ages. Despite the received doctrine of Mary’s independence of sexuality, popular culture—art, poetry, fiction, drama, pilgrimages—articulated a strong sense of her physical presence. A brief survey of the period’s popular culture can show the persistence of Beattie’s “dual theology,” even in its “embryonic form.” In visual representation, what Madeline Caviness calls the hidden “gynecological power” of representations of Mary constitute one of the most important subjects of medieval art. Caviness argues that the increasing realism of depictions of the Virgin in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance dramatically increased their potential sexual suggestiveness so that “subjects that were not erotic in the abstract modes of representation of Romanesque art became disturbingly sado-erotic in the more and more graphic representations of physicality” of the later period.28 Depictions specifically of what Glancy calls “postpartum Madonnas” are rare, but some do exist, though not with the detailed anatomical representations of the Christ child’s penis, as Leo Steinberg famously showed. Representations of the Madonna del Parto, the fully pregnant Madonna, or the Virgin suckling the Christ child are commonplace and are increasingly eroticized in the later Middle Ages, and however rare, there are depictions of a post-partum Mary looking exhausted and needing the attention of the midwives Joseph, at least according to the Protevangelium, was sent out to find.29 By the mid-sixteenth century, it is clear that many reformers (both the Protestants and the Council of Trent) felt unease, even distaste and revulsion, at certain kinds of intimate representation of the Virgin, and that they sensed a degree of indulgent sexuality in devotion, art, and theology. The 28 Madeline Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 2, 36. Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 177–82, discusses the increasing realism of late medieval Marianization. 29 For the influence of the story in the Protevangelium, see George Themolis Zervos, “Christmas with Salome,” in A Feminist Companion to Mariology, (ed.) Amy-Jill Levine, with Maria Mayo Robbins (London: Continuum, 2005), 90–3. For a representation of a post-partum Mary, on the website developed by Anne Marshall is a late thirteenth-century wall-painting at St Mary’s, Wissington, Suffolk. As Marshall comments, it depicts “a very rare scene, of the Virgin in bed at the Nativity. There may once have been many more like this, but I suspect that that as veneration for the Virgin grew ever higher in the later Middle Ages, conscious choices were made to show her at the Nativity in a more ‘decorous’ manner.” Accessed November 1, 2010. In The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion (New York: Pantheon Books. Rev. edition, 1996), 16, 219, 238, 110, Leo Steinberg comments that “normative Christian culture has disallowed direct reference” to Christ’s sexual organs or sexuality, contrasting the willingness of late medieval and Renaissance artists “to place this interdicted flesh at the center of their confession of faith,” and asking—akin to my posing the questions about Mariological gynotheology—is there “a genital theology” implied by these representations of Christ? What is the relationship between the theological and the genital, not just as represented in the art work, but apprehended in the viewer’s mind and emotions? In their revulsion from the human body, he suggests, theologians may have too often drifted towards docetism; it was the artists who pulled them back. For further comments, see my discussion in Virgin Mary, Chapter 2.

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nineteenth-century mariologist Edmund Waterton, whose work will be discussed in Chapter 7, expressed such unease, naively but forcibly, when he remarked that it was the Renaissance artists who were responsible for “unchristianizing” and reviving pagan “abomination” and “impieties” in the representation of the Virgin, unlike (as he saw it) “Christian” art of the Middle Ages which painted directly from divine inspiration. In poetry, the period’s intense marianization provided, Rubin notes, “seemingly endless opportunities for display of cleverness and inventiveness,”30 and late medieval poetry also shows a wide range of attitudes to the bodiliness of the Virgin. The Pynson Ballad is perhaps at the austere extreme of the range, and is perhaps a little old-fashioned in its devotional attitudes given the new realism in the visual arts. It presents Mary as the Church authorities would have us see her, austere, powerful, mysterious: “0 gracyous Lady, glory of Jerusalem,/ Cypresse of Syon and Ioye of Israel,/ Rose of Jeryco and Sterre of Bethleem.” In poem after poem, Mary is similarly formulaically hailed: “Queene of the Trinite,” “queene … of paradis,” Noah’s dove, Sinai’s bush, David’s sling and stone, Solomon’s temple; biblical heroines like Miriam, Judith, Esther, Rachel, and other biblical heroines are allegorized to prefigure Mary, and she is repeatedly presented as the New Eve.31 Slightly less conservative, but still well within commonplace fifteenthcentury views, is the East Anglian poet John Lygdate—who in one poem describes seeing the pilgrims following the Milky Way towards Walsingham, 40 miles away, and mentions “the sterres clere” under which the faithful palmer “goes onward on thy pilgrimage” towards Walsingham—who gives detailed if conventional descriptions of her bodily functions, mainly abstract but with occasional details that draw on the buoyant gynotheological flavor of medieval Mariology. Her milk is “hevenly licour of her pappes small,” as she feeds the child whose “yong face between thy pappes couche”; her womb is “the closter virginall … closed and shutte.”32 But, as well, there are many poems on Mary in which there is an explicit level of unembarrassed sexuality on display, celebrating what Rubin terms her “secret places … full of music, ablaze with chastity, yet moist with saving dew”; she quotes a poem which even imagines God so at home inside the Virgin’s womb that he is tempted to return and “unmake the Incarnation.”33 When we turn to the broad tradition of medieval narrative fiction, stories in both poetry and prose, a similar interweaving of “orthodox” and “alternative” Rubin, Mother of God, 177, 268. Middle English Lyrics, (eds) Maxwell S. Luria and Richard L. Hoffman (New York:

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W.W. Norton, 1974), poems 189, 43, 181, 184. 32 A Critical Edition of John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, (eds) Joseph A. Lauritis, Ralph A. Klinefelter and Vernon F. Gallagher (Louvain: E. Nauwelaerts, 1961), 71, 76–7, 103. 33 Rubin, “Mary,” History Workshop Journal 58 (2004), 3; Mother of God, 212, 299; Susan Haskins, (ed.) and trans., Who is Mary? Three Early Modern Women on the Idea of the Virgin Mary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 19. See also Beattie, “Queen of Heaven,” 300.

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celebrations of the Virgin emerges. Marian romances, often derivative upon the popular Greek romances, with their comparable structures of human, loss and devastation, passionate and often highly eroticized adventures, unpredictability, coincidence, and climactic miracles, tell of apparitions and interventions that emphasize the physical presence of the Virgin. Often they are erotic, with the Virgin as the beloved of the hero, praised for her love, even sometimes rewarding her devotee with an embrace, a kiss or (in the famous visions of St Bernard) displaying her breasts or squirting her milk into his mouth. The reformers, of course, ridiculed or angrily attacked such stories. It was, the Protestant antiquarian William Lambarde claimed, typical of an age “prone to believe illusions,” and now fortunately “declining to oblivion.” John Foxe sneers at the fifteenth-century Dominican theologian Alanus de Rupe’s vision of the Virgin who “betrothed herself to [him] … kissed him, and gave him her breasts to be fondled and milked and, finally … gave herself to him as familiarly as a wife customarily does to her husband.”34 Especially vivid evidence for the increasing realism of depictions of the Virgin, including her sexuality, comes from the popular drama, especially the collection from East Anglia we know as the N-Town Plays, where there is a striking Mariological focus. From the increasing number of records unearthed in the past 50 years (especially through the University of Toronto’s Records of Early English Drama project), we have learned that in addition to the better-known, usually annual, festivals, many plays and entertainments were frequently presented in the streets, in halls and taverns, in village squares and market places. Penny Granger’s recent study of the N-Town Plays argues the records prove that there were many individual performances in East Anglia’s towns and villages, often as “show-cases” for “collegiate or monastic establishments,” especially if, as she claims, the plays incorporated liturgical material that would “bring ‘church’ out of doors and into the street or playing place, thus transforming the audience into a congregation.”35 Records are sparse but we do have some records of dramatic activity specifically in Walsingham as well as in nearby Lynn and Snettisham. Stanley Kahrl claims we can also with some certainty connect the worship at the Shrine of Walsingham with playing. The Little Walsingham guild records show payments to banner bearers, torch holders, and minstrels, repairs to the “scepter” and “for the mending of the dragon”—which suggests a St George play or procession—and (in an entry that implies the regular presentation of pageants or plays, presumably from the N-Town collection, as part of the Corpus Christi celebrations and at other times) there is a record a payment of 4d for “the berar of the dragon at Corpus Christi mes

William Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent, (ed.) Michael Zell (Bath: Adams & Dart, 1970), 324–6; Thomas S. Freeman, “Offending God: John Foxe and English Protestant Reactions to the Cult of the Virgin Mary,” Studies in Church History 39 (2004), 228–38. 35 Penny Granger, The N-Town Play: Drama and Liturgy in Medieval East Anglia (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009), 40. 34

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and this Guild time.”36 What was the “Guild time”? Do such records suggest that we can legitimately speculate that the Common Place or the Friday Market would have been likely places in which the N-Town Mary Play might have been staged by local guilds? Peter Meredith argues that a separate Mary play, built around the major events of the Virgin’s life and with an emphasis on communal and familial events, was written for a guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary and incorporated into the N-Town collection. Little Walsingham had two such guilds, one dedicated to the Purification and one to the Annunciation, with women making up over an unusually high 50 percent of their members.37 Walsingham’s Common Place, on the north side of the priory, would, in fact, have been an ideal location for a scaffold or wagon to be set up for the presentation of such plays presented. Given the paucity of records generally from the period, it is not unreasonable to suppose that in the village that was home to England’s most important Marian shrine, one or more plays centered on the Virgin might be presented by one or other of the Village guilds as part of the variety of delights that Simon Coleman sees as waiting for the eager pilgrims to Walsingham. Granger likewise sees the N-Town Plays articulating the orthodox structures and assumptions of the liturgy, and Victor Scherb has made the case that medieval drama was overwhelmingly “staging faith,” with the plays firmly representing Christian orthodoxy.38 According to such readings, the N-Town Plays’ presentation of the Virgin would intentionally be representing her special status, her selfdenial, obedience, silence, self-effacement, and her sexual purity, manifested not as renunciation so much as the absence of sexuality. But such a view, that the role of the drama was “predominantly celebratory and confirmatory rather than questioning or revolutionary,” has been qualified from many sides in recent years, both in scholarship and theatrical practice.39 Of all art forms, the drama is inherently encouraging to alternative, even oppositional, ideas. In the theatre, Peter Lake notes, “we are confronted with a sort of playpen in which participants could adapt and lay aside, ventriloquize and caricature, try on for size and discard a whole variety of subject positions, claims to authority, arguments and counter36 Memoirs Illustrative of the History and Antiquities of Norfolk and the City of Norwich (London: Archeological Institute, 1851), 147–8; Stanley R. Kahrl, review of Meredith, Mary Play, Speculum, 65 (1990), 729. 37 For the Walsingham guilds, see Kenneth Farnhill, Guilds and Parish Community in Late Medieval East Anglia, 1470–1550 (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2001), 39, 49. 38 Victor I. Scherb, Staging Faith: East Anglian Drama in the Later Middle Ages (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999; Granger, N-Town Play, especially 83–119. 39 In 2009 and 2010, the Darklady Players of New York, directed by Jenny Greeman and under the influence of dramaturg John Hudson, presented scenes from the York plays—the Annunciation, Joseph’s Troubles with Mary, and the Assumption—as satire. That reading was more attributable to a twenty-first century agenda, but that it worked theatrically did demonstrate the openness of the dramatic script. For the Darklady Players, see www.darkladyplayers.com, accessed September 1, 2009.

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arguments.” 40 As the reformers were to point out—and enforce regulations and censorship to support their prejudices—the theatre is a place of ideological slippage, where enactment may easily open up unintended meanings. The sexuality of the Virgin comes closest to the surface in the plays on the Annunciation and Birth, the events on which the cult of the Virgin at Walsingham was built. The N-Town Plays on these events present the scenes in acceptably orthodox theological terms, but members of the audience were also able to compare them with their own bodily experiences of conception and maternity, which cannot always have been unambiguously painful and humiliating or experienced as sinful. Just as stories of virgin martyrs, with their explicit, even prurient, details clearly excited medieval readers, so the enactment of the incarnation, pregnancy, accusations of infidelity, birthing, afterbirth, midwifery, or virginity testing, put into the complex experience of performative counter-transference all the most physical aspects of an audience’s experienced carnal life. The experience of sexual pleasure and, not least, the feelings of joy and fear associated with gestation were bodily realities that would be part of the audience’s experiences of the events being depicted—and are echoed in such scenes as Mary’s cry of joy in the Incarnation play as she feels the child move inside her. It is hard to believe that the women in the audience (or even the men) thought automatically at such a moment that they were in a state of sin rather than finding identification and a measure of emotional counter-transference—especially when the scenes are lightened by the recurring humor. The Midwives scene in N-Town (and also, even more explicitly, in the Chester collection, where the stage direction speaks of the two “obstetrics” touching the Virgin’s “sexo secreto”) brings out the gynotheological in a startling way. Today, it is still a scene that can shock as well as amuse (I speak from the experience of acting in and directing it) as if the bodily reality of the scene is deliberately designed to subvert the theological purity of the underlying dogma. Theologically, the two midwives whom Joseph is directed to fetch—illustrated in the Wissington wall-painting discussed earlier in this chapter (see note 29 above)—become witnesses to the postpartum miracle of Mary’s continuing virginity. Mary asserts, in accord with sound theology and the story in the Protevangelium, that “pyne nere grevynge fele I ryght non,” and invites the midwife to “tast with youre hand yourself.” Zelomye does so, and amazed, affirms that “A fayr chylde of a maydon is born … His modyr nott hurte of virgynity.” In awe, she also points out the miracle of the Virgin’s flowing milk: “Beholde the brestys of this clene mayd/Ful of fayre milk how that thei be.” The other midwife, Salome, expresses skepticism that “ a mayd milke have” and states that she will never believe it “but I it preve/ with hand towchynge.” Mary invites her to carry out a vaginal inspection: “To put you clean out of doubt/Touch with your hand and well assay, / Whether I be fouled or a clean maid.” “Here” says the Chester direction, “Salome 40 Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 379.

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touches Mary and when her hand will be dried up wailing and almost crying she admits the miracles and wails”: “Alas, alas ... my fals untrost.”41 The miracle of Mary’s miraculous virginity is therefore attested by authorities recognizable to the watching community.42 Theatrically, the scene is a remarkable tour de force— today, the closest equivalents would likely be plays about the distinctive female experiences of sexuality or childbirth like The Vagina Monologues or Mom’s the Word. Nowadays the goal would generally be to demystify the idealizing myths of female sexuality; here the ostensible intention was to support the mystification, to demonstrate the miracles of Mary’s continuing virginity. But as with the scene of the bodily realities involved stand out as at least potentially undermining the orthodox theological reading of the scene. The intimate sexual realities in which the Virgin is involved are being staged publicly. In a variety of popular cultural forms, therefore—visual representations, poetry, prose fiction, and drama—we can sense the ideological contradictions at issue in late medieval culture that are centered on the Virgin’s bodily nature. There is an ongoing tension between the spiritualized Virgin of the masculinist theological tradition and what Beattie terms the “fecund Virgin of the medieval imagination” with “her rich incarnational and relational significance” and the “maternal potency of nature.”43 For further evidence of the dual presence of orthodox and alternative traditions of Marian or “women’s religion,” we can turn to the impressive body of women religious writers in the period. East Anglia was an area with a distinctive focus not just on the Virgin but on women’s religious experiences generally. Karen Winstead points to the significant numbers of women recluses, informal groupings of religious women, as well as traditional women’s orders. She analyzes the Lynn Augustinian John Capgrave’s biographies of holy women and his book on pilgrimage, The Solace of Pilgrims, suggesting that Capgrave’s portraits of assertive, independent women may well be influenced by “the high profile of East Anglian women as visionaries, patrons and even authors.” Theresa Coletti argues that “documented feminine challenges to ecclesiastical structures and traditional Christian doctrine occur more frequently than in any other region of late medieval England” so as to constitute a distinctive regional effusion of female piety, and one that was not confined to traditional ideals of virginity but embraced a variety of holy wives and matrons. 44 41 The N-Town Plays, (ed.) Douglas Sagano (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), 139–40. The Chester direction reads: “Tunc Salome tentabit tangere Mariam in sexu secreto, et statim arentur manus eius, et clamando dicit.” See www.umm. maine.edu/ faculty/necastro/ drama/chester /play_06.html, accessed March 1, 2010. 42 Caroline Bicks, Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 19. 43 Beattie, “Conceiving Mary,” 19. 44 Karen Anne Winstead, John Capgrave’s Fifteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 114–5; Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of the Saints, 155.

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Recent scholarship on medieval women writers in the period has emphasized how frequently the images of the spiritual life are drawn from their erotic experience. Some evoke their experiences explicitly in metaphors of genital coupling: Mary as Jesus’ bride, Mary united with God in divine marriage, seducing or even copulating with God. These are writers expressing what was likely a common and certainly more women-centered complex of experiences based on the affirmation of the body rather than its denial. As early as the tenth century, Hildegard of Bingen’s poetic meditations on the birth of Christ describe the event in terms of the Virgin’s own erotic experiences, the “paradox of the initial bypassing and then ultimate passing through of the female genitalia” from the security of the “closed gate” of her virginity to the warmth of impregnation, the engorging of her genitals, and the explosion in what Judith Peraino terms “the opening of her vagina and the orgasmic salvational ejaculation (‘Et Filius Dei per secreta ipsius quasi aurora exivit’: And the son of God came forth from her secret passage like the dawn).” Hildegard, suggests Peraino, sees the birth as a “reverse penetration.” There are frequent accounts by female mystics of their own sexual ecstasies or their own virginal breasts dripping because of the ecstasy of imagining breastfeeding the Christ child. The feminization of Christ’s body, especially through the vulvic imagery of the “side-wounds” at the crucifixion is also, as a number of scholars have suggested, a recurring motif in the age’s literature and devotion.45 The most celebrated of these East Anglian women was Julian of Norwich. Her writings provide a remarkable example of how traditions are invented. There are only a handful of references to her in medieval records, yet in the late twentieth century, following the rediscovery in the 1930s of her Showings, there has developed a remarkable enthusiasm for her work, expressed across a range of literary, theological, and feminist scholarship. Even her mythical cat—as I noted in my preface—makes a frequent appearance in novels, children’s books, and stained glass windows, not to mention fridge magnets, coffee mugs, silver brooches and tea-towels. Julian’s vision is an orthodox christocentric one, but in her eyes, Mary is still “in worth and grace above all that God made.” What is more remarkable is the way that Julian draws on female bodily realities to analyze her religious experience. In the longer version of her Showings—revised perhaps over 20 or even 40 years as she brooded on the significance of the visions she experienced during her near-fatal illness in 1373—she becomes increasingly independent of the traditional denigration of the insights, let alone the writings, of a woman. “Botte for I am a woman, schulde I therefore leve that I schulde nought tell you of the goodenes of God?” she asks originally, then proceeds in the longer version to affirm her right to speak and triumphantly overcome what Grace Jantzen terms her earlier “internalised misogyny.” Julian provides us with evidence of an intensely Judith Ann Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 32, 46; Rubin, “Mary,” 3; Mother of God, 147–8; Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia: A Critical Edition of the Symphonia armonie celestium revelatium, (ed.) Barbara Newman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 1–6. 45

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body-centered theology, using the language of mothering, birthing, and especially in her imagery of Jesus-as-Mother, correcting (with some implied awareness of her own heterodoxy in a time when Lollards were especially viciously hunted) the dominant Augustinian emphasis on sinfulness and the corruption of the female body. Julian’s God is experienced as both a father and a mother. God gives birth to humanity like a woman, nourishes us like a mother, with “dereworthy motherhed,” and brings us through motherly nurturing to eventual redemption.46 But what of the everyday experiences of ordinary women? I have looked so far at representations of women, mainly by men, and at remarkable and unusual women like Julian, and other mystics or writers. How might Walsingham help us understand the extent to which women’s experiences were valorized, if not by the dominant theological tradition, but in some alternative yet lived reality? Walsingham’s distinctiveness was that not just that it originated in a woman’s vision and was focused primarily on women’s experiences; and for that reason attracted large numbers of ordinary women as pilgrims. Here the pioneering work of Susan Morrison on women pilgrims to Walsingham is especially helpful. It is likely, Morrison argues, that a majority of Walsingham pilgrims were women. They came to Walsingham to pray for their fertility, their unborn and living children, to ensure safe birthing, to avoid birth pains (which after all had been Eve’s punishment that was handed down as part of the sinfulness of being a woman). Women pilgrims, especially pregnant, would-be pregnant, or recently pregnant women, would have been taught the contrast between Mary the immaculate Virgin Mother, who did not experience birthing trauma (or even physical effects), and themselves. The orthodox interpretation of Walsingham wanted to bypass—except as the consequences of the Fall and therefore applicable to women, who were not Mary—what all women and probably most men recognized as the origins and consequences of pregnancy: sexual intercourse and its details of interpenetrating genitalia, exchange of bodily fluids, aromas, and complicated feelings, not to mention the physical accompaniments of pregnancy, like morning sickness, weight gain, exhaustion, and bodily changes. These were all explained as signs of women’s punishment, and did not affect the Virgin. Morrison shows how the traditional ideological positioning of women would also have been reinforced by their very journeys to Walsingham, perhaps as part of an attempt to ensure that women’s supposed sexual voraciousness and temperamental unpredictability, especially when away from the restraints of family or home, were controlled. She demonstrates how a medieval woman pilgrim was able to take a variety of routes—via Sporle, and Litham, or through East Dereham, 46 Sandra J. McEntire, “The Likeness of God and the Restoration of Humanity in Julian of Norwich’s Showings,” in Julian of Norwich: a Book of Essays (New York: Garland, 1998), 20–27; Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority, and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 23. For Julian’s writing, see Showing of Love, trans. Julia Bolton Holloway (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2003).

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and finally along the last stages of the Walsingham Way to Houghton St Giles and then on to the village—but that by whatever route they approached Walsingham, the pilgrims would enter a highly focused iconographic system that reinforced approved roles for women, always in relation to their maternal as opposed to their sexual roles. Sporle had a church with a wall painting of St Catherine, patron saint of nurses and midwives whose wounds, when she was beheaded for her faith, ran with milk, not blood. In Litham All Saints, the rood screen (which survived the Reformation desecration) featured female saints representing steadfast faith in spite of physical torture. East Dereham has a rood screen featuring St Withburga, who miraculously provided a supply of milk and who was rewarded by the Virgin by the establishment of a healing well. At Houghton St Giles, the church was dedicated to St Catherine, the protector of nursing mothers; the rood screen (still able to be viewed, despite some Reformation desecration to the figures’ faces) shows a host of female figures, including St Emeraria (the Virgin’s grandmother), Mary Salome and Mary Cleophas, Elizabeth the mother of the Baptist, and St Anne teaching the Virgin to read. It too was no doubt designed to reinforce women’s traditional roles just before reaching Walsingham. Nor should be ignored the number of Marian relics in local churches along the journey, especially the many copies of Our Lady’s Girdle, commonly used as an aid during childbirth. 47 Morrison’s choice of stopping places on her version of a woman pilgrim’s Milky Way is largely illustrative, but her general point is undeniable: the parish churches, minor shrines, wayside chapels, and images en route to Walsingham were designed to reinforce women’s approved maternal roles while emphasizing their personal bodily differences from the Virgin herself. But Morrison also notes that women pilgrims generated “an anxiety on the part of post-plague English society of movement and hierarchical disruption,” and that anxiety centered specifically on women’s sexuality.48 Pilgrimages presented women with expectations and experiences beyond their normal routines. Even if they were approved by ecclesiastical authorities, as Leigh Ann Craig shows in her survey of European-wide Virgin miracle stories, pilgrimages could easily become an unusually “flexible form of ritual” for women whose roles were normally strictly controlled. Could a pilgrimage to Walsingham, as a shrine specifically dedicated to the Virgin, have been especially open to women pilgrims considering an “alternate” sense of their own sexuality and its connections with their religious experiences? Even though we are frustrated, inevitably, by any evidence being necessarily indirect, I think we can at least open the possibility. 47 Susan Signe Morrison, Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England (London: Routledge, 2000), 28, 29, 34, 35. In these paragraphs, I draw on the whole section, 27–35, of this important study. For the rood screen, see also Carole Hill, “St Anne and the Cult of her Daughter at Walsingham,” in Janes and Waller, Walsingham, 99–112. 48 Morrison, Women Pilgrims, 35, 69; See also Susan Signe Morrison, “Ophelia, Waste, Memory: Pilgrimage Badges and Walsingham Remembered,” in Janes and Waller, Walsingham, 49–66.

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Here I shall take up Coleman’s observation, that even within a rigidly-supervised society, pilgrimage provided a “splendid diversity,” a polyvalent symbolic space, able to accommodate “varying” or “discrepant” discourses,” a prompt “for private, sometimes ironic, even subversive narratives,” able to accommodate alternate “pathways.” Rather like a modern theme park, Walsingham was “a ritual space capable of accommodating diverse meanings and practices.”49 The pilgrims could visit the Holy House, view the relics, pray before the Virgin’s statue, bathe in the pool or drink from the holy wells, bring gifts and petitions, provide money for lights to shine and masses to be said, buy souvenirs. But the pilgrims could also indulge themselves in a variety of other ways. Here I return to the point with which I opened this chapter, the charges of sexual immorality that were constantly connected to pilgrimages and which were especially associated with women. One of the aspects of pilgrimage that made Church authorities nervous was its opening the “curiosity” of pilgrims, especially women, who were supposed to be protected from unexpected temptations. Curiositas was a controversial term for medieval authorities, and while not always associated with illicit or immoral activities, laid pilgrims open to their possibility.50 Morrison’s recent research has uncovered further signs of sexuality in the margins or interstices of the Walsingham pilgrimage experience. She analyses the overtly erotic badges that were often carried by pilgrims. In addition to representations of such sacred moments as the Annunciation that would be found on Walsingham pilgrim badges, and which have been located on the continent, and in Scotland, as well as in England, there are many parody badges—erect phalluses or rampant vulvas, often in procession or mock pilgrimage. A walking vulva dressed in pilgrim garb with staff and hat, for example, presents in tangible form the topos of the sexual woman pilgrim mocked and satirized in secular literature and which both the pious and those opposed to Walsingham, like the Lollards, could point to in strong disapproval.51 As Mark Hall comments, such scurrilous images “would no doubt have upset church authorities, but the average believer on the street may have been less offended.” Medieval Europe continually saw pilgrims searching for “saintly body parts” and so it is probable “that this would have given rise to and fuelled irreverent humour and beliefs (many connected to body parts and

Leigh Ann Craig, Wandering Women and Holy Matrons: Women as Pilgrims in the Late Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 3; Coleman, “Tradition as Play,” 279; “Do You Believe in Pilgrimage?” 359, 360; Coleman and Elsner, “Pilgrimage to Walsingham,” 192–3. 50 Jan van Heerwaarden, Between Saint James and Erasmus, trans. Wendy Shaffer and Donald Gardner (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 137, 183 51 Morrison, “Ophelia, Waste, Memory.” For an extension of her argument, see Excrement In The Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). For pious and secular badges, ampulae, and souvenirs of Walsingham, see Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges, 135–46. 49

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functions).”52 Such badges may also have constituted a not too subtle sign system among pilgrims concerning sexual availability and curiosity, enough to explain (if not justify) More’s anxious patriarchal quip that men should look to their wives when they went on pilgrimage. One person who would presumably have strongly disapproved of the obscene badges, even while she might have been fascinated by their explicitness, is another of East Anglia’s holy women, the irrepressible Margery Kempe. Kempe’s account of her experiences is a remarkable source for understanding women’s roles in the fifteenth century. Like Julian, to whose Norwich cell she journeyed late in the anchorite’s life, Kempe’s remarkable account of herself provides a small window into what may well have been a widespread struggle to connect the experiences of her own body with her religious experiences and what Liz McAvoy terms “its female specificity in order to forge an alternative—and feminine—route to religious experience.” Her classic account of her own repeated pilgrimages—not merely to Walsingham, which was, since she lived only 20 miles away, her local shrine and which she visited at least once, around 1433, but even as far as the Holy Land—presents a particular women’s experience of pilgrimage. But in addition to her own experiences, her account provides further evidence of the ways in which sexuality might erupt on a pilgrimage. Her journeys involved her constant fear of robbery or physical attack. Women, as Morrison notes, “suffered crimes … peculiar to their gender”: she instances a woman who was kidnapped and made to spend several days in the municipal brothel. But an even greater affront to the pious matron from Lynn were threats from what she saw as irresponsible and pleasure-loving fellow pilgrims. We are told not only that “che was evyr aferd to a be ravischyd or defilyd,” but that she disapproved and sometimes chose not to continue with groups of pilgrims apparently more bent on pleasures than piety. At times, some fellow pilgrims refused to travel with her: “thei wold not gowyth wyth hir for an hundryd pownd.”53 Margery sees herself as the “weak creature” who might easily succumb not just to surprise attacks but to the temptations offered by fellow pilgrims and encounters on route, and even to her own lascivious fantasies, as in the celebrated occasion when she records that she is tempted by the sight of a man’s penis. As Craig points out, Kempe’s complaints were not unusual for women pilgrims who were frequently abandoned by fellow pilgrims for their behavior, devotional extremity, or what one pilgrim termed “inquisitive prying into unprofitable matters.”54

Mark A. Hall, “Wo/men Only? Marian Devotion in Medieval Perth,” in The Cult of Saints and the Virgin Mary in Medieval Scotland, (eds) Steve Boardman and Eila Williamson (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2010), 119, 122. 53 Liz Herbert McAvoy, intro. The Book of Margery Kempe (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003), 15; The Book of Margery Kempe, (ed.) Lynn Staley (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Medieval Institute, 1996) 73, 224. 54 Craig, Wandering Women, 162; Morrison, Women Pilgrims, 58. 52

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Reading in the gaps of Kempe’s narrative, it may be that further signs of an alternative tradition for which we are searching were being enacted, not so much by the celebrated matron from Lynn, but by those fellow-pilgrims of whom she disapproved. Perhaps her account of her own pilgrimages gives us a picture of men and women discovering a level of unexpected relaxation and pleasure that could easily have proved therapeutic—and in the case of women pilgrims to a place like Walsingham, adding, even in ways that would not have been approved by the authorities, to the feeling of well-being experienced there. Pilgrimage gave women the power of the weak, an example of how “in contradistinction to the politically or militarily strong, the subdued autocthonous group” becomes “ritually potent.”55 Women on pilgrimages were perhaps given access to power and a voice they would otherwise have had silenced and suppressed. “Raising a female voice in a world fiercely dedicated to stifling it,” observes Michele Osherow, “requires courage” as well as opportunity.56 Walsingham perhaps provided the impetus for both. In order to uncover the insistent but repressed energies, experiencing the body positively and embracing its sexuality, whether in genital expression or in other ways, including experiencing more positive views of mothering, may well have tapped into that bodily dimension that the masculinist Church had tried for a thousand years to repress. As Beattie argues, “as always in Catholicism,” there are “womanly images just below the surface” and in circumstances that may come out of disapproval or active repression, women have nevertheless been able to “tap into this subterranean life of the Church.”57 Does late medieval Walsingham represent such an opportunity? And do these occasionally surfacing hints add up to a continuing tradition? Or do they suggest spasmodically recurring upsurges of lost possibilities? Coleman’s views on the diversity of experiences opened up at Walsingham echo Beattie’s insistence that there was implicit in some early Christian responses to Mary an alternative tradition of body-centered experiences that could have led to an very different account of women’s place in salvation—and, indeed, to our understanding of women more generally. At the heart of medieval Mariology, those oppositional or subversive voices were at least pre-emergent, locatable, by Raymond Williams’s definition, in cultural margins. While appearing to be merely idiosyncratic or ‘personal,’ looking at them over a long period they may be articulating “new experiences, new possible practices, new relations and possible relations,” even though at the time they are, as Williams observes, “apprehended but not yet articulated.”58 Huriye Reis, “[S]che was evry aferd”: Pilgrimage and Medieval Women in the Book of Margery Kempe,” Hacettepe Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi 22 (2005), 151–61; Julia Bolton Holloway, Saint Bride and Her Book (Newburyport, 1992), 168; Craig, Wandering Women, 126. 56 Osherow, Biblical Women’s Voices, 154–5. 57 Beattie, Rediscovering Mary, 58. 58 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 126. 55

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I will now bring together the argument of this chapter. I have attempted to show how the contradictions of medieval gynotheology at least potentially permeated experiences offered to pilgrims to Walsingham, especially women pilgrims, in the pre-Reformation period. They constitute what has been variously referred to by some theologians, historians, sociologists and others as “alternative,” “subversive,” “repressed,” “marginalized,” “pre-emergent,” experiences that call into question the dominance of the orthodox masculinist tradition of the post-patristic Church. In the late fifteenth century, the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham was a triumphant expression of the contradictions of medieval incarnational culture, which included the affirmation of God’s employment of a woman’s body to bring salvation, and an invitation to revere, and even worship, that body. The experience of visiting the shrine was therefore not just devotional, but more broadly reflective, as Duffy puts it, of “the deep rhythms of pre-Reformation religion.”59 In providing a variety of evidence for the late medieval sexualization of the Virgin, and thereby observing that the reformers’ observations on medieval Mariolatry were on target, I am (I want to emphasize!) not condoning their disapproval of it. I am probing to find how we might, at least in part, explain the powerful hold of the Virgin on late medieval men and women, what emotions and allegiances might have been experienced by visitors to Walsingham, why the reactions against the great shrine of the Virgin were so strong, and (in later chapters) what its manifestations were after the 1538 destruction of Walsingham. What the reformers rejected (in part, I suggest, because of their own anxieties and the very different, even bleak and certainly more masculinist, view of the cosmos their theology implied) were beliefs and practices that reached for (or, alternatively, grew from) especially deep levels of both individual and collective psyches. Beneath the devotion to Our Lady, pilgrimages, miracles, and the “idolatry” which the reformers saw embodied in Walsingham lay a level of craving for some role for the female within the transcendent. Protestants repeatedly thundered that much late medieval devotion to Jesus’ mother was idolatrous. Walsingham, I am suggesting, embodied a peculiarly female source of power rooted in the female body represented by the Virgin. Precisely because Mary was a female figure, the special power of Walsingham included not only that recurring, perhaps fathomless human fantasy—of which there are no doubt male, female, and shared versions—not only of a return to the archaic Mother but to other dimensions of women’s religious and sexual experiences, especially where the two are interconnected. For many pilgrims, entering the shrine and the Holy House may well have been, especially after the way stops on the “Milky Way,” like returning to the womb, a re-uniting with the Mother figure from which, Theweleit argues, most of us have never fully been born and from which ultimately, perhaps, we separate at our peril. For Langland’s Piers Plowman, with which I started this examination of the evidence, direct and indirect, for my case, pilgrims may have been “clad as hermits,” but their goal was 59 Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven; Yale University Press, 2001), 176.

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Fig. 2.1

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Window of the Anunciation, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. By permission of Graham Howard, Official Photographer, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

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“their ease to have.” For the reformist bishop Hugh Latimer, however, that level of “ease” or pleasure which he perceived in the sexualization of the Virgin was a matter of great offence—and clearly a matter, too, of some apparent personal un-ease. On June 13, 1538 Latimer, wrote to Cromwell that “our great sibyll” [a statue of the Mother of God] “with her old syster of Walsyngham, her yonge syster of Ipswych, with the other two systers of Doncaster and Penryesse, would make a jolly mustere in Smythfield.” That recourse to gender-directed violence represented the reformers’ solution to the un-ease occasioned by the image of Our Lady of Walsingham and her sisters.60 Historically, it has been the solution of a masculinist culture. Destroy the threat of female power. Lay it waste. Burn it. In her study of waste, Susan Morrison quotes a twentieth-century Catholic writing to The Times on the subject of women priests: Priestesses should be burnt at the stake because they are assuming powers they have no right to. In the medieval world, that was called sorcery. The way of dealing with sorcerers was to burn them at the stake. It’s illegal now but if I had my way that is what would happen to them. In medieval times, I would burn the bloody bitches.61

The history of ‘imaginings’ of Walsingham will, as later chapters will suggest, be regrettably be continually associated with burnings, burials, and coverings over, but also with re-surfacings, hope, and openness of mind and spirit. Only somewhat less violent reactions may be seen throughout the Reformation era. In a somewhat more sophisticated approach, but responding to the same phenomena, Beattie to some extent queries the Council of Trent’s response to Reformation attacks and its ostensible concern with good taste in divine representations. She points out that before the Council representations of the Immaculate Conception focused on the openly physical images of fertility, birth and infancy in order to stress Christianity’s incarnational focus, but after Trent, such images were weakened by being forcibly spiritualized. Focusing on the physical relationship between Mary’s parents, she argues, rather than on the divine grace of her conception was seen as potentially harmful to the faithful, since it encouraged unseemly contemplation of exactly “how she actually was conceived.” The result was a further unfortunate loss of the bodily realities of Christianity.62 Hugh Latimer to Thomas Cromwell, in Gillett, Walsingham, 64. For comments on Latimer’s unease before the sexual and motherly roles of the Virgin, see MacCullough, “Mary and Sixteenth-Century Protestants,” 204–5, and James Simpson, “The Rule of Medieval Imagination,” in Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England, (eds) Jeremy Dimmock, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 19. 61 The Times, March 9, 1994, “Vicar says women priests should be burnt as witches,” 4, quoted Morrison, “Waste Space,” 65. 62 Waterton, Pietas Mariana Britannica, I, 248–9; Beattie, “Conceiving Mary: Gender, Theology and Sanctity in Marian Art,” Lecture at the National Gallery, London, 7. See http://sites.google.com/site/tinabeattie/papers2. Accessed June 1, 2010. 60

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What, then, I have termed gynotheology—whether conceived negatively or positively—is not, therefore, the projection of modern psychoanalytical or cultural theory on an age innocent of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. It is a recurring target of Reformed polemic, and acted out in the destruction of Walsingham and other shrines and religious institutions in the 1530s. It also underlies something of the uneasiness in the Council of Trent about what the Catholic Church perceived as exaggerations or misunderstandings of Catholic theology and devotion. But my analysis of the experience of Walsingham for women pilgrims—the events of pilgrimage itself, the environs of the shrine and village—are concrete instances of the possibility of ‘alternate’ pathways that were emerging in the late fifteenth century and which, as later chapters will show, continued to surface in Mariology, in theology, devotion, and in traces throughout popular culture even where one might least expect it. I turn next to someone who definitely went to Walsingham and who, in many senses, certainly seems to have delighted in its splendid diversity. That is Walsingham’s own (or rather, first) Chaucer, Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Chapter 3

Walsingham’s Chaucer: Erasmus’s Peregrinatio Religionis Ergo It may strike readers, perhaps with some irony, that the most detailed and apparently reliable account of pre-Reformation Walsingham we have is that by a reputed skeptic, Erasmus of Rotterdam. If, by comparison with the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury (about which Erasmus also had some penetrating and amusing comments) Walsingham’s great disadvantage in its cultural history has been the lack of a Chaucer to celebrate the shrine and its pilgrims, the great humanist comes the closest. His Latin colloquy, Peregrinatio Religionis Ergo, usually translated as A Pilgrimage for Religion (or for Religion’s Sake) was written for pedagogical purposes rather than for entertainment and even though it is what today we might call “creative nonfiction,” it lacks both the imaginative grandeur and popular vernacular immediacy of The Canterbury Tales. Had a Chaucer stepped forward to write the “Walsingham Tales,” long before the ebullient nineteenth-century “raconteuse” Agnes Strickland, did so, Walsingham and the Bell Inn in Holborn might have become cultural icons as famous as Canterbury and the Tabard Inn in Southwark. The “Walsingham Tales” would also have had the additional dimension of its pilgrims having as their goal a representation of strikingly woman-centered experiences and so perhaps might have afforded many variations on Chaucer’s Prioress or the Wife of Bath. Far more than Chaucer’s work, however, Erasmus’s Peregrinatio did have significant political impact. It played a major role in the emerging controversies over the veneration of ‘images,’ pilgrimages, and eventually the closing of the monasteries in the 1530s—and most especially on the examination and dissolution of Walsingham.  Desiderius Erasmus, Peregrinatio Religionis Ergo (Basle, 1526); The Pilgrimage of Pure Devotion (London, 1536; facsimile repr, intro. Dickie A. Spurgeon (Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1972), cited in-text, and in footnotes throughout as Erasmus, Pilgrimage. In quoting the work here, for reasons that will become clear as I discuss Erasmus’s influence on the fate of Walsingham in the late 1530s, I have used the first (anonymous) English translation, published in either 1536 (the year Erasmus died in Basel) or 1537, immediately before the disastrous (for Walsingham) year of 1538. The standard-modern English translation is by Craig R. Thompson, The Colloquies of Erasmus, in The Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 40 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). Henry de Vocht surveys later translations and paraphrases, including that by William Burton (1606), H. Brome and others (1671), Roger L’Estrange (1680), and Nathan Bailey (1725): The Earliest English Translations of Erasmus’ Colloquia 1536–1566, (ed.) Henry De Vocht (Louvain: Librairie Universitaire, 1928). The nineteenth-century translation by John Gough Nichols is discussed briefly in Chapter 7, below.

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Erasmus wrote at a time when, at least to him, rational compromise over reform in the English Church and—less certainly, parts of Europe—still seemed possible. Erasmus’s position is typically that of rational compromise, tinged with some mild irony. When Menedemus asks about the Virgin, “How wold she be worshipyd?” his friend Ogygius simply replies: “The most acceptable honor, that thou canste doo to her is to folowe her lyuynge” (64). But Erasmian moderation was ignored or distorted by extremists on both sides. What he certainly did not anticipate was the uses to which his description of Walsingham would be put by Cromwell’s eager young humanists, propagandists, preachers, inspectors, prosecutors, and eventually, in 1538, his wrecking crews, as they looked for justification for their attacks on religious houses, pilgrimages, relics, and idolatry. A decade after his death, and especially under Edward VI, radical iconoclasts adopting a Calvinist rather than an Erasmian or even a Lutheran position, came for a time to dominate the Church of England. Erasmus, however, left us a description of Walsingham which, even though cast as fiction rather than memoir, clearly drew on his experiences there, and can help us construct something of both its history and mythologies. The Colloquies, in which the dialogue on Walsingham was published, first appeared in 1522, the Peregrinatio appearing first in the second (1524) edition. Containing typically brilliant rhetoric by the age’s most learned man, the work was designed to instruct by providing a model of eloquence. When Erasmus paid his visit to Walsingham a decade earlier, William Lowthe, who had been appointed the prior by Henry VII over the wishes of the other canons, was being examined on charges of incompetence and corruption—including drunkenness, embezzlement, concubinage and indiscipline, which included keeping a fool, who appeared in religious processions dressed up in a surplice. Lowthe resigned in 1515 and was demoted to become prior of West Acre, one of Walsingham’s subsidiary houses, but there is no indication that Erasmus picked up news of the scandal: he had little English, and relied for information (and translation) on the young Cambridge scholar Robert Aldridge. He may therefore in fact have seen the Shrine at a disreputable time, but he may not have been aware of its problems, since the dialogue notes, seemingly without irony, that it seemed prosperous and well organized for the benefit of both pilgrims as well as its own self-sufficiency. A second visit (by Ogygius) “within this thre yere” (16) is referred to, and therefore it is sometimes suggested that Erasmus himself may have visited, again from Cambridge, in 1514. We should not forget, however, that despite some of the ways it was used by Cromwell’s henchmen—and, for that matter, how his characters’ observations have been directly attributed to Erasmus himself in many later accounts of the Shrine—the Peregrinatio is neither autobiography or an official report, but a fictional dialogue. Erasmus may therefore have made only one visit to Walsingham. Medieval Walsingham’s special distinction was, I have suggested, that it was a place of immanent female power, manifested in concrete material details: not only For the scandals of Lowthe’s appointment and removal, see Dickinson, Shrine, 53.



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a story of a miraculous origin and miracles, but a statue, holy wells, holy house and relics. Walsingham was centered on an event in which a woman’s body was praised as the vehicle of salvation, and encouraged devotees to revere, and even worship, that body to an extent that was blasphemous to reformers. Walsingham was not, of course, without critics before the Reformation. For Lollards, Our Lady of Walsingham was the “witch of Walsingham”; like the Reformers after them, Lollards often tinged their disapproval with scatological remarks about whores, venereal disease, and sexual promiscuity. There were also sarcastic remarks about the number of ‘different’ Virgins scattered across the land—Our Lady of Walsingham was just one of many across England. Why should it be singled out? Partway through his colloquy, Erasmus does raise the question of rival Madonnas. Menedemus asks why Walsingham is so special, especially as other shrines of the Virgin seem grander—he instances “a moche more lordly temple” dedicated to Our Lady at Antwerp than at Walsingham (28). The reformers attacked such particularism, but defenders of local cults, who included Sir Thomas More, responded that it was of course absurd to think there were multiple Virgins such as Our Lady of Ipswich, Willesdon, Walsingham, and so forth. There was only one. But the experience of popular religion—as opposed to the official theology—emphasized precisely that local specificity did matter, and so a multiplicity of madonnas, with seemingly different temperaments, preferences and loyalties, grounded in local needs and therefore able to be petitioned for particular local favors, seemed quite appropriate to ordinary late medieval parish Christians and pilgrims. In this respect, England was like other Catholic countries, not least Italy itself. Throughout his career, Erasmus repeatedly affirmed that he was deeply devoted to the figure he termed the “singular glory of heaven” and the “only hope in our calamities.” However temperate, Erasmus’s devotion to the Virgin never disappeared, and at least in part motivated his visit to Walsingham. In a letter of 1511, written when he was in Cambridge, Erasmus informed his friend Andreas Ammonius that he had “undertaken a vow for the good-success of the church. I intend to visit the Virgin of Walsingham, and to hang up some Greek verses there. If ever you go there, look for them.” Entitled “The Vow of Erasmus,” the verses indicate that rich pilgrims may leave gifts of gold, silver, precious stones or riches to thank or beseech for gifts of health, children, or long life, but since he himself is a poet: Michael P. Carroll, Madonnas that Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy Since the Fifteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 32, 71; More, “The Dialogue concerning Tyndale,” English Works, II, 62. Christine Peters comments on multiple Virgins in Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval and Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 62. See also Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 106. For the Lollards’ “wych” of Walsingham, see e.g., Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Continuum, 1984) 168. 

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Bringing these verses only, all he has Asks in reward for his most humble gift That greatest blessing, piety of heart, And free remission of his many sins. 

In the Peregrinatio, he has his pilgrim Ogygius likewise present a poem in praise of the Virgin accompanied by a prayer, addressing her as sola feminarum omnium mater & virgo: “Oh cheffe of all women Mary the mayd, most happy mother, moste pure virgyne, we vnclene, and sinners, doo vysyte the pure & holy … we pray thy [thee] that thy sone may graunt this to vs, that we may follow thy holy lyffe.” Paradoxically—given the centuries of opprobrium under which Erasmus’s reputation languished within the Catholic Church—in the twentieth century, this prayer was used as the official prayer of a Catholic guild devoted to Our Lady of Walsingham and for reciting it, a bishop granted an indulgence of 40 days. In the early decades of the sixteenth century, there seemed to be no reason why Walsingham’s popularity and riches should decline. Henry VIII and Queen Katherine of Aragon were both enthusiastic supporters of the Shrine; she was an annual visitor, and in her will left provision for money to be distributed on a pilgrimage to Walsingham. Henry paid for his glazier, Bernard Flower—whose work included the glass for Kings College Chapel, Cambridge—to complete the windows in the Holy House, the lack of which both William of Worcester and Erasmus’s pilgrim make note. For 27 years Henry unwaveringly provided annual payments of 10 pounds for a chantry priest to sing mass and to keep a candle burning constantly—until September 29, 1538 when the record contains the ominous remark: “for the King’s candle before Our Lady of Walsingham and to the Prior there for his salary Nil.” Before that terminal date, the popularity of pilgrimages and the veneration of holy relics had, despite occasional expressions of skepticism, not slackened; yet, seemingly at its height of fame, riches, and popularity, beneath the surface Walsingham was becoming increasingly open to humanist skepticism and eventually evangelical attack. As the new learning spread, pilgrimages, relics, indulgences, and the elaborate materialism of mariological devotion would become,

Erasmus, “Pean Virgini Matri (Paean in Honour of the Virgin Mother),” Collected Works, (ed.), Elaine Fantham and Erika Rummel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), vol. 69, 33; Collected Works Vol. 86: Notes to Poems, trans. Clarence H. Miller, ed. Harry Vredeveld Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 120–3, 520-1. For a survey of Erasmus’s statements about Mary, and other women saints, see Anne M. O’Donnell, “Mary and Other Women Saints in the Letters of Erasmus,” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 11 (1961), 105–21.  Desiderius Erasmus, Poems, (ed.) Cornelis Reedjik (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1956), 301; Marguerite M.R. Finnerty, The Literature that Grew Out of the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham (Masters diss., St John’s University, 1946), 49.  Hutchinson, Cromwell, 298. 

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as G.W. Bernard puts it, “desperately vulnerable,” not just to Erasmian irony but to “Protestant, or simply common-sense rationalist critiques.” In the 1520s, however, when he wrote the colloquy, the early stages of Reformation were just under way. So, stormed Thomas Bilney, preaching in the late 1520s, and eventually to be executed for his sentiments, “you do not well to go on pilgrimage to Our Lady of Walsingham,” because the Images or ‘idols’ there “be nothing else but stocks and stones.” To go on pilgrimage, to make an offering—whether Kings’ or lords’ riches, ordinary men and women’s ex votos, or in Erasmus’s own case, a reverential poem written in the Virgin’s honor—would be to acknowledge the special aura of a particular place and so (at least according to the views of many reformers) to commit idolatry. The key figure in this first phase of the English Reformation was Henry VIII himself, the deus ex machina (or diabolus ex machina, as Bernard quips). As the struggle between radical and traditionalist forces interacted with his growing desire for a divorce, Henry authorized an increasingly aggressive religious and political policy to get what both he and therefore the deity desired. It was not necessarily what the majority of the English wanted. Eamon Duffy’s persuasive argument is that into the 1530s, allegiance to the beliefs and practices of traditional religion was largely undiminished and “continued to hold the imagination and elicit the loyalty of the majority of the population.” Such a reading of the 1530s gains support from official documents but the documentary culture is always selective, and as I suggested in the previous chapter, needs to be read against the grain to sense the emergent possibilities in the culture. Certainly, the 1530s sees a frantic persecution of “alternative” religious experiences, whether they were conceived of as evangelical or papist. Like “terrorist” today, “heretic” was a term applied with general vehemence to one’s enemies, whomever they were. From the conservative side, largely reflecting the King’s own taste in liturgy and devotion, there were stern warnings against “blasphemous slander both against God and also our blessed lady,” and in 1536, a priest in Hertfordshire, about 50 miles from Walsingham, could publicly announce to his parishioners that “they that pull down abbeys and churches … shall be damned.” There were, on the other hand, increasing attacks by evangelicals and, although less vocally, some among Henry’s own council, on the veneration of Gillett, Walsingham, 39; G.W. Bernard, “Vitality and Vulnerability in the Late Medieval Church: Pilgrimage on the Eve of the Break with Rome” in The End of the Middle Ages? England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, (ed.) John Lovett Watts (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), 228. The phrase “new learning” was a humanist commonplace, though under Queen Mary it was often used to vilify Reformist doctrines, e.g., Edmund Bonner, A Profitable and Necessary Doctrine, with certain Homilies (London, 1555), fol. 32r.  Quoted in Patrick Collinson, “Night Schools, Conventicles and Churches: Continuities and Discontinuities in Early Protestant Ecclesiology,” in The Beginnings of English Protestantism, (eds) Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 226–7.  Bernard, “Vitality and Vulnerabilty,” 231; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 479. 

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the saints, relics, images, and prayer for the dead (and thereby the intervention of saints and the efficacy of pilgrimages). Some of the sharpest exchanges centered on the Virgin: as Peters puts it, in these first decades of the Reformation, “many of the worst excesses of catholic superstition seemed to crystallise around” her body and the cults associated with it. These include indulgences, about which Erasmus expressed some amused criticism, and also, more seriously, miracles. The “wyche of Walsingham” and her supposed miracles, celebrated so enthusiastically in the Pynson Ballad, had been the special targets of Lollard scorn during the previous two centuries: a typical Lollard exhortation was to “not adore an image, the blessed Mary of Walsingham, nor the blood of Christ at Hailes,” thus linking two pilgrimage sites with what for reformers would have had the most outrageously physical associations.10 Such hostility to Walsingham trickles over into popular evangelical literature in the 1530s. In the Court of Venus, a mid-century miscellany of poetry and tales, occurs a poem attributed to Chaucer but clearly written in the 1530s, likely written by Robert Shyngleton, at one time chaplain to Anne Boleyn and a convert to the reformist cause, entitled The Pilgrims Tale. It represents in earnest ballad stanzas the evangelical reaction to Walsingham and pilgrimages. The pilgrim of the poem’s title is setting out from Lincolnshire—the origins of one of the strongest protests against the Dissolution—“towards Walsingham apon my pelgrymage.” But he is converted from that goal and instead attacks the devotions at the Shrine which, he asserts, has deceived many pilgrims who “have put trust in suche fables vayn.” Walsingham, he complains, is built on “the fals pretense” that pilgrims “thorow there prayer there” should achieve “redemption.”11 I will provide a brief outline of the dialogue Erasmus gives us between Menedemus (“stay-at-home”) and the enthusiastic traveler Ogygius (“naïve or simple-minded”), and then discuss in more detail some of the issues raised in their discussion. After the two greet each other, Menedemus questions his peregrinating friend, who is lightly caricatured as a stock pilgrim, wearing scallop shells, badges and souvenirs and with “snake eggs” [i.e., a rosary] on his arms (15–7). Their initial topics are pilgrimages, relics, and iconophobia, all matters of increasing moment in the 1520s. It is important to recognize the overall tone that emerges from the dialogue, which is mainly amused more than caustic, fond rather than hostile, slightly superior but never bitter. Ogygius recounts his trip to England, to the “Virgin-by-the-Sea” at Walsingham, where Mary has “the most holy name in all England,” which he describes as a country where nobody could hope to prospayre except they vysyte her with thayr offerynge every yere” (29). That could at once be read as a comment on corruption, a tribute to the characteristic Mariology of English society, or a mild comment on a comforting and unobjectionable act of Bernard, “Vitality and Vulnerability,” 231; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 382, 387; Peters, Patterns of Piety, 215; Ethan H. Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 167. 11 The Court of Venus, (ed.) Russell A. Fraser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 13. 10

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popular devotion. Erasmus, whose sense of geography in the Peregrinatio is either (the more likely) deliberately vague or (like Shakespeare’s) not always on a par with his wit, locates the shrine “betwixt the Northe and the Weste” rather than the east coast (29). In some Dutch editions of the colloquy, the western location is taken seriously, and the village of St Mawes is identified as the subject of the first part, but the 1536 English translation makes a marginal note that it is Walsingham that is indicated—and all the details fit Walsingham.12 When we cross-check the details with other more or less contemporary descriptions, such as William of Worcester’s, Erasmus gives us a fairly accurate picture of Walsingham itself. We are able to confirm where the Holy House was in relation to the Priory church, that it was still unfinished, that it had “on ether syde a lytle dore wher ye pylgrymes go thorow.” We learn, too, that “ther is lytle light, but of ye taperes, with a fragrant smell” and a very distinctive atmosphere, very “mete for religion” (31–2). Ogygius tells us that the image of Our Lady of Walsingham itself, at least in his view, was not aesthetically prepossessing: it was “Imagincula, nec magnitudine, nec material nec opere praecellens,” cheap looking, not grand, and not well constructed. He then describes the organization and demeanor of the priory as a whole. The monks, Ogygius says approvingly, are richer in piety than in wealth. The priory church is impressive, with the Virgin having her own “inner chapell” (i.e., the Holy House), which is built on a wooden platform with its windows and doors unfinished and open. One of the canons stands within the interior chapel, in “our ladyes prevy chambre,” to collect offerings, though there are, Ogygius regrets, some visitors who pretend to give but who, with astonishing nimbleness, “stayl that whiche other men hathe gyuen.” He then recounts the stories of the knight’s miraculous rescue and the relic of St Peter’s knuckle joint, about which he expresses some surprise regarding its size. He describes the two wells, “a couple of pittes, both fulle of water to the brynkys;” they can cure, he affirms mockseriously, both headache and stomach pains, a claim that elicits Menedemus’ scornful laughter. Ogygius also recounts the story that the stream that feeds the wells had “sodenly sprynge owte of the erthe” at the Virgin’s command. He examines the Holy House, which he points out has been renovated and is therefore not quite the original miraculous construction that it was claimed to be (29–38). Then Ogygius and Menedemus turn to a long and witty discussion of the Shrine’s major relic, the Virgin’s Milk, which was held for veneration at the high altar of the Priory church. It is praised for having nourished the Savior, and therefore, Menedemus comments, it is certainly a devout act on a pilgrim’s part to revere “such “an excedynge precious relyque” which is appropriate “to be worshipyd,” especially since he is assured it was not merely scraped from the floor (like, it is implied, other samples elsewhere) but “came out of the virgynes brest” directly. Towards the end of the visit, his guide asks Ogygius whether he would like to view the Virgin’s secrets, a phrasing in which in the English translation (though less explicitly in the Latin) Erasmus takes some particular coy pleasure, Nichols, Erasmus, 82–3.

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and which clearly inflamed those among Cromwell’s inspectors who were looking for some scandal. Having set up the clearly lascivious association of “secretes” in his readers’ minds, Erasmus then amuses himself by diverting his readers to Ogygius’s discussion to the toadstone jewel at the foot of the statue of the Virgin. It is to signify, he is told, that “she hathe overcome, trod underfote, abolyshyd all maner of unclennes.” The “unclenness” presumably includes the “secretes” that his carefully tongue-in-cheek rhetoric has produced in his readers, an impression which is then reinforced by mention of the Virgins “pryvytes” which he is invited to inspect, the details of which of course we never get. Menedemus, like the reader, laughs—and the discussion moves on from Walsingham to the Shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury (37–8, 49, 54, 60, 63, 64). Such is the outline of the Walsingham section of the Peregrinatio. The rhetorical subtlety of the colloquy makes Erasmus’s moderate views very clear, even though we know he passionately supported “this new learnynge, whiche runnythe all the world ouer nowadays” (19) which was fuelling the drive towards Reformation. Like More, Erasmus could acknowledge with tolerant humor that most saints’ lives and stories of their shrines may involve a certain amount of skullduggery, without calling for their destruction. Menedemus recounts a (presumably fictional!) letter from the Virgin to one Glaucoplutus (the Swiss reformer Zwingli). The letter’s main point is to warn against the extremities of iconoclasm which Erasmus saw developing among the reformers. Mary complains about being overworked by the triviality and even immorality of petitions addressed to her. She gently thanks the reformer for discouraging irresponsible pilgrims from making shameful bargaining petitions to her, including those “a shamfast yongman dare scantly aske of a Bawde, yee they be suche thynges as I am ashamyd to put in wrytynge.” But she cautions him (and clearly Erasmus is directing her views at the reformers generally) that if he rejects her, he is dangerously close to rejecting Christ himself. Observing in passing—in a typically Erasmian gleeful sideswipe, amusedly criticizing yet expressing a degree of fondness—“the sayntes haue theyr weapones or myschefues, whiche they send apon whome they liste,” he characterizes the Virgin’s moderation (indeed, one can imagine Erasmus’s quiet conviction that he could speak for her, and that her views would be, shall we say, Erasmian): But as for me thou canst not cast owt, except thou cast owt my sone, whiche I hold in myne armes. I wyll nat be seperat frome hym, other thou shalt cast hym owt with me or els thou shalt let vs bothe be, except that you wold haue a temple withowt a Christe. (21–7)

The letter from the Virgin—which must assuredly have been delivered to her, the enthusiastic pilgrim tells us, by angelic messenger—warns against what Erasmus saw as the extremity of increasing evangelical iconoclasm. It is jocular in tone but ends on a firm note, and Erasmus himself asserted that the colloquy as a whole was written to oppose, not support, the increasingly outspoken radicals. In an apologia appended to the 1524 edition of the Colloquies, he reassured readers who saw only

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his mocking that he was indeed serious and was ridiculing only “charlatanism”: “In A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake, I reproach those who with much ado have thrown all images out of the churches … those who exhibit doubtful relics for authentic ones, who attribute to them more than is proper, and basely make money by them.” He acknowledges that while he wants to draw attention to those who exhibit doubtful relics,” and to criticize those who “are crazy about pilgrimages undertaken in the name of religion” and those who “attribute to them more than is proper, and basely make money by them, ” nonetheless he wishes to censure “those who have thrown all images out of the churches.” The conservative Ten Articles of 1536, a year or so before the publication of the English translation, acknowledged that “images be suffered only as books, by which our hearts may be kindled to follow the holy steps and examples of the saints represented by the saint.” Ironically, Erasmus’s views are generally in line with what became moderate voices at the Council of Trent: “since the nature of man is such that he cannot without external means be raised easily to meditation on divine things … certain rites [and] ceremonies” are permitted whereby “the minds of the faithful [are] excited by those visible signs of religion and piety.” So “images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God, and of the other saints” should be retained, with “due honour and veneration” accorded them.13 But the Erasmian position did not persuade the followers of Calvin and Zwingli, whose influence in England was, by the time the Peregrinatio appeared in English, already proving to be stronger, even though such tendencies were repressed by Henry’s conservatism for another decade . “I do not see,” asserted Calvin, with his typical firmness on the subject, that even “simpletons” could gain any benefit from images “unless it were that they would become anthropomorphizers.” He attacked the traditional (and originally Nicaean) distinction between adoration (latria) and veneration (dulia), rejecting the argument that images could be created “without affronting God.”14 In the Calvinist universe, which the evangelicals saw as justified by the gospel, the material world contained no authentic touch of the sacred and so violent acts designed to remove and to destroy offensive parts of that world could be justified as fulfilling God’s purposes. Erasmus believed, by contrast, that the Church’s abuses could be eliminated by scholarship, education, and above all, tolerance and humor. Walter Gordon characterizes his polemical style as a “blend of moral vision with a spirit of merriment,” designed to avoid the “ethical abrasiveness” of more extreme and 13 Erasmus, “The Usefulness of the Colloquies (De Utilitate Colloquiorum)” in The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 626–31. For the Ten Articles, see Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 413, and English Historical Documents, (ed.) C.H. Williams (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967), 795– 805. The text of Trent’s pronouncement is in Confessions and Catechisms of the Reformation, (ed.) Mark A. Noll (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing 2004), 199–200, 210. 14 For Calvin on “anthropomorphizing” see Sergiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts: the Protestant Image (London: Routledge, 1993), 64.

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solemn radicals.15 In the 1520s and 1530s as evangelical preachers, like the Lollards before them, continued to attack pilgrimages for their venality and corruption, but the reformers’ rejection of pilgrimages was now more deeply rooted. They were taking exception not just to the belief that particular places like Walsingham might have special spiritual powers, but also to the broader assumption, which they also saw as idolatrous, that the material world either as a whole or particular, even revered, objects could be the vehicle of divine grace. These are among the early signs of what becomes the gradual de-sacralization of the world: the magical universe of the Middle Ages was one where special places were invested with not merely symbolic or memorial significance, but by the real presence of divinity, concretely embodied in physical places—a sacred spot, a relic, a speciallyprivileged statue or picture. Even if he was only partially conscious of it, or expressed it with a degree of reluctance, Erasmus was a precursor of a new world. In practice, Protestantism did not completely abandon a sacralized universe, but its pioneers and confessional statements did not encourage any understanding that human efforts or wishes could bring about supernatural effects through material objects. The Peregrinatio provides us with a revealing contrast with the Pynson ballad’s description of Walsingham 60 years before. The differences between them reflect some of the major changes that are occurring in popular religion and the broader society in the crucial pre-Reformation period. The Ballad had focused on Walsingham’s miraculous origins, the miracles of the Shrine, and the Virgin’s continuing interventions in history and individual lives. It is emphatically, almost exclusively, Mariocentric. The Virgin’s miracles are her own, even though their details are kept vague. Erasmus, however, comes down to particulars and he does so in a tone very different from the Ballad’s uncritical acceptance of the Virgin’s interventions, accompanying each story with a degree of amused skepticism derived from the “new learning.” He repeats the legend that the wells or “fowntayne” did “sodenly sprynge owte of the erthe at the commaundement of our lady,” which the Ballad also highlights; he recounts the story of the Knight’s rescue by Our Lady, with his skeptical interlocutor Menedemus asking whether he really took “so maruylous a myrakle for a trewthe.” Tellingly, he does not mention the Pynson Ballad at all, so there is no account of the origin of the shrine in a vision of a Lady Richeldis. That suggests that either Erasmus did not know of or had not read the ballad, or even that the story of the shrine’s supposed miraculous origins was not as widespread as nineteenth-century and later commentators, in their eager invention of Walsingham’s traditions, were keen to make out. Menedemus does mention the relic of St Peter’s knuckle: Ogygius marvels at its size. Perhaps Erasmus knew the account of Peter’s martyrdom in the Golden Legend where it comments on his small stature (34–5). None of these matters is chosen innocently by Erasmus: each connects with current and emerging controversies. But the tone overall is gentle, 15 Walter M. Gordon, Humanist Play and Belief: The Seriocomic Art of Desiderius Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 104.

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mocking, and sometimes even a little elitist and self-indulgent, as if Erasmus trusts his learned audience to share his good-humored enjoyment of the superstitions of popular religion so long as they are not taken too seriously. The Colloquies had been written at a time when humor and education rather than iconoclasm might still have seemed a plausible weapon of reform; in the mid-1530s, as the relics and miraculous statues, girdles, and smocks, were shown (or asserted) one after another to be fraudulent, Erasmus’s remarks could more easily be taken as supporting the emphatic exposure of feigned relics. In the case of veneration of the Virgin, the belief in her bodily assumption (in the later Middle Ages, not yet dogma but an increasingly dominant view) meant that relics sought by her devotees had to be primarily clothing and minor detachable body parts like nails, hair, or milk. These secondary or tertiary relics became the focus of numerous cults and devotions across medieval Europe. Worshippers came to Walsingham seeking such material connections with the Virgin, reaching for her power through objects that had touched her, or had been attached to her body and therefore retained some of her aura and power. They are granted a magical life, derived from the power of the original. Lollards, evangelicals and reformers were appalled by both the proliferation of such objects, and as the iconoclastic urges of the Reformation gathered momentum, wherever possible they destroyed such material signs of superstition. But less easily destroyed were the habits of mind and the emotional attachments that went with them. Those were harder to get out of the heads of the majority of English people. In the previous chapter, I argued that the veneration of Marian relics is a striking example of a deep-rooted strategy of adaptation, predominantly though not exclusively male, that is (and is during the Reformation referred to as such) fetishization, which helps account for the continuing power of the Virgin in late medieval England—and beyond. The fetishization of body parts or material objects connected with the beloved or object of desire may be labeled as a “perversion,” but is a normal part of human attachment and relationships. Fetishes, as I suggested, may be anything ordinary object that the devotee imbues with metonymic power and on which he (or she) chooses to focus devotion as a substitute for the absent object of desire—girdles, beams of wood, shoes, clothing, pets, portraits, locks of hair, odors, sounds. In the case of the Virgin, the devotee may seek out and use familiar inanimate objects associated with her—not just relics like hair, milk, garments, statues, badges, even seemingly everyday objects like the pictures in a Book of Hours, bedside statues, pictures, holy cards. Like every normal fetishist, a devotee of the Virgin believes they will bring, or can be used to generate, a certain amount of her power in their own lives. Developmentally, fetishes acquire their power from childhood fantasy structures that may in adulthood be reactivated and elaborated, their origins long lost under the accretions of later narratives but with their power still latent but able to be re-activated unpredictably or deliberately as parts of an elaborate ritual. A flash of the eyes, a shake of the head, an iconic posture or gesture or other bodily habit may remind the devotee or lover of the beloved, whether that is a person or, in the case of Walsingham, reminders of

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what Edmund Waterton, quoting from a fifteenth-century inventory, calls “our ladi Goddes moder.” 16 The fetishist’s goal is to find a remnant of the beloved’s power, and to treasure it, since that may be all he can be given of her. The fetish therefore, whether publicly displayed or privately hoarded, allows the worshipper to experience her in miniature. Sometimes, clinical studies suggest, the fetish is chosen because it has just the right intensity of the beloved’s power with which the worshipper can deal, at least for the moment. In such cases, since her full reality cannot be faced, the Virgin can be accommodated by the worshipper’s mind only if she is accorded less than full presence because the gap between her immaculate purity and freedom from corruption and ordinary men and women is so vast and her claims on him so overwhelming. The devotee participates in or else constructs rituals and narratives in which events are scripted, comforting roles are assigned, and become familiar. They are learnt and repeated to reinforce their efficacy. The Virgin’s roles as mother, queen, empress of heaven and hell, sorrowing mother and powerful intercessor, are typical starting points for scripts of Marian devotion— and, in the case of petitioning her to protect a woman’s body and child in the dangerous experience of childbirth, an object like her girdle would become the occasion for both public ritual and private devotion. These stories, told over and over, become therapeutic, taking on the function of a cure or at least creating a holding pattern by which the devotee (or patient, we might say today) may persist in living functionally or, hopefully, more creatively. The fetishization of the Virgin’s body at Walsingham focused especially on the relic to which Erasmus devotes a long discussion, the vial of her milk. As Jennifer Grattan has shown, in the patriarchal configuration of Mary’s body, she “becomes mother without blood, but not, perhaps curiously, without milk.” The “vexed engagement” between women’s bodily realities and theology insisted that the transformation of menstrual blood was somehow a “filthy process” but its transformation into milk – as envisaged by the prevailing biology – was not.17 As the reformers repeatedly pointed out, often with enormous sarcasm and obvious distaste, there were multiple samples right across Europe of what were claimed to be Mary’s milk. Menedemus uses a common piece of evangelical sarcasm when he exclaims: “O how like to the sone is the mother, for he hath left to vs so moche blood here in erthe, & she so moche mylke, that a man wyl skarysly beleue a woman to haue so moche mylke of one chylde, in case the chyld shuld sukke none at all,” asking his friend, “do nat you maruayll at this?” Ogygius partly softens the tone when he replies with typical Erasmian tongue-in-cheek: “It may welbe a strange thynge, but no maruayle, seynge that the lord whiche dothe encreasse this at hys pleasure, is almighty.” The earliest reference to the milk at Walsingham is in the reign of Edward I, when is mentioned as being kept at the high altar. Ogygius, 16 Kaplan, Louise. Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 35; Waterton, Pietas Mariana Britannica, 221. 17 Glancy, Corporeal Knowledge, 109, 117.

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Erasmus’s pious pilgrim, similarly tells us that the “Milk is kept upon the high Altar … preserv’d in a Crystal Glass.” It does not, however, appear to be liquid. What he sees looks like powdered chalk, understandably, since “it has been put in above 1500 years ago,” and it is “so concreted, you would take it for beaten Chalk, temper’d with the White of an Egg” (40–44). Erasmus then has the two friends discuss the (in)famous vision of St Bernard receiving milk directly from the Virgin’s breast. No doubt aware of the many depictions of the scene as well as narrative accounts, Erasmus has Ogygius report that “For whan he was an old man, yet he was so happy that he sukkyd of that same mylke, that Iesus hymselffe sukkyd apon.” Menedemus teases him by asking him whether the milk at Walsingham should therefore perhaps have been authenticated by St Bernard, who, he thought, because of his remarkable rhetorical skills, had been “rather callyd a hony sukker than a mylke sukker.” Asked why the vial is not shown open so the milk might be viewed and venerated more closely, we are informed that it is kept apart “lest the Milk of the Virgin should be defil’d by the Kisses of Men.” Kissing milk is deliberately incongruous; Erasmus choice of “kissing” is clearly directed at eroticizing the Virgin’s breasts, the source of the milk (42, 57). Erasmus’s view of the Virgin’s milk and, indeed, relics in general, is one of slightly superior amusement rather than dogmatic hostility. He gives a skeptical account of its circuitous journey from the Holy Land to Walsingham, via Constantinople and Paris. Ogygius is, however, repeatedly assured that Walsingham’s vial of milk was genuine, undoubtedly expressed directly from the Virgin’s breast. As Erasmus hints, most likely it was one of the many scrapings from Bethlehem’s “Grotto of Our Lady’s Milk,” where even today, visitors are informed that when a drop of the Virgin’s milk fell to the floor of the cave, it turned the rock white and gave rise to the chalky stone in the Grotto—although perceptive visitors today have been known to observe that the cave receives the occasional coat of whitewash. Long before Erasmus, councils, synods, and various church authorities had often denounced inauthentic relics: it clear that there is a degree of spuriousness about the Virgin’s milk, along with many of the traditional stories associated with it. Elizabeth Johnson comments that we should read Mariological statements as poetical or metaphorical statements, rather than for any literal attachment to history.18 The tone of the colloquy implies that this relic, even if it is of dubious provenance, does induce genuine devotion to the Virgin and, further, that it embodies a yearning for something more profound which the milk, as an image of the Virgin’s motherhood and intimacy, represents. For Erasmus, what is more objectionable than dubious relics is the exploitation that may accompany them. Once again, we should contrast his amused tone with Calvin’s raw indignation at the same phenomenon “that there is no Foundation in

18 Johnson, “The Symbolic Character of Theological Statements about Mary,” 316, 319.

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the Gospels for these foolish and blasphemous extravagances.”19 For Erasmus, it is the stories behind the foolishness of the tales of miracles and relics that matter more than any literal or historical account of their origins or miracles. The discussion of the Virgin’s milk is followed by a similarly suggestive incident regarding the relic of a piece of wood on which the Virgin had sat or leant: Ogygius “perceyuyd by and by thorow the smell of it, that it was a holy thynge.” Where the milk is a primary relic, an excrescence from the body of the Virgin, even more intimate than her hair, the wood (which may be Erasmus’s invention, of course) has been “touched to,” in this case sat or leant upon, her body. Ogygius kisses it three or four times; then, he says, “I poppyd it in my pursse.” He uses it to cure the headache of a fellow pilgrim by putting it beneath his pillow while he sleeps (a common action within normal erotic fetishism), implying that he is suffering from a hangover. Erasmus conveys his enjoyment of the slight titillation of the incident, with its associations with the Virgin’s body, as he does in the incident concerning the Virgin’s “secrets” or “pryvytes’ to which I have earlier referred, when one of the canons offers to show Ogygius: … greater mysteries, he dyd aske me whether I hadde euer sene our ladyes secretes, but at that word I was astonyed, yet I durst nat be so so bold as to demande what thos secretes were. For in so holy thynges to speake a mysse is no small danger. I sayd that I dyd neuer se thaym but I sayd that I wold be very glade to see thaym.

Having set up his reader with this double-entendre, he reinforces it by having the attendant canon remark to his visitors that “I suppose it greate wronge, to hyde any thynge frome you, but now you shall see the pryuytyes of our lady … ” which of course are never further specified (64–5). The anonymous but unmistakably reformist oriented preface appended to the 1536 English translation, headed “to the reder,” claimed that Erasmus “set forthe to the quycke ymage” Walsingham’s “supersticyouse worshype and false honor,” and that he attacked those who “go vpon pylgramages vnder a pretense of holynes.” It is a view that is significantly different in both tone and substance from what Erasmus actually has in his colloquy. The underlying motivation for the publication of the translation is, however, made very clear, when the preface asserts that Erasmus’s work unreservedly supports the Henrician agenda of royal supremacy and independence from the papacy. All Christian men, the anonymous writer proclaims, need to learn their duties “to god, hys prynce, and hys nebure,” according to the “strayte pathe of whiche scripture doth testyfye.” God, he goes on, “willeth every soule to be subjected” to the King who has undertaken the “reformacyon” of the Church, which (he asserts) Erasmus supports. This, of course, is the same king who would still pay for two or three more years to have a 19 For Calvin’s critique, see A Treatise on Relics [1543], trans. Valerian Krasinski (Edinburgh: Johnston and Hunter, 1854).

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candle burning continuously before Our Lady of Walsingham. The preface singles out the “detestable” and “desperate synne of idolatrye” as particularly heinous, and praises Erasmus for setting forth “the supersticyouse worshyppe and false honor gyvyn to bones, heddes, iawes, armes, stockes, stones, shyrtes, smokes, cotes, cappes, hattes, shoes, mytres, slyppers, sadles, rynges, bedes, gyrdles, bolles, belles, noses, gloues, ropes, taperes, candelles, bootes, sporres” and other “soche dampnable allusyones of the deuylle” that are contrary to scripture and constitute not only heresy but sedition. Most of the items in this remarkable sentence are, of course, nowhere mentioned in the colloquy (3, 6, 7). The preface to the reader shows how Thomas Cromwell and his household were giving a particularly focused reading of Erasmus’s colloquy. Some of Erasmus’s emphasis on reform rather than suppression surfaced early in the process of reforming the monasteries, the outcome, as Robertson puts it, of a decade of “humanist-inspired reform [only] colored at the end of the decade by genuine Protestantism.” The prefatory remarks to the Peregrinatio, mark the transition from reform to abolition as Erasmus is enlisted to support to the increasingly aggressive reformist viewpoint.20 As well, there are occasional words or phrases in the body of the translation deliberately chosen to ridicule papistry and superstition. The angel supposedly delivering the Virgin’s letter to Glaucoplutus lays it on a papist “aulter” rather than on the more accurate “pulpit.” The milk, we are told, is to be “worshypped,” not just revered or venerated. “Worship” could be acceptable to moderate Protestants—as in the Cranmerian marriage service, “with my body I thee worship,” a phrase with which Cranmer of all people would not want to encourage idolatry—but it is a special nuance of the translation that adds to an overall effect that is made brutally obvious in the preface. Less subtly, when Ogygius utter his “holy prayer” to the Virgin’s milk, he thinks that both the figures of Virgin and Child in the statue respond in appreciation and that the milk likewise moved. The translation reads “me thought yt” [the milk] “daunsed” rather than that it simply “moved,” as if it were somehow being manipulated from behind the scenes, rather like “feigned” relics like the Rood of Boxley, a target which the reformers loved to ridicule, which was made to move and speak through a series of “engines and old wire.” And finally, with a flourish and a translator’s enhanced lasciviousness, a note typical of what the introduction terms “certayne newfangled felowes,” Erasmus’s joke about the Virgin’s’ secretum is translated more crudely as “Now you shall see the pryvytes of oure lady.” The “pryvytes” turn out to be, as I noted above, “a whole world” of quite unspecified “maryulles,” but in translation, Erasmus’s amusing sexual gesture has been hardened into a directly lewd term (33, 41, 42, 43, 64–5). Who was responsible for the translation and “to the reder”? Cromwell had attracted a household of aggressive, efficient, highly educated young men, most 20 Mary Louise Robinson, “Thomas Cromwell’s Servants; the Ministerial Household in Early Tudor Government and Society” (unpub. Doct. Diss.,University of California, Los Angeles, 1975), 299.

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with reformist tendencies, who gave “concrete form to the ideals, both secular and ecclesiastical” that were emerging in the 1530s. The translation was undoubtedly produced by one or more of these scholars who in the end, as Robertson comments, “furthered the goals of the English Reformation more surely than those of their fellows who dismantled the monasteries and destroyed the shrines”—although in some cases these duties overlapped.21 As the king’s vicegerent in matters ecclesiastical, Cromwell was authorized to visit, inspect, and if needed, reform or even close religious houses, and the Erasmus colloquy became part of that initiative. Which of his household might have undertaken the translation is unclear. The leading candidate would be Richard Taverner, a leading translator and popularizer of Erasmus in England. In 1531, he published a translation of Erasmus’s Encomium Matrimonii, and noted in a work of 1539 that Cromwell “had enured me with diverse tranlacions and other exercises,” which also included a collection of Erasmian proverbs. He was, notes Robertson, “a thorough-going Lutheran who gave even Erasmian translations a distinctively Protestant flavor.” Others may have produced it or contributed. The preface’s strong polemical tone and unambiguous emphasis on obedience to princes is closer to the attitudes of Thomas Morrison, who specialized in justifying the royal supremacy and writing “obedience literature,” justifying the suppression of sedition.22 Another possibility is William Marshall, who had published works translations of works by Erasmus, Bucer and other continental reformers, including a treatise “showing that images are not to be suffered in Churches,” as well as a work of Luther’s on “chrysten” as opposed to “counterfayte,” bishops.23 The publication of the English translation of the Peregrinatio, then, came at a strategic time, as the reformist members of Henry’s regime moved their revolution forward, attaching itself to Henry and Cromwell’s centralizing caesaropapist policies. By the late 1530s, as well as pursuing the “King’s business” concerning Anne Boleyn, Henry was persuaded by Cromwell and Cranmer that he was called by God to rescue his people from “such dreams vanities and fantasies as by the same many of them were seduced and conveyed into superstitious and erronyous opinions.”24 The Injunctions of 1538 were a crucial step forward: they intensified the relatively moderate views in the 1536 Ten Articles on pilgrimages and relics, justifying an attack on a way of life that, earlier in his reign, the king himself had Ibid., 299, 312–3. Ibid., 303–4, 306. 23 John K. Yost, “Taverner’s Use of Erasmus and the Protestantization of English 21 22

Humanism,” Renaissance Quarterly 23 (1970), 266–76; William Underwood, “Thomas Cromwell and William Marshall’s Protestant Books,” Historical Journal 47 (2004), 517–39. Dakota L. Hamilton, “Richard Taverner,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography 236 (2001), 248–59, attempts to chart the complex relationships in Cromwell’s circles regarding Erasmus’s texts, also noting how they were politicized. 24 G.W. Bernard, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 495.

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participated in and defended. The clergy were, four times a year, to exhort their flocks “not to repose their trust or affiance in any other works devised by men’s fantasies beside Scripture: as in wandering to pilgrimages, offering of money, candles, or tapers to images or relics, or kissing or licking the same, saying over a number of beads, not understood or minded on, or in such-like superstitions.” Duffy comments that the language shows “condemnation and contempt,” which is certainly far from Erasmus’s tone, but it exactly describes that of his evangelical translator. Much of what had been the visible life of the Priory and village of Walsingham was prohibited, including Henry’s own “offering of money, candles, or tapers to images or relics.”25 The canons at Walsingham priory had been one of the first to sign on to the Royal Supremacy, “with one mouth and voice” affirming that “Henry our King is the Head” of the Church in England and that the Bishop of Rome “has not any greater jurisdiction, conferred upon him than any other extern Bishop.” Prior Vowell—whether by persuasion or coercion is unclear—signed on September 18, 1534 in an act still seen at today’s shrines (both Roman Catholic and Anglican) as a betrayal of what Walsingham stood and stands for. That capitulation, however, in itself did not in itself immediately destroy Walsingham’s habitual pattern of life: the title accorded to Henry was not entirely new, and at least in the early stages of the revolution, the royal powers were seemingly qualified by clauses like “so far as the Law of Christ allows.”26 Given the centuries-old history of quarrels between church and monarchy, the king’s move could be seen as a strategy in that continuing struggle, and at that point it appeared that only the lesser religious houses, those with incomes under £200, were to be closed. Cromwell, however, had grander ideas. He had calculatedly ordered a survey of wealth held by monastic property, the Valor Ecclesiasticus, described by Richard Rex as “one of the greatest administrative achievements of the age,” and by Mary Louise Robertson as “an irrefutable testimony to the administrative skill and efficiency” of his regime. The members of Cromwell’s household were, by the mid 1530s, well trained not only in translating Erasmian and other reformed works, but in investigating and suppressing moribund religious houses. Wolsey had in the 1520s suppressed a number of smaller houses (which were the initial targets of the dissolution activities in the 1530s) in order to consolidate their resources and founded colleges at Ipswich (his birthplace) and Oxford. By early 1535, when Cromwell launched a major program of reform, he had a well trained, mainly lay, and predominantly reformist staff with whom to work. While financial commissioners were calling in reports, Cromwell, as Henry’s vice-gerent for matters ecclesiastical, prepared another commission, with its attendant investigators, and sets of questions and instructions, to visit, examine, and if necessary suppress all Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 407. For the controversy over the wording of the King’s supremacy over the Church,

25

26

see Peter Marshall, Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1988), 50.

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religious houses. He chose trusted members of his household, working especially closely with Richard Layton, Thomas Legh, and John Price (or ap Rice), the latter having special responsibility for East Anglia along with Legh, whose evangelical enthusiasm for finding reprehensible practices occasionally needed to be contained and even reprimanded by others on Cromwell’s staff. 27 Predictably, given the not-too-hidden royal agenda and the wealth of the Shrine, the Commissioners gave special attention to Walsingham’s finances. Erasmus had cleverly constructed his dialogue like an investigative uncovering, starting with externals (the pilgrim’s ridiculous costume) through to the inner privacy of a glimpse at the Virgin’s sanctum. But subtly, as Gordon points out, as if surprised by what he discovered, at the very heart of the Shrine, there was not only a sense of ecstasy or miracle, but something rather “more like a bank … the numinous has turned numismatic.”28 The critiques in Erasmus’s colloquy, however they might have been meant as light satire, were appropriated to Henry and Cromwell’s firm goal of dealing with the religious houses, not just to eliminate pilgrimages (for which the king had developed a particular antagonism) and “feigned relics,” but very specifically for their wealth. The Commissioners’ survey of Walsingham’s wealth included the income of the shrine as a whole; as well, it listed separate amounts for the “Holy Milk,” the chapel of St Laurence, and the Holy House. Here, in the investigation of what could be gained by destroying not only Walsingham but other shrines and religious establishments, is where Erasmus’s colloquy acquired its political importance—far more so, it must be admitted, than any of the tales Chaucer told of his pilgrims. In addition to probing Walsingham’s finances, and eventually confiscating its wealth, Cromwell’s commissioners made an unusual and distinctive special report on Walsingham. They drew up a list of Articles of Enquiry, consisting of detailed questions that were clearly drafted by someone who had read the Peregrinatio, though (given the original’s complex, critical but still loving, tone) with far more hostile intentions. The Articles have the same critical, almost predatory tone as the English translation’s preface. It is extremely probable that the translator was even one of those drawing up the questions: mixed into the matters requiring responses by the Shrine were some that, by detail and phrase, could only have been taken from Erasmus. The Articles pose a series of questions about what, in the eyes of the investigators, were blatantly fraudulent and superstitious miracles and relics. With skeptical though amused rather than hostile eyes Erasmus had, for instance, raised the issue of the authenticity of the miracle of the knight’s escape, and the liquidity (and genuineness) of Our Lady’s milk. The commissioners’ questions echo his language but not his tone: they turn Erasmian amusement into scorn, questioning not just particular miracles which supposedly “Our Lady performed,” and asking on what basis the claims were examined, but whether any of the so-called miracles 27 Richard Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993), 58: Robertson, “Thomas Cromwell’s Servants,” 201, 203–5. 28 Gordon, Humanist Play, 103.

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“could not have proceeded directly from God”—that in itself reflected a firm reform emphasis—and why should any be attributed to Our Lady or, if so, why to the particular image of Our Lady at Walsingham? Such questions involved a rigid rejection of the medieval universe in which miracles could be a daily occurrence for the reformed view that miracles were confined to the Gospel narratives. But even more radical is the question: “what proof is there that [the supposed miracle] could not have been worked by natural means?” It was one thing to wonder about corruption in the Priory and ask cynically whether “Our Lady perform as many miracles now as she did when there were greater offerings made to her”; it was quite another to question of the existence of miracles themselves. We are in sight of Lafew’s pronouncement in Shakespeare’s All’s Well, That Ends Well that the age has changed and that “miracles are past.”29 The priory’s responses (which unfortunately we do not have) probably made no difference to the commissioners’ conclusions. Predictably, they decided that the priory was corrupted by “notorious incontinency” and “great superstition.”30 Erasmus had barely hinted, and in the most indirect way, at any sexual corruption at Walsingham. They turned his mild satire into evidence of the need for immediate and punitive abolition. The Virgin’s letter to Glaucoplutus, with its light exasperation at the absurdities of petitions for succor and support, could easily be read as satire rather than as amused whimsy, while Erasmus, as we have seen, was not averse to some sly and slightly lascivious humor, which no doubt reinforced any suspicion of (and the regime’s hope to discover) sexual improprieties. In the Peregrinatio, we learn that the canons, except for the one receiving gifts by the altar of the Holy House, are not allowed to be continually in attendance to the Virgin, lest “peradventure by occasion of that relygon,” they should be diverted from “thayr owne virgynyte” (33). This ironical remark picks up on one of the key charges leveled by the Reformers against the Catholic Church, that the Virgin had been turned into an idol or goddess and had become a perpetual temptation to sexualization. Erasmus’s dialogue voices the suggestion with some understatement; Cromwell’s inspectors were eager for any support for their cause. But it was an accusation repeatedly made against religious houses. Cromwell’s commissioners ‘uncovered’ repeated examples of sexual scandal at the establishments they visited. As a twentieth-century Catholic historian exploded indignantly, the agents’ letters to Cromwell “abound in the most filthy accusations, general and particular. They manifest the prurient imaginations of one who was familiar with vice in its worst forms.”31 Cromwell’s commissioners had ‘found’ exactly the same evidence of depravity at the Augustinian priory of Pentney, about 20 miles south, where the Prior was alleged to be involved in an intrigue 29 Shakespeare, All’s Well, That Ends Well, III, I, 1. For the text of the Commissioners’ Articles, see Stephenson, Walsingham Way, 62; Gillett, Walsingham, 61–3. 30 Gillett, Walsingham, 60. 31 Francis Gasquet, Henry VIII and the English Monasteries (London: John Hodges, 1893), 437.

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with the abbess of Marham and further five of his canons supposedly confessed to “incontinency.” Not content with the slur of sexuality, in Walsingham’s case, witchcraft was added as an intensifier. One of Cromwell’s agents whose work was concentrated in and around Norwich, Richard Southwell—whose grandson was the Catholic martyr Robert Southwell—wrote to Cromwell that during their inspection, they had found “a secret privy place within the house ... in which there are instruments, pots, bellows, flies of such strange colours as the like none of us had ever seen.” It was seemingly alchemical equipment, and any “art of multiplying” involved was likely the “multiplying” of pilgrims badges or tokens. Sexuality, witchcraft, false relics—as Stephenson comments, “one did not need to be very sophisticated to realize that the days of the Priory and Shrine were numbered.” Marshall argues that “despite a reputation as unprincipled thugs, the visitors appointed by Cromwell … were intelligent and educated men, their interim reports to the minister often witty, cruel, and politically astute,”32 but they were clearly instructed to carry out a largely predetermined or at least increasingly focused policy. In the events of 1535 to 1538 at Walsingham—the Commission’s highlyfocused examination of pilgrimages, relics, and miracles, the burning of the Holy House and wrecking of the Priory, the burning of the ‘image’ of Our Lady of Walsingham—it was as if the sources of power on which the old magical universe had been based suddenly vanished. Ideology consists, after all, of what is made to appear as common sense. But for the new ‘stories’ of the new emerging world to achieve the matter-of-fact-ness of ideology, it was a process of getting the old ones of pilgrimages to the shrine, the Image, the Virgin’s milk, and the way of life they embodied, “out of their heads.” Pilgrimages to Walsingham ceased: first, for the simple fact that they were forbidden; and second, gradually for most people, alternative stories started to be naturalized, started to ‘make sense.’ The Blood of Hailes, the Virgin’s milk at Walsingham, the ‘images’ of Walsingham, Ipswich, Pen Rhys, and hundreds of other places of pilgrimage that has been at the center of devotion, and of the thousands of relics—girdles, hair, bones, heads, shoes, even Erasmus’s beam of wood on which Mary had reputedly sat—would become, as the reformers hoped, the ludicrous and empty souvenirs of a vanishing age. Protestant propaganda ridiculed the reliance on the legendary saints for curing diseases, finding lost objects, and a myriad of daily acts, and gradually, over a generation such criticisms seemed to incontrovertible or at best a matter of indifference. It is because of Erasmus’s writings on Walsingham and the actions to which they contributed that he occupies an ambiguous presence in modern accounts of the Shrine. Henry VIII and Cromwell are usually portrayed as the main villains but Erasmus is, oddly enough, given some of the blame. The Anglican Father Stephenson moralizes that Erasmus, was a “trouble-maker,” who “embellished his account of Walsingham in a rather unfair way,” and “put the worst interpretation on the facts;” he was “something of a snob … rather disagreeable … rather affected,” Marshall, Religious Identities, 135.

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and finally, a “pompous foreigner.” The Catholic historian Martin Gillett bluntly accuses Erasmus of “anti-Catholic propaganda,” and of being “totally unable to level down to the thoughts and ideas of humbler folk around him,” which does point to a degree of fastidiousness in Erasmus’s thought.33 Such views make the great humanist a co-conspirator in the dissolution of the whole way of life Walsingham represented. But as the Peregrinatio shows, he tried to balance his age’s extremes: the Erasmian position was that one should not be affronted by superstition, superfluous wealth, or spurious claims of authenticity, but rather laugh gently at them as indifferent matters, and then work, through sound scholarship and careful reasoning, to bring about their reform. Extremism and violence were worse than supposed corruption or laxity. Marshall contrasts Erasmus’s position, which sought to reform by learning, subtlety, and time, with the more radical “evangelical and “apocalyptic” stances which identified fraudulent miracles with the false wonders of Antichrist,”34 and therefore needed to be immediately and utterly destroyed. But, ironically fortified by Erasmus, it was the radical reformist position which, for more than a century, became the dominant voice in English religion and politics and which tried to make the palpable presence of the Virgin, so prominently manifested at Walsingham, disappear. Subsequent chapters will ask whether, however, they were successful? And how did Walsingham—its ruined shrine and its village—adapt to the slow process of protestantization that gradually, and in contradictory ways, transformed English society, and the English imagination?

Stephenson, Walsingham Way, 47–9, 64, 66; Gillett, Walsingham, 65. Marshall, Religious Identities, 134.

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Fig. 3.1 East window, Augustinian Priory. Photograph by permission of John Twyning.

Fig. 3.2 Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham: Altar of The Holy House. By permission of Graham Howard, Official Photographer, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

Fig. 3.3 The “Abbey,” Little Walsingham. Photograph by permission of John Twyning.

Fig. 3.4 Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham: the Holy House. By permission of Graham Howard, Official Photographer, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

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Chapter 4

“As You Came from Walsingham”: Walsingham in Poetry and Music after the Dissolution This chapter moves Walsingham beyond the traumatic year of 1538, and examines how its name and memory were kept alive in literature and popular culture through the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and contributed to the complex sense of loss and nostalgia that haunts the early modern period. In his study of pilgrimage in English literature, Philip Edwards states that Walsingham had little influence on subsequent literature. It is an odd assertion since there is a rich set of associations with Walsingham in Elizabethan popular culture, including some surprising appearances in text and music, and in some contexts whose associations with the shrine and Our Lady of Walsingham would appear, on the surface, to be hostile or indifferent. The contradictory memories of Walsingham are part of a broader process of “fades” and “traces” of the place of the Virgin in early modern English culture during what I have termed elsewhere the “century of iconoclasm.” Here I explore Walsingham’s special place in that transition from a Mariocentric culture to one in which the Virgin is marginalized, repositioned or as Christine Peters terms it, undergoes “adaptation” or “reshaping.” Peters warns that the fading of the Virgin has been exaggerated: we should speak, she argues, rather of a “redefinition of her significance rather than of her disappearance.” By contrast, many modern Catholic and Anglican apologists have spoken of the tragic loss of the Virgin from English culture until the Catholic revival in the late nineteenth century. Charlotte Spretnak speculates that the “memory of England’s earlier devotion to Mary, so fervent and widespread that the country was once known as ‘Mary’s dowry’” was a tragic loss, not just for individuals but for the broader culture. That apocalyptic note is part of a reaction against what is perceived as the de-sacralization of the universe caused by the Protestant revolution and symbolized by the “disappearance” or “rejection” of the Virgin. The Catholic Robert Parsons shrewdly observed that the Reformers’ goal

Philip Edwards, Pilgrimage and Literary Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 24–44.  Peters, Patterns of Piety, 208, 223. See also Waller, Virgin Mary , Chapter 5.  Peters, Patterns of Piety, 243, 208; Charlotte Spretnak, Missing Mary: the Queen of Heaven and her Re-emergence in the Modern Church (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 159. 

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was to have “destroyed the old memories [and] would now make us new.” It was a warning directed to those of the old faith, the decreasing number of Catholics, some of whom gradually conformed to the new order while hoping that there England would eventually return to Rome, while others actively rebelled, either by going into exile in Catholic Europe or working underground to support the infiltration of missionary priests to actually reconvert the schismatic English. In this chapter I ask: how successful were the reformers in getting the “old memories,” including Walsingham, out of their heads? And how is this transition articulated, not only in the cultural margins of poetry, music and popular culture, but in the heart of the Elizabethan Protestant establishment? The search for the reminders of Walsingham in post-Dissolution England must start, as Margaret Aston’s many studies have shown, with the ruins themselves. The destruction of Walsingham created a cultural palimpsest that has continued to be read in multiple ways in the subsequent 500 years as different positions are staked out and in turn re-inscribed or reinvented in alternate traditions. This process started in the 1530s. By the end of the sixteenth century, with the exception of cathedrals, which under Elizabeth were co-opted to parade the state religion, and the ubiquitous parish churches, which were stripped of as many trappings of popery as possible, religious architecture largely became marginal to the cultural life of England until at least the late seventeenth century. But the remnants of religious buildings remained a striking presence in the English landscape. The devotions and day-to-day practices of the medieval church—and indeed, as James Simpson suggests, the very concept of “medieval” itself which was mocked by humanist educators and Protestant reformers alike—was reduced to a “site of ruin.” Shakespeare’s “bare ruined choirs” (Sonnet 73) became an unavoidable sign of radical cultural change. The destruction of shrines, abbeys, priories, and chapels in the 1530s and in the following century of iconoclasm re-inscribed a landscape in which every few miles across much of England there would be a reminder, not unlike the aftermath of a war, of devastation and ruin—an iconoclastic re-marking of land and material objects either as idolatry overcome and superstition abolished, or as the ruins of a once proud and nurturing way of life. The iconoclastic struggles of the century are still visible in many parish churches. It is not uncommon to go into a town or village and see in passing the ruins of an abbey or priory, with entry forbidden because of the danger. The village of Little Walsingham itself, not only with the striking east window of the Priory Church standing erect amidst lawns and gardens where there had once been a large church and priory buildings, but also, at the other end of the village, the substantial ruins of the friary fenced off and publically inaccessible, is an example. Or to visit the financially and architecturally crumbling parish churches in villages like those around Walsingham, like Houghton St Giles, Great Snoring or East Barsham,  Helen Parish, Monks, Miracles, and Magic (London: Routledge, 2005), 39; Gillett, Walsingham, 65–6.  James Simpson, “The Rule of Medieval Imagination,” 11.

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where parts of the church fabric remain damaged or walls painted over, from the time of the Reformation. The great priory of Bromholm, which Henry III had visited before coming to Walsingham, is now a crumbling arch at the end of a dull street in a rural Norfolk town, near a coastal power station. Or on a more mundane level, one frequently finds oneself today on a Priory Lane with no priory, or only a few ruins; or on Abbey Road without an Abbey or, if one is in Cambridge, as Erasmus was, in the Abbey Stadium near what had once been an abbey. On Annunciation Day, 1538, the annual funding for Henry VIII’s candle at Walsingham was duly funded for the last time; on July 14, the Commissioners returned to Walsingham, removed the Image of Our Lady of Walsingham, its jewels and other riches; on August 4 the canons were summoned to hear that the priory and all its lands were surrendered to the King. The handing over of the friary took place soon after. Between 1538 and 1540, about 400 monasteries and friaries and 50 nunneries were suppressed all across England. Cromwell’s agents seized lands and riches, destroyed revered images and relics, and hung or burnt those who refused to cooperate or who were designated as heretics. Significant portions of a whole way of life was suddenly wrecked along with the buildings themselves. The Virgin had been at the center of Walsingham’s religious and community life for 400 years, and however much reform of the monasteries had been needed and indeed for some years threatened by Wolsey or Cromwell, the dissolution must have been felt as a cataclysmic shock by many. The inhabitants of Walsingham had seen the property and riches of the priory signed away, an act that over 500 years later is still on occasion compared, by guides and officials of the modern shrines, with Judas’s betrayal of his Lord. Pilgrimages were stopped. Most of the commercial livelihood of the village ceased. There was some suggestion in Cromwell’s household to turn the priory into a College, but it never eventuated. Local villagers, who no doubt had been employed over the years in maintaining the buildings, were hired to wreck both the priory and the friary on the village’s outskirts, burn down the Holy House, seize and destroy the Virgin’s milk and other relics. They were taking part, as Shagan describes the equivalent events at Hailes, “almost without realizing it, in an enormously volatile act of iconoclasm,” and no doubt with mixed motives and feelings. The familiar and comforting world of magic—the apotropaic powers of shrines, the aura of the pilgrimages and relics, the hotels, baths, wayside chapels, hermits and chantries—was swept away, or at least ruined beyond use. In the words of one of Henry’s diplomats, Sir Robert Wingfield, in 1539 surveying the previous year’s work, “sorceries and enchantments that have been set forth by such as long have continued the usurpation of Gods authority … under the cloak of hypocrisy.” Bernard, King’s Reformation, 465. Gillett, Walsingham, 61–3; Bernard, King’s Reformation, 596; Shagan, Politics, 172;

 

Shakespeare, The Tempest, IV, I, 150. For this paragraph, I draw on Shagan, Politics,176–7, where the dismantling of the destruction of the Blood of Hailes and its local impact is reconstructed from local records.

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As a curious sideline, one of the other images seized around the same time as Walsingham’s was the statue of our Lady of Grace from Ipswich. But Our Lady of Walsingham’s “younger sister” may have escaped burning, as it is possible that the priests at Ipswich managed to transport it out of the country, eventually to come to the Italian town of Nettuno, where it is still known as the English Madonna. In the late twentieth century a replica of the Nettuno statue was erected in Ipswich. At least, that is the legend that has developed around Our Lady of Ipswich: yet records of Cromwell’s house at Austin Friars in London show the receipt in 1538 of the image of Our Lady of Ipswich to be stored with other relics and idols for eventual destruction. Perhaps, some versions of the legend speculate, a fake was substituted for the ‘real’ image. Stephenson speculates wistfully that something similar might have happened at Walsingham and that “the evil intentions of the iconoclasts” towards the Walsingham image may not have been carried out; he mentions, although with no proof, that “there have been stories handed down that this is what was done,” and mentions that the Martyrs’ House, where the subprior Nicholas Mileham was imprisoned before his execution, had been dug up to see whether it was hidden there. The commissioners at Walsingham, however, seem to have been particularly thorough, and the “older sister” almost certainly did not escape. For Protestants, then and now, it was important at such public demonstrations of the powerlessness of idols that no miraculous rescues were made, that it could be demonstrated that the statues did not resist the flames, and that “the images of Our Lady of Walsingham and Ipswich … that were used for common pilgrimages,” had been destroyed so “the people should use noe more idolatrye unto them.”10 We have no record of the fate of the Virgin’s milk; the vial was likely broken when the high altar of the priory church was wrecked or it was burnt along with the Holy House, the ashes of which would be eerily uncovered in the 1961 archeological expedition. It is not that there were no protests and even some open rebellion. Across England, the most serious opposition to the dissolution of the religious houses occurred in 1536 when what became known as the Pilgrimage of Grace erupted in the North to protest the dissolution of the religious houses. An angry assemblage of 30,000 men, led by a charismatic lawyer, Robert Aske, and vastly outnumbering the mustered royal forces, demanded that the monasteries be restored and Cromwell and other low-born advisors restrained from further iconoclasm. The King instructed his agents to negotiate, promising redress, but once the rebels dispersed, had them arrested and many, including Aske, executed. In such an atmosphere, the mildest protests over Walsingham’s dissolution were likely to be seized on as treasonable. We can see something of the national trauma at the local level in 1537 in what was termed the Walsingham Conspiracy, which W.R. Elton Robertson, Thomas Cromwell’s Servants,” 218. Vail, Shrines of Our Lady in England, 105–9; Stephenson, Walsingham Way, 64, 65. 10 G.R. Elton, Reform and Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,  

1977), 339; Gillett, Walsingham, 65; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 402.

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termed the “most serious plot hatched anywhere south of the Trent.” Cromwell and the Duke of Norfolk were both seriously concerned that Norfolk and East Anglia generally would rise in support of the rebels. Essentially local and largely unfocused grumblings were elevated into rumors that Walsingham men would “raise the country.” Just as the Pilgrimage of Grace presented itself as supporting the King against evil counselors, so at Walsingham, the conspiracy took shape from a meeting of a few in the Common Place discussing a resolution to inform the King about what Cromwell’s commissioners were doing to their Priory and, by extension, their village and livelihood. Two Walsingham lay choristers, Ralph Rogerson and George Guysborough, were overheard complaining to each other about the putting down of religious houses—“within a while Binham shall be put down, and also Walsingham,” they are reputed to have said, not without reason— and remarking that the upshot, especially with the landed gentry taking over the confiscated lands, would be to further disadvantage the “pore pepyll & comyns.” Cromwell ordered a swift and brutal response. The two principal complainants, along with nine others, were hung, drawn, and disemboweled in various would-be exemplary public ceremonial executions across Norfolk, in Norwich, Yarmouth, Lynn, and Walsingham itself, where Guysborough and sub-prior Mileham were hung in what became known as Martyr’s Field.11 As befits a shrine centered on the Virgin, there was a female dimension to the Walsingham rebellion. While the conspirators were awaiting trial in Norwich, it was reported that a woman named Elizabeth Wood had commented that “it was a pity that these Walsingham men were discovered, for we shall never have good world till we fall together by the ears,” and that “we never had world since this king reigned.” She too was arrested and executed. Two of the Walsingham conspirators’ wives were also involved in the interrogations, and as Sharon Jansen points out in her survey of women’s roles in the rebellions and conspiracies of the late 1530s, there was some special nervousness shown by the authorities about the supposed unpredictable and, most especially, the verbally uncontrollable nature of women.12 On August 4, 1538 the Priory property was handed over to Cromwell’s commissioners. Subsidiary priories like that at West Acre were also closed and the estates sold to Protestant loyalists. Prior Vowell, now signing himself in his letters to Cromwell as simply “priest,” was treated generously for his cooperation and was supported by a local landowner Sir Richard Gresham—who himself benefited from some of the Priory’s estates—as a “very discreet and learned man 11 C.E. Moreton, “The Walsingham Conspiracy of 1537,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 63 (1990), 40–41; Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 6, 105, 124. See also T.H. Swales, “Opposition to the Suppression of the Norfolk Monasteries. Expressions of Discontent: The Walsingham Conspiracy,” Norfolk Archaeology 33 (1965), 254–65. 12 Sharon L. Jansen, Dangerous Talk and Strange Behavior: Women and Popular Resistance to the Reforms of Henry VIII (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), 81.

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Fig. 4.1 The Common Place, Little Walsingham. Photograph by Gary Waller. of good name,” one who could “set forth the Word of God very well, whereof “there was “great need.” He received a clerical living, along with a pension of £100.13 Those priests and other inhabitants of the religious foundations who were perceived as loyal were also able to be absorbed into the wider community— some continuing as priests, others as teachers, some simply becoming vagrants. The fall of Walsingham was complete and even occasioned international notice. On November 1, 1538, Melanchthon, the German Reformer, and echoing one of Erasmus’s descriptions of Walsingham, praised the overthrow of the idol of “Mary by the Sea.” “Pilgrimage saints go down apace,” exulted John Huss.14 As part what has been termed the greatest redistribution of land in England since William the Conqueror, the lands, buildings and riches of Walsingham reverted to the crown and over the next 10 years were sold or granted to loyal Protestants. Within a year from the dissolution, the priory itself and its grounds were transferred from the crown to the governor of the local leper hospital, Sir Thomas Sidney. There is a legend, admittedly dating back only to the seventeenth century, that Sidney was chosen by the townspeople to buy the priory on their behalf; instead, Stephenson, Walsingham Way, 65. Gillett, Walsingham, 65; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 402.

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he paid £90, and allegedly “kept it to himself,” a phrase that echoes accusingly throughout subsequent histories and guidebooks.15 Like other newly-privileged families across England, the new owner used both standing buildings and material from the ruins to build himself a manor, of sufficient grandeur (and perhaps symbolic significance) to be considered to entertain the Queen and her entourage in 1578, becoming a symbol of both the ruthlessness and generosity of the new regime. The redistribution of land as a consequence of the politicization of religion in the 1530s was arguably, in the long run, the most important material change in the period. Many of its consequences are visible: the pattern of land ownership around Walsingham retains much of the shape established in the 1540s. The village slowly adapted. At first, the village’s three guilds of Our Lady continued to function, though in 1540 they combined into one, which continued for a few years and, since they had presumably previously met in the Priory, undertook the construction of a guild hall, until guilds themselves were formally abolished a decade later, and so another traditional mainstay of the village’s life disappeared. By the time Elizabeth became queen in 1559, there was no chance that pilgrimage sites would be restored. Around 1570, William Lambarde was celebrating that “Canterbury, Walsingham, and sundry suche like, are nowe in these our days become in manner waste, since God in times paste was in them blasphemed most.” With the important exception of Catholic exiles, recusants, and conforming “church papists,” it is easy to agree with Duffy that by around 1570 England’s religious and geographical landscapes were dramatically changed.16 By that date, Walsingham had only three Catholic families, and by 1603, the village’s population had dropped 25 percent from before the Dissolution, the largest percentage drop of any town in East Anglia.17 But as Aston notes, as well as providing “a series of signposts to the destroyed monastic era,” the ruins very early on “led to nostalgia and poetry, as well as to antiquarianism and history.”18 Perhaps the earliest written manifestation of these feelings is in a poem attributed to the Catholic nobleman and the queen’s second cousin, Philip Howard, from 1580 the twentieth Duke of Arundel. In the late 1570s, possibly during a royal progress in 1578 (according to a plan of her progress through Norfolk), Elizabeth may have visited what was now Sir Thomas Sidney’s estate. Would she and her court have noticed not just the ruined priory, For the Sidney myth, which can be traced back only to the seventeenth century, see Gillett, Walsingham, 64. It is repeated in most histories and guidebooks to Walsingham (and by virtually every guide to the Shrine today). See e.g., Scilla Landale, Walk Around and Discover Walsingham (Walsingham: Guided Tours of Walsingham, 1992). 16 Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts. Volume 1:Laws Against Images. Oxford: Clarendon Press, (1988), 46; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 382, 387. 17 John Patten, “Population Distribution in Norfolk and Suffolk during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 65 (1975), 45–65, and English Towns, 1500–1700 (Hamden: Archon Books, 1978), 251. 18 Margaret Aston, “English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense of the Past,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973), 232. 15

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but other remnants of the village’s former life, including, on the edge of the village, the friary? Or, just up the slope from Sidney’s mansion, Martyr’s Field? But whether he visited then or not, Howard may well have known Walsingham intimately. He had local connections as well as religious ones: he owned Flitcham Prior, 20 miles away (and today part of the royal Sandringham estate), which had also once been owned by the Walsingham Priory. Then, or shortly after—if the traditional ascription in Bodleian Manuscript Rawlinson Poet. 219, labeling the poem as by “Earl of Arundell” is correct—he wrote a haunting poem bitterly bewailing precisely the very phenomenon that William Lambarde was celebrating, the destruction of Walsingham.19 The authorship of the poem is not certain, but what evidence there is does not rule out Arundel’s authorship. We know that although he had Catholic sympathies—and eventually converted—and that he was a favorite of Elizabeth in the late 1570s; he participated in the Anjou marriage negotiations, and performed with Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville in the Four Foster Children of Desire pageant in 1581. His name is on the Queen’s New Year gift list rolls from 1577 until 1585. But in 1583, he was arrested for allegedly associating with Mary Queen of Scots and openly avoiding Protestant religious services. In 1584 he announced his conversion to Catholicism. His defiance—which is certainly at one with the sentiments of the Walsingham poem—could not be tolerated and he was arrested. As part of her desire to include conforming Catholics, at least in the nobility, within her religious settlement, the Queen made a gesture of reconciliation, offering to release him if he would “bear the sword as usual before” her in procession to her chapel and otherwise duly attend her presence. He refused, and was further condemned during the Armada crisis for plotting with Catholics and illegally trying to leave the country. He spent seven years under sentence of death in the Tower and died of dysentery there in 1595.20 Usually entitled “The Wracke of Walsingham,” until recently the poem was given attention largely by historians and devotees of Walsingham, making its first appearance in a mainstream anthology in the early 1990s, its belatedness in reaching any version of an Elizabethan poetic canon attributable at least in part to its explicit religious convictions. The marginalization of Catholic writings has been a striking characteristic of mainstream literary history until the last decades of the twentieth century. The Protestantization of English literary history is seen most blatantly perhaps in the evaluation of Edmund Spenser as an “English” not just a “Protestant” poet, the positioning of Philip Sidney as the quintessential English Protestant Petrarchan poet, and (moving into the seventeenth century) the marginalization of Richard Crashaw as excessive, extravagant, vulgar, shocking, 19 Quotations are taken from the Walsingham website, www.walsinghamanglican.org. uk, and it may be most conveniently found in The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse 1509–1569, (eds) David Norbrook and Henry R. Woudhuysen (Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1993), 531–2. 20 Steven W. May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and Their Contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991, 347, 215.

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eccentric, undecorous, and (worst of all) un-English.21 As Alison Shell and other scholars, by no means all Catholic partisans, have shown, such views take the claims of the Protestant regime at its own evaluation. There is a rich tradition of Catholic poetry and other writings that has been marginalized as part of the longstanding dominance of the Protestant World Picture. If it is indeed his, perhaps the Walsingham poem was written, along with other devotional poetry and translations, while Arundel was in the Tower. In one of his other poems, a “Fourfold Meditation,” there are some stanzas on the Virgin Mary which were omitted from the 1606 published edition, in which he makes what becomes a standard Catholic comparison of the Virgin to the Queen of England, to whose allegiance he had formerly been bound, sentiments which are exactly echoed in the Walsingham poem: In the wrackes of Walsingam Whom should I chuse But the Queene of Walsingam, to be guide to my muse? Then thou Prince of Walsingam, graunt me to frame Bitter plaintes to rewe thy wronge, bitter wo for thy name.

The poem starts on site, as if an observer is looking around at “the wrackes of Walsingham.” Given what we know of Arundel’s movements before his imprisonment, the speaker may not literally be there in Walsingham itself, but rather looking back to a time when, as part of Elizabeth’s retinue, he observed without perhaps recognizing the significance of, the setting and the contrast between the past and present. He looks around and asks how he can register his feelings of shock and indignation. In such a world, who, he asks rhetorically, should be his Muse? And what should he call upon his Muse to inspire him to do? The poet’s true Muse should be the “Queen of Walsingham,” and no earthly queen, such as Elizabeth, can replace her. The earthly alternative who now rules England is a false queen. The true “Queen of Walsingham” is then asked to guide him to her Son, the “Prince of Walsingham,” so that the poet may directly petition divine help to “frame/ bitter plaints to rewe thy wrong.” The next section reinforces the precise sense of place with which the poem opens, but now it does so by using traditional religious imagery, both biblical and polemical, to underline the theological significance of the scene:

For typical objections to Crashaw, see the summary in Richard Rambuss, “Sacred Subjects and the Aversive Metaphysical Conceit: Crashaw, Serrano, Ofili,” ELH 72 (2004), 497–500, 503; see also Barry Spurr, See the Virgin Blest: the Virgin Mary in English Poetry (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 99–100, 101, 104, 105. 21

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The sheep remind him of the men and women attacked by the reformers and iconoclasts, “the ravening wolves” of the Reformation. Reference to a “Sacred vyne” may suggest a vineyard, but primarily refers to the source of the eucharistic wine now no longer consecrated at the Priory. Just as the estate’s vines are “rooted up by the swine,” so the Mass has been desecrated by the Protestant revolution. The poem then further develops the sense of loss occasioned by contemplating the ruins and the lands around. What was once a “holy land “ is now reduced to “wracks”; the priory’s towers lie “levell with the ground,” and the “waies” of Walsingham—a reference to the many routes, the “Walsingham waies” that led to the shrine—are now empty of people, when they were once filled by a “press of peers.” In the past, Walsingham’s fame was proudly trumpeted, “blowen,” but now the only sound is the melancholy cry of owls where once “sweetest himnes” were sung, lines that again recall Shakespeare’s “bare ruine choirs where late the sweet birds sung”: Such were the workes of Walsingam while shee did stand! Such are the wrackes as now do shewe of that holy land! Levell, Levell with the ground the towres doe lye, Which with their golden glitteringe tops pearsed once to the skye! Wher weare gates, no gates ar nowe; the waies vnknowen

Instead of the pilgrims, the “palmers,” who had once thronged to Walsingham, now the ground is overrun with “toades and serpents,” no doubt literally as well as metaphorically: Wher the presse of peares did passe, while her fame far was blowen. Oules do scrike wher the sweetest himnes lately weer songe; Toades and serpentes hold ther dennes wher the Palmers did thronge.

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Then, finally, the speaker turns from mournful plaint to increasingly direct invective. The culminating note of the poem is not nostalgia but indignation, and as absolute as any of the reformers’ condemnations: “Weep, weep O Walsingham, Whose dayes are nightes, / Blessings turned to blasphemies, Holy deedes to dispites,” cries the indignant poet who ends with an umambiguously denunciatory couplet: Sathan sittes wher our Lord did swaye Walsingham, oh! farewell!

Clearly, the poem could have been written only by someone with strong, outspoken Catholic sympathies.22 Arundel’s poem (if it is his) represents not an example of nostalgic sympathy for regrettable destruction, but is an outright rejection of the destructiveness of the Reformation and the Elizabethan settlement. Walsingham is the symbol of such destruction and the poet’s defiance. We have no indication whether “The Wracke of Walsingham” circulated, even among recusants, but regardless of whether it found an audience at the time, it expresses feelings of unease and disillusion that were increasingly common, projected them upon this once sacred place. So what, then, did “Walsingham” mean for most Elizabethans in the last decades of the century, by then a generation or two after the dissolution? The “The Wrackes of Walsingham” embodied the embattled feelings of the embattled recusants, afraid for their lives on the one side, their souls on the other; but to what, and with what reverberations, did “Walsingham” represent to the gradually compliant English populace and especially to the Protestant patriots, like the Sidneys, around the Queen? No longer would “Walsingham” have referred primarily to the shrine. In court circles, the name would be recognized as that of Elizabeth’s powerful and somewhat sinister minister, the spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, who had connections by marriage with the Sidneys, and who died in 1590. His family had, in fact, come from the small village in Norfolk, once (as the majority of Elizabethans had learned to believe) the home of a shrine centered on an idolatrous ‘image’ of the Virgin Mary and the subject of superstitious pilgrimages under the old papist regime, and now partly in ruins, partly transformed into the home of a minor branch of the Sidney family. But no later than around 1590 and probably in the previous decade, the name of Walsingham had also come to refer to the words and tune of what becomes known as the “Walsingham Ballad.” But although we may speak of ‘it,’ the Walsingham Ballad (not to be confused with the Pynson Ballad of the previous century) is really a family of words and music. While the two are often combined both in Elizabethan published and unpublished songbooks (and indeed in modern performances) each has a significantly distinct place within the complexities of early modern England. The relationship between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture is 22 Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 11.

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a vexed one in any period. In early modern England, plays were seen as having low cultural status and were often discarded (the equivalent of ‘pulped’): today, Shakespeare’s plays, along with those of his contemporaries are seen as ‘high’ culture. Ballads had long occupied an ambiguous position between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Poets like Sidney might sneer at the crudity of ballads and songs, but nonetheless use them in their writings. Many ballads were revived in the eighteenth century as evidence of the rich folk element in English life, and two hundred years later are treated as ‘high’ cultural works and incorporated into elite musical and poetical discussions. First, to the Walsingham tune. A definitive history of the Walsingham tune is hard to trace, and in discussing it, I rely particularly on Bradley Brookshire’s pioneering essay on the composition.23 Approximately 30 versions can be found, in many collections, published and unpublished, including the century’s premier collections of keyboard songs, My Ladye Nevells Book and the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. My Ladye Nevells Book was arranged (though not copied) by Byrd himself, and includes his Walsingham variations as the 31st of 42 compositions. ThenThe Fitzwilliam book opens with the spectacular Variations by John Bull—“a hard blow for the gallant duke or duchess who picked up the Fitzwilliam and found John Bull’s 30 Variations on Walsingham yawning like Charybdis before them!” comments Matthew Roy24—and once again includes Byrd’s work. Bull’s Variations, likely written to compete with Byrd’s, is one of the greatest (and among the longest, at 19 minutes) keyboard pieces of the time. Both composers take over a melody that had evidently become part of Elizabethan folklore and elaborately and lovingly enhance it. Bull’s includes 30 variations on the tune, with “virtually every conceivable virginal figuration known at the time,” though with the starting melody remaining the top line throughout.25 Byrd’s Variations most likely date from the 1580s, making the composition roughly contemporary with the “Wracke of Walsingham,” and as the next section of this chapter will show, coinciding with the emergence of various adaptations of the Bradley Brookshire, “’Bare ruin’d quires, where late the sweet birds sang’: Covert Speech in William Byrd’s ‘Walsingham’ Variations,” in Janes and Waller, Walsingham, 199-216. My discussion of the Walsingham ballad here expands on and in places modifies the briefer treatment in Virgin Mary, chapter 5. 24 Matthew Roy, “Conserted Consort: “And all the while sweete Musicke did apply Her curious skill, the warbling notes to play.” www.matthewjroy.com/1/post/2010/05/ conserted-consort-and-all-while-sweete.html. Accessed June 1, 2010. 25 John Gillespie, Five Centuries of Keyboard Music: An Historical Survey of Music for Harpsichord and Piano (New York: Courier Dover Publications, 1972), 55; David Yearsley, “The Esserzici Work-Out Book,” CounterPunch, Nov. 12–14, 2010: www. counterpunch.org/yearsley11122010.html. The Walsingham variations have been recorded innumerable times, from Virginalists to the pop/rock singer Sting. See Sting, Songs from the Labyrinth (Deutsche Grammophon B000HXDESU, 2006). For a comprehensive list, and ready access to audio files, using Sibelius software, see www.musicwww.co.uk/walsingham. htm. Accessed June 1, 2010. 23

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words of the Walsingham ballad. Despite his strong commitment to Catholicism, which can be dated from the 1570s, Byrd was employed in Elizabeth’s own chapel. Jeremy Smith terms him the Shostakovich of his age, in that he conformed to the regime but directed much of his work to opposing it, at least in sentiment. As Master of the Queen’s music, he dutifully composed for the Anglican liturgy and celebrated the Queen in anthems like “O Lord, make thy servant Elizabeth our queen,” and madrigals like “This Sweet and Merry Month of May,” in which “Eliza” is described as “the queen of second Troy.” But most of Byrd’s music shows affinities with, if not outright allegiance to, some of the age’s more militant recusant forces, including the Jesuits, who were actively trying to undermine the Elizabethan Settlement and working to bring about England’s return to Rome. His religious music is overwhelmingly preoccupied with what Joseph Kerman terms “guilt-ridden prayers for mercy or at least expressions of personal penitence,” laments for Jerusalem, the destroyed city, or the Babylonian captivity,” all themes that are easily interpreted in terms of the religious situation in which Byrd and his fellow recusants found themselves. Kerman argues that “Byrd’s impressive, deeply felt motets of the 1580s should be viewed as covert protests, prayers and exhortations voiced on behalf of the beleaguered Catholic minority.” He is frequently noted in the company of Catholic families and for a time lost his Chapel Royal appointment. 26 Brookshire shows that in the Variations, Byrd reveals himself not merely as a brilliant adaptor of a popular tune, but as “a master of covert speech in which the musical codes” direct his audiences towards a distinctive religious affirmation. The Byrd Variations might therefore be described as his Walsingham roman a clef. Placing the composition in the context of Elizabethan nostalgia and its emerging religious tensions reveals not only “the charred embers” of its religious affirmations—“leveled,” he adds, by modern “scholarly inattention as surely as the Reformation laid waste to Walsingham itself”—but also how Byrd’s specific stylistic features made clear his religious allegiances. 27 Byrd’s opening notes, Brookshire shows, deliberately make the connections with the spiritual significance of Walsingham. He puts the tune into a distinctive musical context—not that of a traditional folk ballad but of his own religious works. Several of Byrd’s other secular keyboard compositions, such as The Carmans Whistle or The Maiden’s Song, start with a monophonic statement followed by second and subsequent voices added for the later measures. But the Walsingham Variations open much more emphatically, as if they were a chorale work: a single cantorial voice gives the first two bars; a tutti of 4–5 voices responds and then rises to a complex cadence, a pattern that is repeated throughout, and which mirrors the characteristic pattern not of his secular ballads but of his motets. The cadence used in the Walsingham Variations reflects the typical structure of the Amens in the motets. Thomas Morley noted that “as for the Motets and other 26 Joseph Kerman, “Byrd’s Settings of the Ordinary of the Mass,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 32/3 (1979), 408; Brookshire, “’Bare ruin’d quires,’” 202. 27 Brookshire, “’Bare ruin’d quires,’”, 199–200.

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grave music, you must in them come with more deliberation in bindings to the close.” William Palmer observes that “the writing of elaborate and beautiful Amens to various motets, anthems and liturgical settings seems to have been a favourite practice … of Byrd’s day.” In employing a structure distinctive to his religious works, Byrd clearly intends to sacralize his Walsingham variations and so give his audience with an audible clue to his and their sense of Walsingham’s loss from late Elizabethan England.28 Other musical techniques employed in Byrd’s variations similarly point to sources and intentions well outside of the range of his usual keyboard music. Brookshire notes that the “alternatim performance of plainchant (sung by a choir) and polyphonic organ versets” was common in Elizabethan sacred vocal music by such composers as Taverner and Tallis. It is a pattern that is strongly associated with settings of the Magnificat, which of course has explicit Marian associations and while certainly biblical in origin and therefore acceptable to Protestants, was significantly downplayed in Reformed liturgy and devotion. It would, however, have readily been associated with Walsingham by Byrd’s fellow recusants. The persecuted English Catholics, Brookshire argues, would have immediately made the connection between the “Walsingham” tune and their own plight. Byrd’s Walsingham variations may have had particular resonance for the closely-knit community of Norfolk recusants who gave him support and patronage and for whom the site of the great shrine was likely a common sight. His Norfolk patron, Edward Paston, a poet and musician as well as a collector and patron of music, provided a refuge for East Anglian recusants at Appleton Hall, which was located between Norwich and Walsingham. Byrd, no less than Shakespeare—though with religious intents closer to those of “In the Wracke”—was mourning for Walsingham’s “bare ruin’d quiers.” The result is a composition in which memory of and nostalgia for Walsingham are made to interrogate the Reformation, its destructiveness, and the spiritual impoverishment of Elizabethan England. Bull’s Walsingham Variations, also found in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, are musically more extravagant than Byrd’s, and certainly more flamboyant in style than grave. As with Byrd’s, however, the passion and complexity of Bull’s variations go far beyond what a setting of a mere ballad would demand, but they are not simply a demonstration of Bull’s remarkable musical virtuosity. By choosing the Walsingham tune, like Byrd, Bull seems to be affirming his own commitment to Catholicism and the memory of Walsingham. For both, the Walsingham tune becomes a passionate expression of loss and defiance, no doubt all the more able to be articulated as religious dissent because, as music, it would escape the verbal scrutiny or censure that a poem like Arundel’s might attract. The continuing presence and popularity of the Walsingham tune in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England constituted both a memory of what Walsingham had once 28 William Palmer, “Byrd and Amen,” Music & Letters 34 (1953), 140; Brookshire, “’Bare ruin’d Quires’,” 211. For Morley’s observation, see Alfred Mann, The Study of Fugue (New York: Dover, 1987), 30.

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represented and an affirmation of an alternative to the established religious settlement of Elizabethan England. Now to the words of the Walsingham Ballad, which from the start seem to have been associated with the basic tune with which Bull, Byrd and other composers worked, though in fact they eventually have a very different history. It was once thought that the most famous version of the ballad, that attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh, “As you came from the holy land,” a dialogue between a male lover and a pilgrim, was the original. Through its presence in anthologies and lists of ‘best poems,’ it has become widely accepted as part of the canon of English poetry. But as Alison Chapman has shown in a careful survey of references to the ballad, just as the Walsingham tune occurs in many versions and variations, Ralegh’s (if it indeed is his) is just one of a number of versions of the poem. There are also, scattered across late Elizabethan and early to mid-seventeenth century popular literature, many incidental references and echoes, serious and parodic, many of the first stanza in which the ballad’s initial situation is established, others simply references to “Walsingham,” as if it were a cultural cliché. This variety seems to point to a broad familiarity with a lost original—or family of originals.29 In short, the words of “Walsingham” reflect the typical ‘folk’ origins of the ballad form, with a communal rather than an individual author. The Walsingham ballad incorporates elements of all the three major groups scholars of traditional ballads have distinguished in ballad collections from Bishop Percy on—the magical and marvelous; the romantic and tragic; and the semi-historical. The ballad, says Mary Ellen Brown, is a “fluid, dynamic practice”: simple in diction, direct in narrative, focused in emotion, oral rather than visual, communally based rather than individual.30 Most ballads focus on love lost or won within a narrative that evokes the emotions of conflicts directly, sparely, almost impersonally, always stressing the helplessness of the individual caught up in wider social or cosmic forces. They grow from desires and needs that are characteristically ideologically as well as stylistically marginal to a dominant culture. As with other ballads, which emerge in print out of a folk rather than a literary culture, can we deduce about some kind of Ur-Ballad for the Walsingham Ballad, if such existed? Did the words get adapted to an existing tune? Or was the tune written for the Ur-version of the Ballad’s words? It is impossible to say. The words probably date, at least in some form, from at least a little earlier than when they surface in the 1590s. It is the kind of folk-based composition that might well Alison Chapman, “Met I with an old bald Mare”: Lust, Misogyny, and the Early Modern Walsingham Ballads,” in Janes and Waller, Walsingham, 217–32. 30 Mary Ellen Brown, “Placed, Replaced, or Misplaced?: The Ballads’ Progress,” Eighteenth Century, 47 (2006), 123; A Scottish Ballad Book, (ed.) David Buchan (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 1–2; G.L. Kittredge, “Introduction” to English and Scottish Popular Ballads, edited from the collection of Francis James Child (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), xi. For the re-discovery of the Ballad in the eighteenth century, see Percy, Reliques of Old English Poetry,183; Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 52–4. 29

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have originated in small informal groups, gatherings around a fire, been picked up and elaborated by travelling minstrels of itinerant poets. Nashe mentions it as if everyone would understand the reference in Have with You to Saffron Walden (1596), and Ralegh’s version of the poem was probably written in the early 1590s. If Brookshire’s argument on the date of the Byrd variations of the tune is correct, some version of the words would have been common knowledge a decade before at least. The extant versions, whether whole poems or echoes, suggest that the situation is a question-and-answer dialogue: an abandoned lover encountering a pilgrim on a road—presumably since it is somewhere on a road to Walsingham, the “Walsingham Way” or some reconstructed memory of it—who is returning from the Shrine. Opening lines vary: “As I Went to Walsingham,” “Have at you to Walsingham,” and “As You Came from [the Holy Land of] Walsingham.” Minor variations of a starting line are again typical of adaptations of an original, typically communally developed, perhaps from an existing tune. In some versions Walsingham has some explicit connection to the Shrine of the Virgin, which might suggest it was written before the Dissolution: “As I went to Walsingham to the shrine with speed/ Met I with a jolly palmer in a pilgrim’s weed”—though that most likely is a construct of nostalgia, not a clue to dating, or else an instance of the timelessness of the action at which many ballads aim. The bereft speaker then bewails that his lover has also gone on pilgrimage to Walsingham but has not returned. The key question is whether the pilgrim has seen her and, asked how she would be recognized, he attempts to describe her. That seems, at least, to be the general starting point for most versions: what follows may vary somewhat in tone as in information and narrative. Bishop Percy’s eighteenth-century collection of ballads includes another quite distinct narrative, a dialogue between a pilgrim and a herdsman, starting “As I went to Walsingham/ to the Shrine with pride.” The pilgrim, who in at least two cases turns out to be a woman, is wanting to learn the way to Walsingham so she may repent and die as she has treated her lover so cruelly that he has died and she wishes to join him. Yet another famous expression of the Ballad, Ophelia’s lament in Hamlet gives hints of a slightly different version, and is of course also spoken by a woman. The traces of the Ballad we find scattered across the literary and popular landscape are therefore not merely individual lyric outbursts: they represent a collectivity that folk ballads existed to express. But all the variants of the Walsingham Ballads have a specific (and absent) point of origin: the existence, perhaps in the past, perhaps only (by now) in legend, of the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, the “holy land,” as many of the versions describe it. The different versions of the ballad likely grew therefore as yet another series of varied, even contradictory, reactions to the loss of a specifically Catholic, Mariological dimension to English post-Reformation life. They record the transformation of Walsingham into a rich symbol of human loss, tragedy and nostalgia, a shift that was both complex and still partial, from the world view represented by Walsingham in the early 1530s, before the Dissolution, to the world which Shakespeare’s Ophelia evokes, in her version of the Ballad, two generations later.

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It is not coincidental that the Walsingham Ballad emerges in the last decade or more in the century, in the restless post-Armada decade, when a number of poets and dramatists are stating to sidle up to the forbidden trappings of Catholicism, as Shakespeare does in his early plays with their frequent references to friars, hermits, “ghostly fathers,” orisons, and the like. In all cases Walsingham is alluded to as a mysterious place of loss and nostalgia, contrition, punishment and even death. The more ‘secular’ versions and references which, Chapman suggests, appear later in the period, combine the lost love and tragic regret within the structure of a pilgrimage; the religious significance of Walsingham has faded but its liminal suggestiveness has remained.31 The distinctive poem traditionally claimed for Sir Walter Ralegh, “As You Came from the Holy Land, ” deserves special attention, both for its remarkable poetical resonance and also as a revelation of how Walsingham was “fading,” yet continuing to be a powerful presence in late Elizabethan life and, strikingly, within the Elizabethan Protestant establishment. If, as most of his editors cautiously agree, he did write it, Ralegh’s version is one of the high points of Elizabethan lyric poetry, its brilliance resting on the incantatory rhythms, the slow, ritualistic way that builds its repetitive spell. It is curious why Ralegh fastened onto the ballad. Did he just, simply, like the tune? Did his opening lines come to him from some greater awareness of the existing words of the ballad? And was he aware that for his six weeks “exile” in the Tower of London in 1591 for offending the Queen by his secret marriage that there was another prisoner who presumably knew the Walsingham ballad and who evidently had strong feelings for it. They would have had little else in common: Arundel was imprisoned for outright rejecting the Elizabethan regime, Ralegh, for pursuing its demands all too desperately. 32 Ralegh’s poem initially follows the common outline —a forlorn lover encountering a pilgrim who is returning from a pilgrimage to the “holy land “ of Walsingham, and asking if he has met his lost love. The pilgrim asks in return how he might remember since he has met “many one, . . .That have come, that have gone.” She is immediately described in the idealized terms so central to the poetry of royal praise in the Elizabethan court: Ralegh slips easily into the platonicpetrarchan rhetoric Elizabeth encouraged her courtiers to use:33

Chapman, “Met I with an old bald Mare.” There are some perceptive remarks on the ‘origins’ of the Walsingham Ballad in Gillespie, “Shakespeare and Popular Song,” 186– 9. See also Beatrice Groves, Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592–1604 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 30. 32 Quotations from Ralegh’s poems and poetry are taken from The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh. Ed. Thomas Birch. London, 1829. For modern editions of the poems, see The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh, (ed.) Agnes M.C. Latham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), and Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition, (ed.) Michael Rudick (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 33 Gary Waller, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century (London: Longman, 1993), 80. 31

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She is neither white nor brown, But as the heavens fair; There is none hath a form so divine In the earth or the air.

Elizabeth, of course (to follow for the moment the politicized reading, as if the poem were written by Ralegh entirely as a meditation on his own miserable fate, exiled from her) is the queen not of Heaven, but of Protestant England, yet she is described in terms partly reminiscent of the Virgin herself: Such a one did I meet, good sir, Such an angelic face, Who like a queen, like a nymph, did appear By her gait, by her grace.

The policicized petrarchanism of the poem derives much of its rhetoric from medieval Mariology.34 It is designed to evoke yet another “invented tradition,” the collective fantasy that the Elizabethan court is immune to change—that it is a harmonious, static world, the secular equivalent of the eternal world preside over by the Queen of Heaven, when in fact it is in fact ruled by change and unpredictability. Ralegh may assert that Elizabeth reigns over mutability (as his friend and protégée, Spenser does) but he knows she is all too mortal.35 Any higher power—a God, a Christ figure (Philip Howard’s “prince of Walsingham,” for instance) — has no place in such a world. But then, what is the alternative to the inevitable feelings of despair? When he is, like his pilgrim, abandoned, to whom can he complain except to the queen? The world that built and nurtured Walsingham is gone, literally in ruins, and there is nowhere else to turn. She hath left me here all alone, All alone, as unknown, Who sometimes did me lead with herself, And me loved as her own.

The “holy land” becomes an idealization of the court; the “way” to Walsingham becomes the pathway courtiers take to the queen’s presence and from which he is now, like the lover, excluded. The original Lady of Walsingham was of course the Virgin. The lady of this poem may be powerful but unlike the Queen of Heaven, she is clearly mortal. And knowing Ralegh’s ambition and his view of his own merit, it would be perfectly in character for the pilgrim to blame the lady and to attribute his fall from favor as her falling away from her “old” lover: What’s the cause that she leaves you alone, And a new way doth take,

See Waller, Virgin Mary, Chapter 6. Edmund Spenser , The Mutability Cantos, The Faerie Queene, VII, vii, 1–2.

34 35

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Who loved you once as her own, And her joy did you make?

She may haunt his mind, “by her gait, by her grace,” but she is fickle, misled, ungrateful. The poem’s sentiments are a parody of the devotion once accorded to the Virgin: Our Lady of Walsingham has been transformed into an ageing and (as Ralegh knew all too well) unpredictable earthly goddess. The Lady for whom the bereft pilgrim yearns may well be a figure of royal power, but she is a mortal not an eternal queen.36 Like the masochistic, self-deprecating medieval worshipper of the Virgin, he is drawn irrevocably to her, knowing she determines his salvation, and that even when most stern and unyielding, she must be revered and worshipped. Unlike the Virgin, however, the Lady of this poem is not an intercessor—there is, emphatically, no higher power than hers. He has tragically been abandoned: I have loved her all my youth, But now old, as you see, Love likes not the falling fruit From the withered tree.

As in many of his other poems, Ralegh invests the ageing queen with the epithets of the Virgin. He is the worshipper; she is powerful and unapproachable (at least so it must have appeared to the bereft and egocentric Ralegh as he languished in the Tower or during other periods of disgrace); but able, if she turns back to him, to bring solace and forgiveness. Most of his poems written around the time when in the early 1590s, when he was in disgrace with the queen, are similarly selfadvertising, expressing adoration of the queen and deeply hurt by her rejection, and always with his own political agenda in mind. His long poetical fragment, “Ocean to Scinthia,” is the barely revised draft fragment of an appeal to the queen, or perhaps an internal debate within that part of his mind he knew to be occupied by her power. In 1592, Ralegh wrote to Cecil: “my heart was never broken till this day, that I hear the Queen goes away so far off—Whom I have followed so many years with so great love and desire, in so many journeys, and am now left behind her in a great prison alone.” In this world, he presents himself as a victim of a selfsacrificial, unrewarded love, that can be given or taken away in an instant: Know that Love is a careless child, And forgets promise past; He is blind, he is deaf when he list, And in faith never fast. His desire is a dureless content And a trustless joy; He is won with a world of despair, And is lost with a toy.

Ralegh to Cecil, July 1592, Works, 655.

36

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The initial dialogue between the sympathetic but puzzled pilgrim and the abandoned lover had set up a situation that is recognizably like other versions, but Ralegh’s conclusion, with its ambiguous narrative voices, is where his distinctiveness shows. The final stanzas not only shows Ralegh brilliantly adapting the ballad to his own personal and political agendas, but skillfully giving his readers the opportunity to enter into different roles in the discovery of love’s disillusions in a bleak universe. Ralegh’s adaptation of the Walsingham ballad can therefore be read as a cry of rejection, almost (at least as he feels it) at a cosmic level, that he experiences when excluded from the royal presence. How does he deal with that? By separating the love of “woman” from the love that the idealized Elizabeth inspires, even though she now falls short in her rejection of her faithful lover: Of womenkind such indeed is the love, Or the word love abused, Under which many childish desires And conceits are excused. But true love is a durable fire In the mind ever burning; Never sick, never old, never dead, From itself never turning.

To what extent does Ralegh’s version of the Walsingham ballad look back to the ruined shrine of Walsingham itself? What is left of that older world? Only traces. Yet in his poem, that earlier, abandoned world still echoes resonantly. The lost shrine of Walsingham still echoes through the poem: without Ralegh’s being conscious of it, Walsingham’s “holy land” represents an older world implied by the nostalgia of the lines, and the unnamed and un-namable sadness of the poem’s ending. The logic of the poem points back to a world that a Catholic like Arundel or Byrd might have re-affirmed. But Ralegh could not end his poem like that. He cannot name the absence that is lost and irrecoverable. By the 1590s, Protestant England has abandoned Our Lady of Walsingham—even though Ralegh’s lines suggests that she, as it were, is still present in it. Another culturally reverberating version of the Walsingham ballad occurs in the opening lines of Hamlet, Act 4, scene 5, in which the bereaved and distracted Ophelia sings a plaintive lament, seemingly a fragment of a song of lost love that seems to reflect not just on the loss of her father or even of Hamlet’s love. Here are Ophelia’s lines, without the interspersed dialogue with Gertrude: How should I your true love know From another one? By his cockle hat and staff, And his sandal shoon … He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone; At his head a grass-green turf, At his heels a stone …

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White his shroud as the mountain snow Larded with sweet flowers Which bewept to the grave did not go With true love showers. (4, 5, 23–6, 36, 38–40)

Commentators since the mid-eighteenth century have noted that the origin of the lines is a ballad, or song, popular in Shakespeare’s time, that mentions “the holy land of Walsingham.” In his celebrated collection of traditional Ballads and Songs, Bishop Thomas Percy wrote that “the scene of this beautiful old ballad is laid near Walsingham, in Norfolk, where was anciently an image of the Virgin Mary, famous all over Europe for the numerous pilgrimages made to it, and the great riches it possessed.” Verity’s annotation on Hamlet (1904) summed up 150 years of commentary about the play’s connections with the Walsingham Ballad, when he noted that, along with the other “Ballad-snatches” from which Ophelia sings a few lines, the song was “of unknown authorship” and that “indeed, the composition of ancient ballad-literature is probably ‘communal’ to a great extent, not simply individual.”37 The maligned but often theatrically revealing first Quarto of Hamlet reads: “Enter Ofelia playing on her lute and her haire downe singing.”38 The stage direction draws attention immediately to the echo of the Walsingham ballad with which she starts her laments. In her perceptive reading of the scene, Alison Chapman shows that Ophelia’s ravings are “marked by a surge of allusions to medieval Catholic piety”: throughout the play Ophelia has been surrounded by the Catholic trappings that Elizabethan authorities had tried to eliminate. The setting of the action in Denmark perhaps adds a little extra irony because Denmark had abandoned Catholicism and had been firmly in the Lutheran camp from about 1530 on. Yet Ophelia’s “orisons”—her posing as a pious devotee with a prayer book—and Hamlet’s quip about her getting to a nunnery, associate her with the lost Catholic world. Isolated and alienated in a society that traps and exploits her, she can be taken as representing the alienation suffered by Catholics within the new, harsh world of Protestantism, with its empty fallen, material universe, its transcendent, masculine God, and its repression of any female presence in or near the deity. But, Chapman asks, does Shakespeare invite us to censure Ophelia for “resorting to such suspect forms of piety”? Or has she found herself in a world “which has driven her to such extremes and in which she can only voice such forms of piety in mad isolation and at the moment of death?” This is where the Walsingham Ballad plays a key, if minor, role in the play. Do the allusions here to Walsingham, and so to England’s Catholic past, reinforce in Protestant minds suspicion of the Old Religion centered on Walsingham as sexually corrupt? 37 A.W. Verity, (ed.), The Tragedy of Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 178. 38 The First Quarto of Hamlet, (ed.) Kathleen O. Orace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 79.

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Or does the bleak Protestant universe of (with the ambiguous exception of the Ghost) Lutheran Denmark and Protestant England bring about her madness and give her no comfort in the way traditional religion would have? When Hamlet advises her to go to a nunnery, what did that connote in Protestant England? A false hope? A deluded attempt to escape? A joke? Or a lost possibility of salvation of which her madness reminds her in vain? Her lover, like the Walsingham pilgrim, has gone, apparently never to return, and she waits for him in vain. Shakespeare inverts the gender roles in his brief Walsingham fragment: the result is a reversal of the medieval “woman in motion” where a wife, mother or maid could go on pilgrimage, whereas by contrast, Ophelia is frozen in her place by her role as daughter or a potential wife: “I hop’d,” confesses Gertrude, “thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife” (5, 1, 245). 39 Her wish, in the context of the changing role of women after the Reformation, is the pious belief that dutiful marriage is the most fulfilling role for woman’s desires and aspirations, but not, it seems, in a world in which purgatorial ghosts appear only to a faithful remnant, one that in multiple and contradictory ways, is out of joint. Like Walsingham itself, in her deranged singing and in her subsequent death, Ophelia has been “wasted”: the phrase is Susan Morrison’s in her recent study of “waste” in the medieval and early modern periods. Walsingham was, she argues, “literally laid waste [and] became recycled,” in both its new guise as part of the Sidney estate and manor house in Little Walsingham village and also “in the imagination of English culture.” Like Walsingham, Ophelia’s body has not just been wasted; it has become a place where “anxieties about the trashing of the submerged traditional religious past in England are played out and reconstituted.”40 Like the memory of Walsingham in the iconoclastic Protestant imagination, Ophelia’s sexuality is associated with decay and corruption: Laertes warns his sister against the “canker” of sexuality and “contagious blastments”; her father (Polonius in the fuller second Quarto and Folio versions, Corambis in Quarto 1) refers to Hamlet’s affections for her as “ unholy suit/ Breathing like sanctified and pious bawds” (Folio, I, iii, 39, 42, 129–30), and that his tokens of love, erotically charged trinkets that serve as fetishes of sexual desire, are “keys to unlock Chastity unto Desire” (Quarto, 4, 67-8). Hamlet himself is revolted by female sexuality and thereby his own in what he obsessively fantasizes over as his mother’s “rank sweat of an enseamed bed / Stew’d in corruption and making love/Over the nasty sty” (I, v, 93–4). Like the Reformers appalled at the sexualization of the Virgin’s purity, Hamlet (in many ways the epitome of Protestant self-consciousness) is repelled by the association of sexuality and both actual and potential motherhood. Ralegh’s and Shakespeare’s reworkings of the Walsingham ballad mark the literary high points of its poetical tradition. The evolution of the words and their connotations takes a very different path in the seventeenth century. With the music, 39 Alison Chapman, “Ophelia’s “old lauds”: Madness and Hagiography in Hamlet,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007), 111–35. 40 Susan Morrison, “Ophelia, Waste, Memory,” 215.

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the connotations remain sympathetic to the Catholic sense of loss and nostalgia; the words, however, become associated with idolatry and sexual scurrility. In this more ‘secular’ version that we can trace mainly in fragments in a number of texts in the early seventeenth century, Walsingham becomes a place not merely for contrition, punishment and death, but a symbol of sexual depravity, as if the sexualization of the Virgin that the Reformers saw in the medieval over-valuation of Mary was now, more than fifty years later, being displaced onto memories and associations of her great shrine. In her study of the Ballad, Chapman discusses allusions to Walsingham in works by Thomas Deloney, George Attowell, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Francis Quarles’ The Virgin Widow, and a number of anonymous plays and poems. Walsingham, she argues, becomes “associated in the popular imagination with sexual immorality, even long after its relationship to a specific shrine in Norfolk had been halfforgotten.” References to the Walsingham Ballad become “a kind of code phrase for corrupt sexual practices,” to the point that, in The Virgin Widow, simply “whistling the Walsingham tune onstage is construed as a crude sexual insult.” This tradition, which Chapman traces to well into the seventeenth century, provides a “debased view of pilgrimage, one in which men pursue women for corrupt ends and in which women prove fickle and unreliable.”41 This development of the poem-ballad reflects the Protestant view of Walsingham just as surely as the tradition of musical variations, starting with Byrd, reflects the Catholic. By the time Ralegh is writing his Walsingham poem and, at the end of the same decade, when Shakespeare is writing Hamlet, therefore, “Walsingham” has acquired associations that confirm the fading of the magical world of the Holy House. But although the specifically Catholic associations of Our Lady of Walsingham have almost entirely gone, it is as if Walsingham has come to represent something broader in the consciousness (and the unconscious) of Elizabethans. Something, the age seems to say, has been lost, whether that is youth or love or identity, something which we cannot perhaps identify and might be surprised to know where it came from and what its ‘original’ significance was. Just as the image of Our Lady of Walsingham (and all other representations of the Virgin) incorporated rich elements that pious Christian devotees would have been surprised or shocked to know about, so earnest late Elizabethans singing, listening to, re-writing or just making casual reference to the Walsingham Ballad may not have been aware of its origins or (some, like an Arundel or Byrd, might argue) its continuing if neglected power. The surfacing of poems and lyrics associated with Walsingham gives us a specific focus for at least some of the age’s unease. Protestants might see the cult of the Virgin as delusion and sinfulness, with the only ultimate reality what Ralegh pleaded for in his last poetic fragment, probably written before his execution in 1617: “And from the earth, the grave, and dust, /The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.”42 In such a world, there is no place for the Virgin. Chapman, “Met I with an old bald Mare, ” in Janes and Waller, Walsingham, 227. Ralegh to Cecil, July 1592, Works, 655.

41 42

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At least in his mind, she is not beside him, not there to appeal for intercession, and at the end not even embodied in another human being. Catholics therefore might argue that the Virgin’s loss represents a tragedy for the whole society, and (as many modern apologists put it) only when England comes back to Our Lady, will she return to England. Or alternatively, one might argue (as I have suggested throughout this study) that beneath all of these diverse yearnings represented by the Shrine in its heyday as a place of Catholic pilgrimage or as a symbol of loss and nostalgia, there is a substratum of a profound human story that connects with a reality that we all struggle to articulate and (if we so believe) to reach. Ralegh’s and Shakespeare’s versions of the Walsingham ballad may be the high point of its many variations, but the history of the Walsingham Ballad itself does not end there. Far from it. In addition to the many references Chapman has examined in her study of the Ballad’s afterlife, there is another poem, also written in the 1590s, which shows powerful traces of Walsingham in its transformation of the shrine from religious icon to ambiguous repository of loss and nostalgia. Although it grows from very different social, religious and poetical contexts, it has very clear echoes of the Walsingham ballad, and links the triumphal Protestantism of the late Elizabethan court with deep and complex traces of the late medieval devotion to the Virgin. Moreover, it also, like the Ralegh poem, has connections with the Protestant Court circles—and, uncannily, with the history of the Protestantization of Walsingham. It is a poem by Sir Robert Sidney, later Earl of Leicester, the cousin of the then-owner of “Walsingham Abbey,” and the father of an eventual owner of it. That transformation, of both the Walsingham estate, with its remnants of the shrine, and Walsingham as a symbol of loss, nostalgia and possibility, as Walsingham becomes Protestantized for three centuries, is the starting-point of the next chapter.

Chapter 5

The Protestantization of Walsingham Much of the history of Walsingham between the Dissolution in 1538 and the late nineteenth century lies under what John Twyning calls a “powerful force of erasure,” almost as if this once prominent and self-confident village and its celebrated shrine were being punished for effrontery and self-aggrandizement. Such a moralizing providential view of history is, of course, one that godly Protestants would have embraced, and indeed, many of the incidents of that history uncannily lend themselves to such an interpretation—as they do to its opposite, as some would indeed eventually see it, that Our Lady of Walsingham was waiting to come back to recognition and prominence in her dowry England. With both readings of Walsingham’s history, we are back in the world of invented traditions, a process operating even when Walsingham lay devastated, its population diminished, and its once prominent position at the end of England’s primary highway reduced to a quaint holdover from an earlier world that had long been lost. Certainly, the place of Walsingham in the rethinking of English historical consciousness that occurred over the long Reformation and well into the nineteenth century, allowed for both extreme constructions of history. In the eighteenth century Walsingham was seen primarily as a residue of quaint but by-then harmless superstition; by the end of the nineteenth century, following Catholic emancipation and the Oxford Movement, it starts to be seen (depending on the perspective adopted) as a potentially dangerous site of renewed idolatry or the emerging symbol of the re-Catholicization of England, observable in both the renewed presence of the Roman Catholic Church and in the burgeoning AngloCatholic movement in the Church of England. Such readings of Walsingham’s history all presuppose the continuing existence of some variety of providential history and some acceptance of at least a residue of the magical universe that the reformers were so determined to eliminate. Later secular historians have generally been uneasy before such theories, and at least until recent ‘revisionist’ historians of the Reformation, most modern historians generally followed in their footsteps. In speaking of the ‘protestantization’or, more conventionally, the ‘secularization’ of Walsingham in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we are entering into a hugely controversial area much argued in historical and theological studies, about the desacralization of English society, indeed (in the views of some theologians) the desacralization of the whole cosmos that, it is argued, was supposed to follow  John A. Twyning, “Walsingham and the Architecture of English History,” in Janes and Waller, Walsingham, 167–84.  For providential history, see Alexandra Walsham. Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1999.

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from the Protestant revolution and which is enshrined in Weber’s phrase, “the disenchantment of the world,” with the Reformation seen as a “milestone on the road towards modernity.” Was the disappearance or at least the diminution of the magical universe of the Catholic Middle Ages an historical phenomenon? Or can we rather observe surges of re-sacralization or different modes of the sacred in different histories and cultures? Is there something inherent in “Catholic” and “Protestant” views of the material universe, as Andrew Greeley, among others, maintains? And do gods (and goddesses) disappear and re-appear within human societies? And how are previous inscribings of their presence or absence apprehended in changing presents? I do not intend to hang all these questions on the fragile remains of the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, but they are all in the background as we consider what happened to Walsingham in the English imagination in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and into the nineteenth before Walsingham’s story took a new (or an old) direction. “Walsingham”—the shrine, the village, the ballad, the poem, the wells— remained therefore potentially dangerous territory, like the site of a nuclear accident that should be avoided for some generations. Nevertheless, the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth century history of Walsingham, the period of what I am terming its protestantization, does give us signs of continuity as well as neglect, as if it were an underground potential for ideological subversion. Indeed “underground,” as we shall discover, is more than a melodramatic metaphor. Throughout my account in this chapter of the long period of detoxification—at least as Protestants saw it—of the polluted ground of Walsingham, the reader should ponder what lay beneath the surface of the devastated priory. As Walsham suggests, without (it would seem) seeing the force of her metaphor as it applies to Walsingham, perhaps the “apparent resurgence of magic and alternative cosmologies in modern British society may represent less a new departure than the re-emergence of vigorous older traditions that previously lay beneath its surface.” I will forbear italicizing that final phrase, although as the following chapter, which takes as its subject the writings of Agnes Strickland—who consistently employs all too obvious rhetorical underlining—demonstrate it is that intensity of emphasis in which the nineteenth-century revival of Walsingham would have wallowed. For beneath the benign chronicle of land ownership, manorial inheritance and Alexandra Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’,” The Historical Journal 51 (2008), 498. Weber’s concept, the “disenchantment of the world,” which Walsham quotes from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is less about the loss of magic than the rise of bureaucracy, even though the phrase has become a shibboleth of secularization: see Alan Aldridge, Religion in the Contemporary World: a Sociological Introduction (New York: Polity Press, 2007) 70–3, and Michael P. Carroll, American Catholics in the Protestant Imagination Rethinking the Academic Study of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 171–2.  See Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).  Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World,” 501. 

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consolidation, and well-intentioned dismissal of its superstitious past, there is a story of continuing struggle between the bland rational surface and a more primitive level of experiences that periodically threatened to erupt. The priory’s immediate land, it will be recalled from chapter four, was sold in the early 1540s to Thomas Sidney, Master of the Walsingham leper hospital, reputedly for £90, a sum which for 300 years has been held up by mourners for Walsingham’s lost glory as an infamous, opportunistic insult. Sidney’s son, also Thomas, inherited a manor house that had been partly built from the ruins of the priory. The younger Thomas Sidney became further associated with Walsingham’s name and history by marrying Barbara Walsingham, a London relation, though not a direct descendant, of the family that had been lords of the manor in the village from at least the time of King John. She was the second sister (of five) of Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s notorious spy-master. Their daughter Frances in 1583 became Philip Sidney’s wife, and after his death (and that of her father’s in 1590), she married the Earl of Essex. By the early seventeenth century the former priory in large part had been transformed into the “Abbey,” and the Holy Family replaced by a minor branch of the Sidney family, whose third generation, Sir Henry and Lady Jane Sidney, were to be accorded a stentorian Jacobean family tomb in the parish church where the medieval windows and rood screen had been destroyed, but where the massive octagonal seven-sacrament font was only slightly damaged—and today remains one of the best examples extant. On the Sidney tomb was inscribed the Walsingham family’s boast of the proud connection with the better known branch of the Sidney family, that Sir Henry had “descended from the stemme of Viscount de Lisle, Baron of Penshurst in Kent.” Viscount de Lisle was, of course, no less than Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester, Philip Sidney’s brother. The tomb is decorated with the Sidney porcupine, found on the family’s crest, most famously located on the title pages of the poems and prose works of Philip Sidney, first assembled and published in the 1590s by his sister Mary; Philip’s funeral mask, with the porcupine still visible (although missing almost all the quills) is today on display at Penshurst Place, in Kent. The Walsingham tomb’s inscription contains a distinctively Protestant hope, with no mention of Purgatory, that Sidney died “in the expectation of the joyfull and disyred day of resurrection, when the saviour of the world shall appeare in power and iudgment to awake all those who have slept. … ” Ironically, the inscription for Lady Sidney describes her life as a “peregrination.” It is a metaphor, commonplace enough, although by around 1600 associated with papist superstition or, in Protestant circles, internalized as a metaphor for the  The inscription, noted the Rev James Lee Warner in the middle of the nineteenth century, was “fast fading, and soon will become illegible”: see Notes on Little Walsingham Church (Norwich: Cundall, Miller &Leavins, 1863), 6–7. For an early version of this chapter, see Gary Waller, “From the Holy Family to the Sidney and Lee-Warner Families: The Protestantization of Walsingham,” in Janes and Waller, Walsingham, 67–82. For an example of the family porcupine, see The Poems of Robert Sidney, ed. P.J. Croft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 78–9.

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Christian life, the individual struggling towards God. The medieval peregrination is in process of being protestantized. The pilgrimage metaphor occurs in yet another poem of the 1590s that is associated with Walsingham. It is of great interest here not least because it is written by the second cousin of the owner of the “Abbey” at Walsingham, the very Sidney who is so obsequiously mentioned on the tomb, and the father of the third earl of Leicester who, in the 1630s, inherited the Walsingham estate. The poem is the Sixth Song (“Lady: Pilgrim”) by Sir Robert Sidney. Unlike Arundel and Ralegh, Robert Sidney was never imprisoned in the Tower, but no doubt he considered his tour of military duty in the Low Countries and consequent exile from the Court, and especially from his home at Penshurst, imprisonment enough. During his life and in his reputation after, Robert was overshadowed by the brilliance of his elder brother Philip, the most dazzling of Elizabethan poets, regarded as the English Petrarch, a rising Protestant noblemen, even destined, in some eyes, for a European crown, and, dedicated (along with his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke) to what they saw as the revitalization of English letters. Philip, Mary, and Robert’s daughter Mary Wroth were all prolific writers; but it was only in the 1970s that it became known that Robert wrote poetry and even in his lifetime it seems to have been known only within the family. In the 1590s, the Sidneian ideals for Protestant cultural hegemony seemed increasingly under threat. Philip’s and Robert’s sister Mary retired to Wilton House, the country estate of her husband, the second Earl of Pembroke, to cultivate a small, inwardlooking group of poets and divines; Philip’s close friend Fulke Greville faded from Elizabethan court politics, eventually to re-emerge under James and to write a long nostalgic Life of Sidney which was a barely disguised attack on the new monarch’s betrayal of the Sidneian ideals, and reinforced the feeling that something inexplicable had been lost in Sidney’s death. Robert kept closely in touch with Mary, dedicated the manuscript copy of his poems to her, and may in part have felt that the writing of poetry was part of the burden he inherited from their famous and much lamented brother. But it was a burden that he likely took up only briefly, almost certainly only while he was in the Low Countries. It is therefore all the more interesting, therefore, that in Robert Sidney’s poetry, in his Sixth Song, Our Lady of Walsingham makes a fascinating and typically disruptive comeback. That the ‘real’ Virgin Queen should return to haunt one of the most evocative poems written by a member of the Sidney family is not just ironical, but opens a startling perspective on the second generation of England’s Protestantization and the gradual secularization of early modern England. Robert Sidney’s Walsingham poem is particularly intriguing when we take him from the narrow context of Protestant politics and theology in which he and the other Sidneys are normally put and instead, read him in the history of Walsingham. The sixth Song, headed “Lady Pilgrim,” takes as its starting point the tune and some of the words of the Walsingham ballad. While the poem’s subsequent narrative has little relation to any particular version of the Ballad, its metre and structure Croft, Poems of Robert Sidney, 36–7.



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undoubtedly show his close awareness of it. The poem’s opening in particular is yet another variant of the basic starting-point of the Ballad, a faithful woman asking whether the pilgrim has met her absent lover: Yonder comes a sad pilgrim, From the east he returns, I will ask if he saw him Who for me absent mourns.

We can hear the language and rhythms of Ralegh’s version in the background—and behind it the ur-tune upon which Byrd and others were developing their variations. These are immediate echoes suggesting the general familiarity with a popular song and the shared starting point of its story. Like Ralegh, Sidney adapts the Ballad’s sonorous tones to his own personal situation. The “Lady” of the poem appears to be a projection of his wife, who “doth rest/ Near Medway’s sandy bed,” which Croft points out is the only non-fictitious proper name anywhere in Robert’s verse. Robert’s and his wife Barbara Gamage’s letters show them to have grown into an unusually loving couple: not only does he, conventionally enough, address her constantly as “sweet heart” or “dear heart,” but the letters are full of sadness over his absence from her and their growing family. But in 1594 he wrote: “there is no desyre in me so dear as the love I bear you and our children … you are married, my dear Barbara, to a husband that is now drawn so into the world and the actions of it as there is no way to retire myself without trying fortune further … sweet Barbara, do not grieve at this journey of mine.” His journeys away were frequent, and in his poem are contrasted with those he wishes to be making as a “pilgrim,” though the desired pilgrimage is not to a distant shrine, but back to his wife. The poem’s pilgrim has been sent, we learn, by the exiled “knight” of whom the lady asks for news, to affirm his devotion to her. “Duty,” the lady complains, “the body ties,” but “his soul hence cannot part.” The pilgrim, a strikingly papist-sounding “aged father,”, asks her by what “tokens” he might recognize the man she seeks, since there are so many travelers on this well-worn path of pilgrimage: Many one see we lady, As we come, as we go: By what tokens, how should I Your knight from others know?

Thereafter, the poem moves in a quite different direction from Ralegh’s or any other version. The lady replies that her knight can be recognized for his steadfastly wearing “griefs livery,” and the fact that he “turns his eyes” westward, back towards Kent and Penshurst itself, “where love holds fast his heart.” He will soon Robert Sidney, Domestic Politics and Family Absence: The Correspondence (1588–1621) of Robert Sidney, First Earl of Leicester, and Barbara Gamage Sidney, (eds) Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 36. 

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be, he has told the pilgrim in a phrase that Shakespeare’s Ophelia would also echo, “dead and gone.” The reason is his absence from her, and the poem describes him as if he were already dead: Only love to him gave breath Love gave him sense to move, Absence drave him to his death That held him from his love.

The pilgrim can indeed give her news of her knight. Sadly, he must announce to her that the knight she yearns for has died “near to the sea … on a sandhill,” looking westward across the sea towards where he knows she waits for his return, and (the pilgrim assures her) her knight vowed his love for her even as he died. The Lady’s response to the pilgrim is one of angry denial: he is, rather like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, at least according to the Protestant understanding of the supernatural, “a lying sprite/ To tempt me come from hell.” Her grief does not have any sense of religious belief, however; rather it takes the poem into the conventional world of Petrarchan paradox and asks how could he die since she is his life? The pilgrim’s philosophy is, by contrast, stark and stoical: she should leave such “flatt’ring toys” like love which “no perpetuity/ Grants days or of joys.” The universe the poem invokes is hostile to any such idealization, but neither does it seem to provide any religious consolation: “Heav’n no more behold doth he/He lies deep in dark grave.” The poem’s universe is the lonely cosmos ruled by the stern God of the Reformers, from which the original Lady of Walsingham has been banished. It is tempting to compare this Protestant “lady “ with the Lady of the original Walsingham. “Near unto the sea this knight /Was brought to his last will.” Our Lady of Walsingham, according to a marginal gloss in the First English translation of the Peregrinatio is “Parathalassiae,” the “Virgin-by-the-sea” (16) whose special care was (and, according to some pious authorities today, remains) mariners on the seas between East Anglia and the Low Countries. But across the sea, from the Netherlands, Robert looked, not to the Virgin in Walsingham but—dutiful Protestant and (from his correspondence, largely) constant husband that he was— a further south, to Penshurst in Kent, and his wife. Much of Robert’s verse can be read as yearning for the security of his wife and family back home at Penshurst. The Walsingham poem is the most clearly autobiographical poem in the collection, projecting the partly calculated, partly wistful, view of a frustrated personal and political career. Its primary readers were, no doubt, Sidney’s immediate family: his wife, sister, and perhaps (a little later) his growing daughter, who was probably about nine when the poem was composed, and who was eventually, as Lady Mary Wroth, was to write the first Petrarchan sonnet collection in English by a woman. Poems of Robert Sidney, 185–95.



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The “lady” of Robert Sidney’s Walsingham poem is emphatically in this world, not beyond. What is missing from Sidney’s poetic world is any woman figure beyond the “world and the actions of it.”10 As in the Ralegh Walsingham poem, there is certainly no alternative Virgin Queen, no replacement of one Virgin Queen by another. Rather, it is the grieving Lady of Penshurst, a domestic pietà, who replaces the sorrowing Lady of Walsingham. Yet her description echoes that of the sorrowing Virgin: his lady can be recognized, the knight says, because she alone represents “what worth of all else men faign/Is all proved true in her.” She embodies what is good, rare and fair; her breath is “Life-nursing”; she has a “heav’n-opening face,” epithets that recall those traditionally accorded the Queen of Heaven. Where she is not is a “dark cave/Where her lights do not shine,” and his last wish is to be buried near her, so even after death he may revere her presence. By the 1590s, pilgrimages had been forbidden for over half a century. The traditional metaphor of human life as a pilgrimage, the same “peregrination” that appears on his cousin’s wife’s tomb in the parish church in Little Walsingham, nonetheless re-appears in Sidney’s poem. But a subtle transformation, a “Protestantization” of pilgrimage has occurred. The peregrination in this poem is not to a special, holy place like a saint’s shrine—certainly not to the Walsingham echoes of which haunt the poem’s form—but nor is it an internalized journey of the mind to make discoveries about one’s inner spirituality, as many Protestant adaptations of the pilgrimage motif would stress. Yet without being aware of the direction he takes, Sidney returns to the view of those pre-Reformation Catholic pilgrims whom the reformist bishop Hugh Latimer had watched in the 1530s and criticized for their idolatrous “wanderings”: at the end of his pilgrim’s journey there is indeed a place made holy and revered for its power and comfort. But it is no longer a religious place, but rather one that is identified with a person, a family, a material home, even the body of a lover, wife and mother. The lady in Sidney’s poem is absent, but her spiritual presence haunts him ­ not from a transcendent Heaven but from the very material location of the Sidney estate at Penshurst Place. He does not wish, at least in the poem, a spiritual reunion; rather, he longs to lie in her arms, and the poem climaxes in a paeon of conventional Platonic-petrarchan praise of her physical and emotional power over hm, so that on hearing of his death she will speak of the physical and emotional power which she knows draw him to her and the absence of which has led to his pining away. His “Lifes delights,” he acknowledges, are found not with God or the saints, but with her, in her arms where he will finally be “laid.” He imagines how her hair will be wound around him; the shining of her eyes will light him to his rest; her lips will serenade him; and in her heart his epitaph will be written: “The most loving, most beloved/ To death by absence pressed, By no time to be removed/At full joys here doth rest.” In such rhetoric, religious devotion is transferred from the Virgin to a mortal woman. The echoes of traditional Marian veneration are, however, still present. As Frances Dolan comments, “for Protestants,” it seemed “particularly Sidney, Domestic Politics and Family Absence, 36.

10

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inappropriate,” even blasphemous, to revere Mary, as opposed to Queen Elizabeth or one’s mistress, precisely because to do so confers on her a kind of divinity to which she is not entitled,” but Catholic commentators in the next century had the temerity to point out that the “idolatry,” which Protestants vilified when Catholics addressed the Virgin Mary, was being transferred to mortal ‘goddesses,’ most notably, they pointed out, in the cult of Elizabeth, for instance in Spenser, and in other ‘profane’ love poets.11 For Protestants. like the Sidneys. with strong Calvinist sympathies (certainly that description fits both Philip and Mary; their brother did not, it would seem, possess their theological acumen, but he would no doubt have believed that as a Protestant Englishman, he would stand among the Elect, at least by political allegiance), the veneration of saints in shrines like Walsingham had been “repugnant to the Word of God”: purgatory and therefore prayers to saints, the intercession of the Virgin, the continuing solidarity of the living and dead were all things “vainly invented” as the Church of England’s Article 22 puts it. The veneration continues—but transferred to the personal. What is revered is the personal, the family and, in the case of the Sidneys, the dynasty, all the more fragile because newly created after the Reformation (despite the family’s commissioning the creation of a family history providing more ancient ancestry). But in a universe that is bereft of divinity except for the stern Protestant God, perhaps sexual love, family, the estate and the would-be dynasty are all we have? Do they provide, to adapt Freud’s famous dismissal of religion as “illusion,” the most powerful illusions we have in the new de-sacralized universe? Are such illusions necessary to avoid the cultural melancholia that Julia Kristeva sees as characteristic of our post-Christian world? Kristeva comments that if religion is “an illusion,” it is one that “human beings have a great deal or trouble ridding themselves of,” and that we still find ourselves in a “endless prologation of the access to the sacred that Christianity made possible.” Christianity, she acknowledges, “opened the vast field of the sacred to figuration,” and enabled artists, poets, and indeed those in any transferential relationship a “resurrection of the divine” in moments, communication and togetherness. This experience, she argues, is a “need to believe” that is in fact “prereligious,” and can occur within,

11 Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 118. I extend this analysis more broadly, to English Petrarchan poetry and its relationship with Marian devotion, in The Virgin Mary, chapter 6. Grace Tiffany Love’s Pilgrimage: The Holy Journey in English Renaissance Literature (Newark: Delaware Press, 2006), 30, shows how in the Reformation how the idea of pilgrimage underwent a transformation. For Protestants, “pilgrimage” was a metaphor justified by the fallen nature of man, not ending in a sacred place or person, but finally only, for the elect, in God, since “to the Protestant mind there are . . . no sacred places, only redeemed souls.” So in Philip Sidney’s fifth sonnet in Astrophil and Stella, the Protestant Petrarchan lover knows that he should not deify the beloved, since “on earth we are but pilgrims made, / And should in soul up to our country move”: The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 167.

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beyond “any strictly religious construction” and “within secularization itself,” the beginnings of which we are seeing in Sidney’s Walsingham poem.12 In a sense Sidney’s poem is about the Our Lady of Walsingham—she is the powerful absence that we may see haunting, without fully entering, the poem. The ‘original’ Walsingham is present in the rhythms and the sentiments, in the deep yearning and affirmation of spiritual transcendence, but it has become detached from the Virgin. Ironically, even if in accordance with good Protestant belief about the spirituality of marriage, the fetishization of unqualified devotion to an inaccessible distant beloved has now been transferred onto a dutiful waiting wife, and the fragile mortality of her arms, hair, lips, and breasts. As with Ralegh’s Walsingham Ballad, the ‘original’ Walsingham discourse speaks through Sidney’s poem even though he is barely aware that it lurks there, let alone that it once possessed any further power. But we are not dealing simply with a process of increasing secularization. There remain, after all, echoes of a deeply religious liminality within the yearnings of erotic love to which his poem points. Because its object is human, not divine, such devotion is therefore all the more fragile, an idolization, to use the term that the Protestant iconoclasts had used against Walsingham and Mariolatry in general. Walsingham, then—what it had represented, what it had ceased to represent— therefore lies tantalizingly behind and provides much of the energy of Sidney’s Sixth Song. But in its mixture of despair and nostalgia, an ideological shift of major proportions is occurring. Sidney, of course, does not know this, although his poem registers some of its anguish. Perhaps the late medieval world that had nourished Walsingham had been largely delusionary; but it had at least provided stories in which men and women had roles of comfort and delight to play. The world evoked by Robert Sidney and Walter Ralegh in their variations of the Walsingham ballad, are fragmented, grim, anxiogenic, fragile. It is perhaps more truthful to the nature of things, but at what cost has that truth has been achieved? Robert Sidney’s Walsingham poem, then, is a striking marker of the initial stage of the Protestantization of Walsingham. Materially, that process continued throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Walsingham estate remained in the hands of Robert and Philip Sidney’s Walsingham cousins for almost a century after the dissolution and redistribution of priory lands. But by 1633 that line of the Sidneys died out. The parish church’s memorial is an ironical reminder of the family’s short-lived glory. With their demise, Robert Sidney’s son, also Robert, third Earl of Leicester, acquired the Walsingham property. Did the younger Robert know that at the Pembrokes’ seat of Wilton House—where Robert most likely sent his poems, since they are inscribed to his sister, the Countess of Pembroke—lay his father’s poetical tribute to the fading but (in the 1590s) still palpable power of Walsingham?

12 Julia Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe. trans. Beverly Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 4, ix, vii, viii, 1, 12, 15.

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The Walsingham property next passed to the Warner family when the Royalist John Warner, who was Bishop of Rochester between 1637 and 1666, purchased it from Robert Sidney’s eldest son just before the Civil War. During the 1640s, Warner was attacked by parliamentarians as a “Popish persecuting Bishopp.” In one of the many ironies in the history of Protestant Walsingham, he wrote a treatise against the sale of Church property, which included the assertions that “Church lands may be given to the Church for God’s service and servants therein,” that such lands “become Holy to the Lord,” that “alienation or selling” them is forbidden by the Bible, the church and civil authorities and that there are “curses and punishments which are set down and executed … against sacrilegious alienations.”13 One wonders how far his own family’s history was put out of his mind as he wrote those indignant words. Warner was forced by Parliament to disclose his personal properties; one of those he did not declare was, in fact, Walsingham Abbey, presumably on the grounds that it had by then been re-assigned in the name of a group of trustees, and then settled on his nephew, John Lee.14 Oddly enough, like the Walsingham Sidneys, Warner also died without direct male issue, which might be seen simply as a coincidence or (one might speculate with an Erasmian tongue in cheek) perhaps as an instance of the phenomenon which, Benedetta Ward points out about the Virgin’s medieval miracles, is reflected in the commonplace medieval phrase vindicta Mariae to describe such instances of her punishment of offenders against her honor. The Madonna, Michael Carroll argues, is often jealous and even vindictive in her dealings with those she chooses to punish—a Madonna, as he puts it, who “maims,” simultaneously both a “source of danger and a source of protection from that danger.”15 In his colloquy on Walsingham, Erasmus, in a typically gleeful sideswipe, both criticizing yet expressing a degree of indulgence for such apparent foolishness, had likewise commented that “the sayntes haue theyr weapones or myschefues, whiche they send apon whome they liste” (26). In his will, Warner made clear that his nephew John would inherit his manors only on condition “that whosoever in in reall and actuall possession of them shall use in ordinarie speech and writings the Sirname of Warner only.” John Lee, who became Archdeacon of Rochester, therefore took the name LeeWarner, and it remained in the Lee-Warner (or, sometimes Lee Warner) family until 1904. Curiously enough, Henry Lee-Warner (1722–1804) also died without offspring, and again bequeathed the Walsingham estate to a relative, Daniel Henry Woodward, on condition also that he took the name of Lee-Warner. In 1904, with the family owning the property once again having no male issue, Miss Agatha Lee-Warner married Eustace Gurney, a member of another prominent Norfolk 13 Edward Lee-Warner, The Life of John Warner, Bishop of Rochester, 1637–1666: with appendix, containing some account of his successors, the Lee-Warner family (London: Mitchell and Hughes, 1901), 37–8. 14 Ibid, 43–4, 63. 15 Carroll, Catholic Cults and Devotions, 176–9.

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Protestant family, who had associations with the Society of Friends.16 The Gurneys own the estate to this day, although the “Abbey” is overseen by The Walsingham Estate Company, incorporated in 1926. Prints and descriptions of the property, the earliest of which date from the early eighteenth century, show the gradual disbursing of the remnants of the priory’s ruins, and the transformation of the estate into gardens, shrubberies, walks and lakes. The village of Little Walsingham itself also fades from the center of public notice. The life of the Abbey and the village became less intimate, and the road between the village and the parish church was lowered so that traffic would not be visible from the house. It becomes one of the many small villages in England with curious ruins and a vaguely mysterious past. The village continued to shrink, even though it maintained its quarter sessions until the 1820s. Walsingham’s declining importance can also be seen in the changes over these three centuries in maps of Norfolk. In Christopher Saxton’s 1574 map, reproduced in Camden’s Brittannia (1586) and Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1612), Walsingham remains prominently displayed. A century later, it still appears on county maps but is highlighted less. In 1787, in The New and Correct Atlas, John Cary includes Great Walsingham but not Little. Bateman’s 1883 survey, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland, lists the Lee-Warner family’s “Walsingham Abbey,” along with the family’s more than 11,000 acres of land, as located in Fakenham, not Walsingham. Guidebooks and travelers’ accounts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries show the same fading picture, often tinged with nostalgia. Parts of what had been the road to Walsingham, the “particular place and residence of the Virgin beyond all other places,” was “on that account generally in the age called Walsingham Way” or Palmers Way, or the Milky Way, a reference to both the Virgin’s milk at the Shrine and to the constellation of stars which were seen as guiding pilgrims there. Blomefeld’s eighteenth-century history of Norfolk recorded that the “superstitious country folk” still remembered that the Milky Way was in the sky to point out to pilgrims the great shrine.17 By then, the belief that the stars signified the Virgin’s protection had long became an archaic superstition; the pilgrims’ route, dotted with reassuring chapels and hermits had been replaced by roads, and coach stops, to be in turn overtaken by the highways and traffic-clogged towns of today. Daniel Defoe’s admittedly idiosyncratic “tour” through the eastern counties of England (1722) simply notes that Walsingham was “famous for the old ruins of a monastery of note … and the Shrine of our Lady … and for little else.” Defoe gives more space to what he saw as the scandal of nearby Castle Rising, by the eighteenth century a “rotten” borough, “with perhaps not 10 families in it

Gilbert, What to See in Walsingham, 88. Blomefeld, Norfolk. 8, 102, 10, 243. For information on historical maps of Norfolk, see http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~genmaps/genfiles/COU.Pages/ENG_ pages/nfk.htm; and www.historic-maps.norfolk.gov.uk/http//www.indcatholicnews.com/ artreco432.html. Accessed September 2010. 16 17

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which … yet send two members to the British Parliament.”18 Eighteenth-century visual reproductions and descriptions of the ruins enfold Walsingham into the increasingly popular romantic Gothicism. Travelers and guides typically refer to the ruins as “fine and picturesque,” or “a celebrated place of monastic splendour and human superstition.” The Romantic artist John Sell Cottman’s drawings of the ruins (1844) show how cultivated the Abbey grounds had become: even by comparison with early eighteenth-century drawings, the extensive outcrops and piles of fallen masonry have been cleared and replaced by “pleasure gardens” or, as the 1847 Nichols translation of Erasmus’s Peregrinatio puts it, “trees, and walks, a trim lawn, and all the agremens of modern pleasure grounds.”19 Beneath the family history of struggle to turn a superstitious site of notorious idolatry into a civilized Protestant squire’s estate, we can trace, however, something more alluring—the covering over and uneasy adaptation rather than the outright destruction of Catholic Walsingham. Of special interest in this regard are Walsingham’s twin holy wells. As Walsham notes, “holy wells and healing springs may have as much [as ruins] to tell us about how England became a Protestant nation.”20 The Walsingham wells were not filled in but gradually became transformed into “wishing wells,” much as all across England, wells and fountains became adapted to nationalistic and local folktales and leisure activities such as “taking the waters.” In her study of early modern fountains, Hester LeesJeffries notes that wells and springs were “reinvented by medicine and science,” but retained a vague, sometimes nostalgic sense of religious significance, often expressed as “vital signs of God’s grace and favour towards the English people.”21 Walsingham’s wells became decorative—springs and ponds rather than miraculous manifestations of the Virgin’s power. There is one rare instance of a well, that of Saint Winifred in distant Holywell on the Welsh border, continuing some existence as a holy well “in penal times,” enabled to do so because of a local “festal culture” that was able to continue independent of local authorities and landowners.22 That was not possible with Walsingham. In fact, in the middle of the nineteenth century, a member of the Lee-Warner family proclaimed, in a classic instance of an invented tradition, that the wells had “from time immemorial” been known as the “Wishing Wells,” and 18 Daniel Defoe, Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, (ed.) P. N. Furbank (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 30. 19 Ancient Reliques: Or, Delineations of Monastic, Castellated, & Domestic And Other Interesting Subjects (London, 1812); Blomefeld, Norfolk, 8, 102, 10, 243; Nichols, Pilgrimages to Saint Mary, 201. 20 Alexandra Walsham, “Reforming the Waters: Holy Wells and Healing Springs in Protestant England,” in Life and Thought in the Northern Church, c.1100–1700, (ed.) Diane Wood (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1999), 227–55. 21 Hester Lees-Jeffries, England’s Helicon: Fountains in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 146. 22 Alison Shell, “St Winifred’s Well and its Meaning in Post-Reformation British Catholic Literary Culture,” in Triumphs of the Defeated, (ed.) Peter Davison (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz in Kommission, 2007), 271.

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Fig. 5.1 The holy wells and modern pilgrims, Little Walsingham. Photograph by permission of John Twyning. he registered his somewhat patronizing opinion that before the Reformation “there lurks a sort of indication that a superstitious feeling was associated with the use of them in the mind of the average votary.”23 Other accounts from the nineteenth century give the details, in yet other imaginative rewritings of history, of what supposedly even from “the old times” had been the rituals enacted at the “wishing wells.” Petitioners would kneel, we learn, on a stone between the two wells. They would “plunge one hand in each well,” so that the water reached the wrist, and while doing so, one “may wish for anything he desires.” After making the wish, petitioners must “drink as much of the water of the wells as may be held in the hollow” of their hands. Secrecy is of the utmost importance: “if he never tells his wish to any other—never utters it aloud, even to himself”—within a year the wish will come true.24 A variant of this charming ritual is reproduced, as we shall see in the next chapter, in Agnes Strickland’s The Pilgrims of Walsingham. 23 Henry James Lee-Warner, “The Walsingham ‘Wishing Wells’,” Norfolk Archaeology 8 (1879), 51–5. 24 Of the innumerable Victorian accounts of the “wishing wells,” largely derived from a combination of Blomefield’s history of Norfolk and liberal readings of Erasmus, see e.g., John Glyde, The Norfolk Garland: A Collection of the Superstitious Beliefs and Practices Proverbs Curious Customs Ballads and Songs of the People of Norfolk (London: Jarrold, 1872), 74–5; Anna Robertson Brown Lindsay, What Good does Wishing Do? (New York: T.Y. Crowell, 1898), 4.

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It is easy to read from such accounts the ways in which the medieval religious rituals were changed to “superstitious” or magical ones. We can also sense the continuing undercurrent of eroticization of the two wells: kneeling before them, plunging into them, expressing one’s desire, drinking from them and then maintaining secrecy. Walsingham’s twin wells were rooted in the strong associations of women and water, a commonplace in classical as well as Christian mythologies, and in the longstanding patriarchal observation of women as unstable, fluid, and (as Theweleit’s analysis of male fantasies makes clear) associated at least in the male imaginary with some “absolute origin,” some “vast and primeval interior”of liquidity and flow. Even in the protestantization of the well, there remained some sense of the numinous, however sentimentalized. Looking back to the “subversive” traditions of place of sexuality in medieval devotion to the Virgin and its connection with “women’s religion,” can we see remnants of an alternative “way of affirmation” lurking beneath the surface?25 We should therefore note not just the differences between late medieval and Protestant Walsingham, but the continuities. Visiting Walsingham’s wishing wells was by the eighteenth century a de-sacralized version of a pilgrimage. There is no reference to any presiding goddess, even though the female associations of the wells are clear; there is, needless to say, no mention of the Virgin, except in a patronizing tone dismissing the primitive though charming superstitions of the past. There are no extravagant public vows, no ex-votos or offerings, but the year-long wait required in the rituals of wishing-wells is not unrelated to the purgatorial waiting time before the ‘heaven’ of a fulfilled wish. We are still within hearing of the echoes of the magical universe26 no less than in Sidney or Ralegh’s Walsingham poems, though it is more associated with individual experience rather than a sacred community. In this process, the “Middle Ages” becomes a nostalgic symbol of a lost world; idealization of the medieval (or the “Gothic”) appears not only in high culture, in literature, arts and architecture, but in everyday material details like guidebooks, accounts of walking tours, prints and illustrations, handcrafts, household artifacts, or guides to local sightseeing. In part as a reaction to the increasing industrialization of England, the upper- and middle-classes of eighteenth-century England became increasingly intrigued by the physical remnants of pre-industrial England like the Walsingham ruins. The “Middle Ages,” a term that had been invented in the sixteenth century, becomes invested with an often unfocused nostalgia. Amateur societies dedicated to Gothic revivalism and local archeology sprung up: the Society of Antiquaries was established in 1718; local county societies follow over the course of the next century, including the Norfolk and Norwich Archeological Society, founded in 1846.27 Lees-Jeffries, England’s Helicon, 27. For Theweleit, see Chapter 2 above, 45, 61. Walsham, “Reforming the Waters,” 245. 27 See P.J.A. Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England 1838–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 182; For the ‘re-invention’ of nostalgia in post-Dissolution England, see Philip Schwyzer, 25 26

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In such an atmosphere it was not coincidental that the Walsingham Ballad, both words and tune, was “discovered” as part of the eighteenth century’s revival of ancient ballads and songs. Bishop Percy’s famous collection Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1761) included “2 Pilgrimages to Walsingham” written in “the old ballad style.” Introducing “Gentle Herdsman, Tell To Me. Dialogue Between A Pilgrim And Herdsman,” a version of what has become identified with the version attributed to Raleigh, Percy comments: the scene of this beautiful old ballad is laid near Walsingham, in Norfolk, where was anciently an image of the Virgin Mary, famous over all Europe for the numerous pilgrimages made to it, and the great riches it possessed. Erasmus has given a very exact and humorous description of the superstitions practised there in his time. See his account of the Virgo Parathalassia, in his colloquy, intitled, ‘Peregrinatio religionis ergo.’ He tells us, the rich offerings in silver, gold, and precious stones, that were there shewn him, were incredible, there being scarce a person of any note in England, but what some time or other paid a visit, or sent a present to “our lady of Walsingham.” At the dissolution of the monasteries in 1538, this splendid image, with another from Ipswich, was carried to Chelsea, and there burnt in the presence of commissioners.28

Walsingham has become a landscape typical of all such romantic ruins with their aura of nostalgia and superstition, and vague suggestions of revelry (and we can sense the dimmest echoes of the sexualization associated with pilgrimages to the Virgin as Percy adds that “the pilgrimages undertaken on pretence of religion were often productive of affairs” dedicated to Venus rather than the Virgin).29 Ancient ballads, wishing wells, pleasure gardens, decorous hints of scandal— Walsingham had been absorbed into Protestant England’s invented tradition of a vaguely romantic, superstitious, and now archaic medieval England. Walsham observes that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarians, scholars and amateurs alike, were obsessed with “recording superstitions”—legends, quaint country customs, singular places of beauty, mysteries, and tales of ancient time and forgotten places. The motives for this fashion were complex. She observes that many antiquarians were still torn between “a determination to rescue historical remnants” and “a pious conviction that these were the residues of false and idolatrous religions which deserved to be utterly obliterated.” On the surface, antiquarianism reflects a nostalgia for a simpler, yet more colorful past, one that offered a relief from an increasingly oppressive present of industry, commerce, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 73. 28 Charles Dellheim, The Face of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 15; Percy, Reliques of Old English Poetry, 183; Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques 52, 113. 29 Percy, Reliques of English Poetry, 183.

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and violence, especially in the cities. It reflects a pride in the progress that England has made since the Reformation, and the present’s superiority over the ancient primitive superstitions, once dangerous, barbarous, and idolatrous but now shown to be quaint and harmless. The term “superstition” loses some of its pejorative connotations: it comes to suggest that the childlike and primitive world that our ancestors once inhabited has become a romantic background for contemplation of rural walks in picturesque but comfortable landscapes, an image designed to promote the contemplation of universal truths like the progress of imperial, rational, Protestant England. Where Reformation polemicists saw “superstition” as leading men to damnation, it is now able—since it is of little danger to rational men of property and education—to be collected, exhibited and benignly patronized.30 Typical of the Lee-Warner family of this period, at least in his tolerance, was the eccentric Henry Lee-Warner (1722–1804), who in addition to carrying on the intriguing family habit (or, perhaps, punishment) of being childless and passing on the estate to his nephew (who duly changed his name), was widely described as somewhat eccentric, preferring to retire from polite society in order to keep company with his servants and workers. He planted trees all over the estate, which in his later life he encouraged his employees to cut down. He was described in his obituary as “the polite scholar, the complete gentleman” who was an upholder “of those leading duties of the Christian—humanity and benevolence.”31 The Protestantization of Walsingham, then, seemed to be complete by the early nineteenth century. But beneath the surface (literally, as I shall show), something else was about to be stirred. The “return of the repressed” is perhaps too crass a phrase to use, but remnants of Walsingham’s former allegiances were as hard to eliminate completely as the piles of stones and rubble on the surface. Around the same time as Robert Sidney had, perhaps unknowingly, been writing his poem with a melody in his head that celebrated the “Lady” who had once been the object of worship in his Walsingham cousin William Sidney’s estate, the antiquarian William Camden had half-regrettably observed that “within the memory of our fathers, when King Henry the Eighth had set his mind and eye both, upon the riches and possessions of churches, all this vanished quite away.”32 By the nineteenth century, the Protestant Reformation had indeed seemingly successfully worked to de-Catholicize Walsingham: “all this,” clearly representing, a world-view, more than just the priory and its lands, certainly seemed to have largely vanished. The

30 Alexandra Walsham, “Recording Superstition in Early Modern Britain: the origins of Folklore,” Past and Present 199, Supplement 3 (1998), 178–206, esp. 187. See also Dominic Janes, Victorian Reformation: the Fight over Idolatry in the Church of England, 1840–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 31 Lee-Warner, Life of John Warner, 82–4. 32 William Camden, Britain, or a Chorographicall Description of the most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Islands adioyning … trans Philemon Holland (London: George Bishop and John Norton, 1610), 479.

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east window of the priory had become “the haunts of a large colony of pigeons who have remained here undisturbed since the monastic times.”33 By the mid-nineteenth century, Walsingham was seemingly no longer a sacred space: it had a superstitious past that had been tamed, a primitive magic that had been civilized. There were no longer any miracles, except in the legends associated with the superstitions of a long-gone age. The holy wells had turned into wishing wells: a survey of the landscape commented drily, in the empirical spirit of Cromwell’s commissioners, though by now without the polemical edge of iconoclasm, that “whatsoever virtue” the wells had possessed “is probably owned by the little river which keeps up their supply.” As one of the many romantic medievalists of the mid-nineteenth century mused, “times have changed, indeed, and this once busy and populous pastoral corner of Eastern England now sleeps in peace … The glory has departed, never to return.”34 Yet, as Peter Matheson comments, “when a ‘great shattering’” like the Reformation “takes place and an enchanted world is lost, it can free us up to step out in new directions but can also toss us into the abyss. Dreams and nightmares frequently interweave.”35 For, regardless of the continuities and adaptations today’s historians may ingeniously find between the late Middle Ages and the postReformation, something had certainly happened to English religion and English society. What had come through was a new society and new ways of constructing the self. For the dominant, landed Protestant squirarchy—at Walsingham, the procession of Sidneys, Warners and Lee-Warners—it seemed unquestionably to have had the inevitability of progress. A dream of a renewed England, purged of popery and superstition, was coming true—at least for members of their class. For the minority of recusants, and for modern Catholics, both Roman and Anglican, the seizure and burning of the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham, the burning of the Holy House, and the closing and destruction of the Priory were, in contrast, not “dreams,” but “nightmares,” a multiple tragedy of enormous proportions that was not to be healed until Our Lady returned to Walsingham. The Catholic historian Claude Fisher writes of the “Deformation,” the “penal days,” the generations of “religious profanities.” More cosmically, Charlotte Spretnak claims that the loss of the Virgin from Protestantism cut a profound “symbolic link between humans and the larger reality,” and that Western man has subsequently “framed the human story” as a “tragic alienation from the unfolding story of the cosmos.”36 As the Lee-Warner family surveyed their picturesque gardens and sculptured lawns from Proceedings of the Congress of the British Archeological Association, British Journal of Archeology 8 (1879), 353. 34 Horace B. Woodward, The Geology of the Country around Fakenham, Wells, and Holt (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1884), 43; H.J. Dukinfield Astley, Memorials of Old Norfolk (London: Bemrose and Sons, 1901), 115. 35 Peter Matheson, The Imaginative World of the Reformation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 4. 36 Fisher, Walsingham, 163, 165, 169; Spretnak, Missing Mary, 53. 33

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the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, they must have reflected that such superstitions had receded far into the past.37 The tone of polite but firmly patronizing dismissal of a no longer threatening primitive age can be gauged by the remark by the Rev. James Lee-Warner in 1856 that the Pynson Ballad’s account of the miraculous origins of the Shrine were “nothing more than the oft repeated story of a building removed by miracle and set up in another place.”38 As Terry Eagleton comments on Peter Ackroyd’s sense of the continual presence of the past bubbling away beneath the surface of history, “the present is a kind of palimpsest through which the special lineaments of the long-buried are dimly visible, awaiting their disinternment by the redemptive rites of the literary imagination.”39 Given Walsingham’s history, and what lay beneath the pristine green surface of the lawns and gardens of the Abbey, his phrase is prescient. In the next chapter I return to the “rites”—at least retrospective if not “redemptive”—of the literary imagination. “Disinternment,” at least of a kind, will also be the subject of a future chapter.

37

For other accounts of the loss and revival of Walsingham within the context of such a reading of history, see Cobb Walsingham, 36, 40, 73, 131; Hole, England’s Nazareth, 78–9. 38 Rev. J. Lee-Warner, “Walsingham Priory,” The Archaeological Journal 13 (1856), 116. 39 Eagleton, Figures of Dissent, 219.

Chapter 6

Walsingham’s Victorian Chaucer: Agnes Strickland’s The Pilgrims of Walsingham The re-inscribing of the medieval that started as far back as the Reformation, and climaxed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often combined nostalgia with patronizing superiority. I suggested in the previous chapter that something of that contradictory mixture starts to surface in accounts of Walsingham in the first half of the nineteenth century. It does so most explicitly in an 1835 book which, its author claimed, was designed to celebrate Walsingham as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales had the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. The Pilgrims of Walsingham; Or Tales of the Middle Age: A Historical Romance (1835) by Agnes Strickland (1806–1874) was a three-volume work of fiction, in which, disguised as ordinary pilgrims, Henry VIII, Queen Catherine of Aragon, and assorted nobles, including Anne Boleyn, “herself a native of Norfolk” (21), make a pilgrimage to Walsingham along a version of the Walsingham or Milky Way, stopping, like ‘ordinary’ pilgrims (or at least like Chaucer’s) at a series of resting places to share stories of chivalry, piety, and romance. Agnes Strickland, indeed, presented herself as the Chaucer of Walsingham. I have suggested rather that Erasmus has some claim to be so described, and that Miss Strickland, one of the most prolific of Victorian ‘lady historians,’ must be relegated to second place. The Pilgrims of Walsingham was one of the earliest of her many works, most of which were written with research help from her retiring but scholarly elder sister Elizabeth, and were among the most popular histories of the period. Most notable were the 12 volumes of Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest; with anecdotes of their courts, now first published from official records and other authentic documents, private as well as public (1840–1848) and its companion Lives of the Queens of Scotland (1850–1855). Early reviewers saw these histories as “works of merit” which enhance her “justly Agnes Strickland, The Pilgrims of Walsingham; Or Tales of the Middle Age: A Historical Romance (London: Saunders and Otley, 1835); reprinted from the first American edition (New York: Garrett & Co, 1854) by Kessinger Publishing (Lavergne, TN, 2009). Unless otherwise indicated, page references are to the reprinted edition, and in this chapter will be incorporated into the text.  The Queens of England was reprinted or abridged in over 30 editions during the nineteenth century; in this chapter I quote from volume 4 of the edition of 1850 (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard), cited as Queens, and the abridged edition (London: Bell and Daldy, 1867), cited as Queens (abridged). 

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acquired literary reputation” as a woman of letters, the somewhat patronizing tone of such remarks surfacing more explicitly later in her career in attacks on her (by male reviewers) on what was seen as her sentimental blurring of gossip and ‘real’ history, not to mention her cloying elevated style. By the end of the century, Chambers’ Cyclopaedia was to condemn her “feebleness of thought,” her “poverty of style,” and “wholly uncritical” sense of history. The discovery that her sister had carried out much of the research, as well as providing some of the writing, led to comments that Elizabeth had been wise “not to have her share in the enterprise acknowledged on the title-page of any of the joint work.” For a new “scientific” history was emerging, and Strickland’s middlebrow bestsellers with their moralized exempla of romanticized women’s lives, both “virtuous” and “vicious,” were increasingly scorned. Her style of sentimental history, however, lived on and, indeed, prospers in mass-market historical romances and television mini-series, and in the following chapter I will mention, briefly, some recent examples in which Walsingham plays a part. Strickland, in fact, came from an unusually literary family. Her sister Jane Margaret, who also wrote children’s books, was the author of a long biography of Agnes, and includes an account of the education of these five remarkable sisters. Two of them, Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill, married, emigrated, and became celebrated Canadian writers; while Elizabeth became Agnes’s research associate and collaborator on historical works, in fact writing more of the biographies than her more public sister. Their brother Samuel also became a writer. The Strickland children were educated by their father who gave them access to a variety of historical and literary works including Plutarch, Petrarch, Ariosto (“in select portions”), Harrison’s Survey of London, and English historians like Camden and Clarendon, just so long, Jane writes, as they “were of a superior order, and were calculated to form their minds and morals.” As I will note later, Agnes’s reading included Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost, hardly (at least in its language) unambiguously morally upright, and while Jane notes that Shakespeare fell “by accident into his young daughters’ hands,” their father finally agreed to let them read “our immortal bard.” From such a background it is not surprising that Agnes Strickland’s passion was “imagining” history and doing so within a framework that combined strict moralizing and strong emotions. Her work has its roots in Victorian Protestant patriotism, looking back to a pastel picture of the chivalric Middle Ages from which, in the modern age, the excess of superstition had been erased, or was at least able to be patronizingly ignored as primitive and quaint. Yet, rather like Walsingham’s Holy House itself, lurking beneath the surface of Strickland’s narratives there lie contradictions and tensions that suggest some emergent social  Chamber’s Cyclopædia of English Literature (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co 1904), 281.  Life of Agnes Strickland by her Sister Jane Margaret Strickland (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1887), 2, 3, 15.

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forces that were eventually to disrupt and transform the nineteenth and later centuries. Such matters as the roles women play in history, the relationship of sexuality to religion, the seductive attraction of Catholic ‘superstitions’ and the interplay of imagination with history are all present in her romance, and are not unconnected with the ostensible subject of her work, the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. The Pilgrims of Walsingham is not widely read today and is available in print largely as a reprint-on-demand publication, so I will briefly summarize the plot and main characters. Strickland imagines a pilgrimage to Walsingham undertaken at Whitsuntide 1522 by Henry VIII, his wife Catherine of Aragon, his sister Marie of France, and her second husband, Sir Charles Brandon, along with (and initiated by) Marie’s onetime wooer and now the powerful “young and accomplished” Emperor, Charles V, who has come from Spain to England to cement an alliance with Henry and to negotiate a marriage with the “sickly, unattractive” eight-year-old princess Mary, Henry and Catherine’s daughter who later becomes Queen “Bloody” Mary I (8). They are joined on their pilgrimage to Walsingham by a retinue of courtiers and ecclesiastics, including Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Archbishop of York, and most prominently, Anne Boleyn. Part way into the journey they are joined by others, including the Abbot of Glastonbury and the Abbess of Ely. Each character is described by repeated epithets pointing to their social status and, especially, their moral function within Strickland’s narrative. Marie of France is the “beautiful Dowager” and “virtuous beauty” who reproves the renewed advances of the emperor who, despite his lascivious intents, is nonetheless described as the “very personification of the beau ideal which the poets and romances of her native land had drawn of a Castilian knight and gentleman.” Catherine is “virtuous” but “declining” in favor, while Anne is variously the “fair Boleyn,” the “fair rival” to the queen, with an unfortunate and (we are warned) eventually fatal “inclination to coquetry.” All the characters are “embued” with the “splendour” of “pomp and pageantry” of Victorian concepts of medieval romance, a combination (at least as Strickland herself sees it) of Chaucer, Ariosto, and Walter Scott, decked out in an inflated rhetoric (though not always unselfconsciously so) of languid and lavishly punctuated sentences, a style she obviously feels is appropriate for “affecting” the “lofty” and “poetical spirit” of romances from “the fast-vanishing age of chivalry” (8, 6, 4). The pilgrims set out incognito, in order for Henry to avoid recognition by his subjects, and at Marie’s suggestion, as a way of bearing the discomfort of over a hundred miles on horseback, they agree to “cheer” the company “on the way to Walsingham” with many a “choicest tale or daintiest song” which turn out to be the “pleasant romances” and “right merry tales” that take up much of the bulk of Strickland’s book (11, 13). They make their way through some difficult terrain, which is at times somewhat heavily allegorized, and stay at a combination of monastic establishments and inhospitable hostelries. The route they take is a variant of the “Walsingham Way” which Strickland carefully researched and encountered in the voluminous reading of chronicles and histories in her father’s

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house and from her own researches. They ride from the outskirts of London, the Queen’s residence of Havering Bower near Waltham Forest (a setting which features in the Abbess of Ely’s tale, the long, final narrative of the journey), proceed through Epping Forest to Bishop’s Stortford where, despite the disguise of their “pilgrim weeds” (13) they are partly recognized by an over-apologetic abbot of a monastery where they stay the first night. Thereafter the route becomes slower and more obviously allegorized, as Strickland tries to create a landscape rather like that of Ariosto or Spenser, whose moralistic patriotic Protestantism was becoming increasingly attractive to Victorian literary taste. The “haughty cardinal” who has been their first guide gives way to the “giddy” Anne Boleyn who, from her Norfolk upbringing, is supposed to know the route into Norfolk, but who leads them on a path that “diverged a little from the regular track,” called (as Strickland assures us of her historical knowledge) “the Walsingham Way.” “The common people,” Strickland informs us in one of her Notes, “had an odd conceit that the Galaxy, or Milky-Way, i.e., the heavens, was placed there by Providence, to point to this Norfolk abode of the Virgin, and this starry track was called in their usual parlance ‘Walsingham-Way.’” In one of her many expressions of pride about Norfolk, Walsingham, and even Anne Boleyn, she goes on to say that the “‘Walsingham Way’ was … a celebrated road on earth, leading through Norfolk to that favoured spot, much frequented by pilgrims.” Adding a further historical detail, she notes that at every town on the Walsingham Way was “erected a cross, which pointed out the approach to that sainted ground. Some of these crosses still are to be seen, and are very elegant in their architectural construction” (24, 357). The route along which the “fair Boleyn,” who throughout becomes increasingly identified with Our Lady of Walsingham, now actually takes her fellow pilgrims enters “an impervious thicket of aboriginal forest,” a term that reveals more than may appear and more, perhaps, than Strickland knows. They follow the “fair ignus fatuus” through the “dismal marshes” of Newport where they become “defiled with black mud and oose” (24). They end a frustrating day at the inn of St Christopher’s Oar at Chesterford, where they are confronted by an “uncivil host and hostess” and a gaggle of local inhabitants, including one Squire Matthew Goggs, whose name echoes the landmark, just to the north, of the Gog Magogs, a place associated with giants mentioned in Ezekiel and in West Country legends which in the late Middle Ages were transferred to Cambridgeshire. The “Gogs” are known for their supposed pagan associations, and today for dawn Easter services held by the local Anglican vicar, thus appropriating for Christianity a pagan site and its ritualistic practices. Squire Goggs—“esq., with houses and lands, sheep and kine (to say  See W.M. Palmer, John Layer (1586–1640) of Shepreth Cambridgeshire: A Seventeenth Century Local Historian, Cambridge Antiquarian Society Octavo Publications 53 (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1935), 110; T.C. Lethbridge, “The Wandlebury Giants,” Folk-Lore 67 (1956): 193-204. I am grateful to Canon John Pinder, vicar of Stapleford, and his wife Jennifer for hospitality and information on the Christian rituals that continue to take place on the Gogmagog Hills.

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nothing of swine)”—is described in a little detail, both to give us the opportunity to laugh at his quaint rustic manners but also because he becomes the not entirely unwilling subject of Anne Boleyn’s flirtatiousness. His encounters with her eventually draw from him a proposal of marriage, which involves an admittance that “if I thought a certain young gentlewoman, with bright black eyes, would make as much of me, I aren’t sure—but I say nothing” (27, 31, 222), which fumbling admittance brings peals of laughter from Anne and indignation and jealousy from both the king and Wyatt (once again and perhaps for the last time, I should observe that the reader may have noted the unusual length of this sentence is designed as an indication of, and a tribute to, the prolixity of Agnes Strickland’s fair pen). Despite his rejection, Squire Goggs joins the party to Walsingham and after their pilgrimage is returning home, puts his proposal to Anne, with the implication that if the fair Boleyn had accepted the honest country squire’s offer, she would have avoided her later dreadful fate. Most of the book’s tales are told at the St Christopher’s Oar as the uncomfortable pilgrims—whose disguises this time are fortunately not penetrated—have difficulties in persuading the locals to give them priority for food and accommodation. So instead of sleeping, they pass the time recounting their stories until breakfast is available, after which they continue to Linton, in southern Cambridgeshire, where they spend a more comfortable night in a friary, “where in compliance with the pressing entreaties of Queen Catherine and Mary of France,” the Abbess of Ely tells the long tale of the imprisoned sisters of Henry VII’s Yorkist queen, Elizabeth, “The Royal Sisters” (226). Thereafter, Strickland telescopes the narration of the pilgrimage: the reader has already taken well over 300 pages to get 40 or so miles, and the last 80 are described briefly. They stay at the monastery of Soham, still in Cambridgeshire, this time diverting from the “direct road into Norfolk” at Wolsey’s insistence; and they cross the Little Ouse into Norfolk and enter Wattering, where Strickland tells us, the first of the Pilgrimage Crosses to direct pilgrims towards Walsingham is fortunately to be seen. In this latter part of the route, “accommodations of a most hospitable nature” are found, at the cost of “dropping a pilgrim’s penny (bearing the impress of the Virgin and Child, and on the reverse the representation of the fine east window of the Walsingham Priory church) into the boxes” (347–8). Never one to avoid showing her reliance on and pride in her (or her sister’s) documented research, Strickland assures her readers that this method of payment was to enable the authorities to establish the number of visitors making their pilgrimage. Finally, on the seventh day, they arrive at Barsham, the reputed scene of Henry VIII’s removal of his footware, and eventually proceed to the shrine of Walsingham itself. From this summary, which has been written (and I trust will be read) in the spirit of Erasmian tolerance, it can be seen how Strickland is blending an earnest version of seriously researched medieval history with the sentimental prose romance. Her later biographies of queens and noble personages were, in fact, grudgingly praised for their detailed research, using not only published chronicles and histories, but

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what was at that time rarely consulted archival material. She and Elizabeth read in the British Museum, and viewed (often after some negotiation for permission) some of the still largely uncatalogued state papers, almost certainly the first women to do so. The popularity of her best-sellers helped solidify a biographybased sense of history in Victorian (and later) popular culture, to the point that a serious historian a century and more later could seriously attribute blame to her for the poor level of general knowledge of English history; her (and others’) melodramatic biographism of Great and Notorious Royalty and Nobles still underlies popular films and television treatments of history, such as Elizabeth R and, more unfortunately, The Tudors. Indeed, it might not be unfair to say that even her over-blown rhetoric—in Strickland “reverses were always tragic and attacks of rheumatism agonising” comments Anne Laurence—is arguably preferable to the gutteral ejaculative sentence fragments of some scripts of today’s popular television “histories,” and to her credit, it has been argued that her fascination with fashion and domestic detail helped the evolution of social history.  Generically, The Pilgrims of Walsingham looks back less to Chaucer than to Sir Walter Scott. Both are invoked, but it is the romanticized aspect of her near contemporary rather than the sharp realism of the medieval poet that is her work’s most obvious inspiration. Scott is “the great master of the human heart,” Strickland claims, and two quotations from his works are used as chapter epigraphs, including a snippet from the ballad of “Young Lochinvar.” Quotations from Chaucer provide two other chapter heads, and in her brief preface to the 1835 edition, Strickland calls Chaucer “the Walter Scott of the thirteenth [sic] century.” By the 1830s early criticism of Scott as a trivializer, merely an entertainer, had given way to a view of him as demonstrating “the power of fiction as an agent of morals and philosophy,” as Harriet Martineau put it, and above all making history come alive by incorporating accounts of great events, archival documents, and as the reluctant Thomas Carlyle admitted, of “living men” (and presumably women). Into this framework—and understandably, given her education and love of tracking down revealing historical documents—Strickland incorporates a variety of incidents, anecdotes, and decorative details with the belief that her writings would be taken seriously as history not simply as entertainment. One contemporary reviewer judged that what redeemed her writings was “the capsule extracts” from historical sources and her expertise in “pointing out sources of various and often neglected information.” As James Simmons comments, too many of the romances of the 1830s and 1840s incorporated history “in the form of undigested lumps Anne Laurence, “Women Historians and Documentary Research: Lucy Aikin, Agnes Strickland, Mary Anne Everett Green, and Lucy Toulmin Smith,” in Women, Scholarship, and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge c.1790–1990, (eds) Joan Bellamy, Anne Laurence and Gill Perry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 129.  Laurence, “Women Historians,” 137.  Strickland, Pilgrims (1835), Preface, i; James Simmons, The Novelist as Historian: Essays on the Victorian Historical Novel (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 23–8. 

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of pure information forced into the text and upon the reader.” The Pilgrims of Walsingham is no exception; it cites, often to draw attention to the author’s extensive knowledge, and often closely paraphrasing such sources as Blomefield’s History of Norfolk—what she terms “the chronicles and traditions of Norfolk”—or Hall’s and Holinshed’s Elizabethan chronicles, which appear to be a main source for Tudor history, including material on the Wars of the Roses, which appears (complete with the Tudor view of Richard III, referred to as “Uncle Dickon,” as a bloody tyrant) in the long story, “The Royal Sisters,” covering the early years of the reign of Henry VII. The Strickland sisters read John Lingard’s 10- (eventually 13-) volume Catholic-oriented History of England (1819-1830) a major feature of which was the use and display of archival research.10 Strickland believed in what Laurence terms “the romance of contact with historical materials,”11 and following the completion of the pilgrimage and the return of the pilgrims, she adds a series of “Historical Notes,” on Walsingham, both the shrine and the “wishing wells,” the Walsingham Ballad, Erasmus’s Peregrinatio, and to a number of incidents in the pilgrims’ stories. Ariosto, Le Roman de la Rose, Boccaccio, Spenser, Milton, medieval French romances, Petrarch and Dante are among the authors who are alluded to. Scattered throughout are various and generally pertinent references to Shakespeare, and especially to a play not widely appreciated at the time, Love’s Labours Lost. That play focuses on a group of young court women outwitting a group of young courtiers, a dynamic echoed in a number of the pilgrims’ own stories and also relevant to the sexual and gender politics of the romance as a whole. Although Strickland does not refer to the high level of sexual innuendo in the play, the fact of choosing it points to an intriguing dimension, only partly repressed, in her work, especially when Anne Boleyn is concerned. The stories told by the pilgrims also come from a variety of medieval and Renaissance sources. Some were published separately by Strickland, whose family never seemed to neglect the chance to publish the same material twice or more. All the story-tellers—apart from the occasional and inadvertent anecdote contributed by servants and bystanders at the St Christopher’s Oar—tell their stories with the same elevated, almost breathless glow of sentimentality of the frame story; the convoluted, multi-claused syntax with its long periods is designed to keep the reader in emotional suspense, but may end by losing its thread. To take one moderate example: He had been greatly captivated by the blue eyes, flaxen hair, and bloomingcomplexion of the Saxon widow, who was fair, fat, and not much on the shady side of forty,—an accomplished embroidress, (the art of needlework being

Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, “’The Reduced Pretensions of the Historic Muse’: Agnes Strickland’s Commerce of Women’s History,” The Journal of Narrative Technique 28.3 (1998), 229; Simmons, The Novelist as Historian, 17. 10 For the Strickland sisters’ use of Lingard, see Una Pope-Hennessey, Agnes Strickland: Biographer of the Queens of England, 1796–1874 (London, Chatto & Windus, 1940), 49. 11 Laurence, “Women Historians,” 131. 

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Each story is set in an historical period that illuminates the heritage of the frame narrative. “The Saxon Widow’s Vow,” from which the last sentence is taken, and “William Rufus and the Salmon Pasty,” are from the periods of the early Norman kings; “The Christian Gladiators” is based on early Christian martyr stories; “The Gothic Count” is a tale from Spanish romances, and the story of “The Royal Sisters” comes from Elizabethan chronicles, perhaps mediated by more recent histories of England that the Strickland sisters would have encountered in their father’s library. The book is enlivened on occasion by a somewhat heavy sense of humor which sometimes works surprisingly well, even if its range is narrow. Within the limits of the historical romance, and notwithstanding the elevated vocabulary and syntactical roller-coastering, Strickland’s frame story and some of the tales are often amusing. There are some predictably gauche attempts at rural and regional accents, and some patronizing references to local yokels, especially the irrepressible though “ill-mannerd” (32) Squire Goggs. Strickland has Henry wonder if the “thick skull” of his “Cambridgeshire subject” contained any of “the article yclept brains” (29) as he affords the aristocratic strangers some opportunity to mock his manners, and some annoyance as he contemplates the fair Boleyn: No, no, my masters, self comes closer than neighbours, all the world over. What I have ordered is not more than enough for Matthew Goggs, Esquire, of Granta Grange, Cambridgeshire, and his merry men; and if there be, the dogs come next, and what they leave you are welcome to divide among you. Though, now I think on it, I don’t care if I invite that fair young gentlewoman, with the bright eyes, to share my supper: yea, and she shall be welcome to the whole breast of the goose, an’ she like it, for a properer damsel did I never see in all my days. (31)

The disguises of the royal party provide a number of occasions to have Henry himself mocked as the “fat pilgrim,” who is advised by the Abbott at Bishop’s Stortford to repent his “ungodly stomach”; and he is assigned a “severe penance” by the Abbot of Glastonbury (81)—which turns out, coincidentally, to be the legendary walk from East Barsham manor to the shrine, thus allowing Strickland (one is always tempted to call her “the fair authoress” or somesuch) with the opportunity to show both evidence of her historical knowledge and some motivation for a famous incident. Strickland’s attitude to Henry is in fact a complicated one. As her historical best-sellers make very clear, she is an enthusiastic royalist, and fascinated with the details, documentable and imagined, of the lives of the great and famous. Her

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romanticized account of Queen Victoria’s early life, published at the beginning of the reign, was criticized—literally by handwritten notes on a copy of the book— by the queen herself for, Her Majesty felt, it was intruding too closely into intimate matters of feelings and inclination. Strickland clearly had some real ambivalence about Henry’s moral character, not only because of his infidelities but (as I shall show anon, as she might have put it, nay did frequently put it, herself) but because of the brutality of his treatment of Walsingham. Yet he was a king. So she builds into her narrative a series of heavy-handed ironies, usually as casual remarks which anticipate future events such as the dissolution of the monasteries or the trial and execution of Ann Boleyn. A number of the pilgrims’ tales predictably mention the frustrations of kings and nobles at the lack on male heirs. Queen Catherine’s own tale of Don Froila’s daughters culminates in the death of his faithful wife during the birth, after six attempts, of a son. Not knowing the queen’s identity, a bystander remarks that the teller is “either a sad and ancient spinster, or, peradventure, the sorrowful wife of some hard-to-please cot-quean, whom she figureth under the feigned style and title of Don Froila, Count de Toros.” The queen is immediately alarmed and defends herself “from the latter charge, not without some alarm, lest a similar construction should be put on her story by her royal spouse, against whom, her own conscience told her, she had pointed the moral of the tale, as far as related to Don Froila’s unreasonable desire of a son, and the tragic consequences that were coupled with its gratification.” Wolsey has to intervene; having “intimate acquaintance with Henry’s peculiarities,” he is afraid that the dissensions that threaten the royal party might mount “if this already jarring chord, between the royal pair, were harped on a moment longer,” and captures Henry’s attention “by demanding the fair Boleyn’s opinion of the tale, feeling assured she was too well versed in the arts of a courtier to be over critical in her comments” (118–19). Likewise, when the Emperor Charles finishes his story, the king comments: “We like thy story well, Sir Charles D’Espaigne,” said King Henry, “albeit it was something of the longest, and we should have been better pleased if the young heir of Toros had lived to revive the ancient glory of his house; there is something so very unsatisfactory for a noble line to end in daughters.” “But consider what illustrious sons-in-law may be acquired by means of daughters. Henry,” said the Queen. “Never talk to me of sons-in law, replied the disguised monarch, testily, tell of a son of one’s own name and lineage, will bring a dower into the family, instead carrying one away from it. Ah, Kate! Kate make me but the father of a boy, and shall chain me to thy girdle, and guide me thy distaff for life.” “Have I not borne thee two fair sons, ay Henry,” replied the Queen, bursting into tears, “and if it hath pleased their Heavenly Father to recall those precious blessings, the giving or withholding of which are in his Almighty hands alone, wherein am I to blame?” (217–18).

Strickland does attempt to generate sympathy for Catherine, “the royal raconteuse” (118) throughout, but her major fascination is with Anne. The “fair Boleyn” presents her with a major artistic and moral challenge, not least because she was Elizabeth I’s mother, and yet was clearly an affront to her respectable Victorian sense of propriety. She has to work delicately around Anne’s alleged sexual adventures:

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her goal in the Queens volume was “to present facts in such a form as to render all the Queens of Henry VIII available for the perusal of other ladies.” She does condemn “the charms and accomplishments of the fair Boleyn,” noting that “we know of no tale of romance that offers circumstances of tragic interest like those that are to be traced in the lives” of Anne Boleyn and Henry’s fifth wife, Katherine Howard. But, interestingly, Strickland does her best to excuse or avoid discussion of Anne’s licentious and ambitious behavior during her early career, commenting that “we think Anne Boleyn must be acquitted of having purposely attracted the attention of Henry,” and that “even in the present age it may lie observed, that ladies who aim at becoming leaders of the beau monde, not unfrequently acquire … undesirable notoriety.” There is no mention, of course, made in the Queens volumes of any pilgrimage to Walsingham like the one in the novel since they are supposedly histories, not historical fiction, and it is not until almost a decade after the pilgrimage is supposed to take place, that “she had overstepped the restraints of moral rectitude.”12 In an abridged edition of the Queens, probably selected for family reading, however, we see a slightly different Anne. Any early indiscretions are completely ignored: the closest Strickland gets to mentioning any connection between Ann and Wyatt is to note that in her childhood, “Thomas Wyatt, the celebrated poet, was in all probability her playfellow.” Anne is depicted as virtuously rejecting the king’s overtures in high moral anguish: “Your wife I cannot be, both in respect of mine own unworthiness, and also because you have a queen already; your mistress I will not be.” She is depicted as pious and dignified in her trial and execution show, when “all present were then in tears, save the base court sycophants who came to flatter the evil passions of the sovereign.” Finally, we are informed that Anne was earnest in preparing herself for death with many and fervent devotional exercises, and whatever may have been said in disparagement of her by Catholic historians, it is certain that she did not die a Protestant.13 By contrast, the portrait of Anne in The Pilgrims of Walsingham shows both more disapproval and more fascination for the “errant damsel” in “pilgrims weeds” (121). This is how she introduces Anne to the story: Her beauty and vivacious wit had, two years previous to this period, attracted the transient attention of King Henry … and though it had not as yet assumed the character of that vehement passion which swept down before it every restraint of law, justice, religion and decency, which impeded its gratification, the growing partiality of the King for the beautiful Mistress Boleyn had been observed by persons of the Court; and her interest had been solicited by many a noble suitor, and, in some instances obtained, to the perversion of right and equity. (9)

There is a tone of glee whenever Anne appears, a dwelling on details of her behavior and the imagining of scenes that Strickland’s moral goals do not require—and indeed from which they threaten to be diverted. While she states that Strickland, Queens, 4. ix, 130, 145. Strickland, Queens (abridged), 198, 203, 230, 227.

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her pedagogical goal is to “render” her accounts of “all the queens of England” acceptable to an audience of ladies, and “even eventful lives could be transposed into moral universals,” the career of the vivacious Boleyn provides her with a challenge she only just meets.14 The moral is clear, and the epithet, “fair,” which is repeated in both the romance and her account in the Queens volume, very quickly becomes an indication of where Anne’s moral flaw lies. More than in the accounts of Anne in the Queens, Ann’s sexuality is highlighted: her attraction to the king is not hidden, nor is her tendency to flirt with other men. Wyatt is a special object of her coquetry, to the point that Henry directly confronts him: “May it please you—” began Wyatt. “Please me, ha!” interrupted the King, angrily, “thou thinkest much of that, Sir Poetaster! so that thou canst rhyme or swagger thyself into favour with Mistress Anne, I trow! But if I see any more such doings, by the girdle of our Lady of Walsingham, I’ll have thee taught to know thy place.” (122)

At this point, Catharine and Marie intercede and “fortunately for Wyatt, the current of Henry’s wrath was diverted by this interposition,” and “with a withering look on Queen Catherine, the King adverted to the primary cause, from which his illhumor had originated” (122), which is the reminder of his being without a son. The relationship between Wyatt and Anne was a matter of court gossip and is probably referred to in some of his poems, first printed in Tottel’s Miscellany, and evidently known to Strickland. Wolsey becomes Strickland’s spokesman as she tries to guide her readers’ responses towards firm moral ends when he comments on the King’s tale of William Rufus that it “is founded on historical facts, wittily and pleasantly woven into a story, which bears a striking moral, not only on the pernicious effects of gluttony, and the ignorance, superstitions, and folly … but also points to the retribution which followed” (81). But throughout the romance, Anne’s “beauty and vivacious wit” gets repeated attention. In the later-written histories, Strickland’s conscious goal of expressing her disapproval of Anne is helped by the fair Boleyn’s having directly intervened into the public, political realm. Victorian morality and gender stereotypes disapproved of any excessive emphasis not only on sexuality but also on women’s involvement in political affairs. As Maitzen points out, those restrictions complicate any attempt to present women as political rather than domestic actors, but in Anne’s case, historically documentable political activities serve to justify Strickland’s double condemnation.15 But here, earlier in her career, in The Pilgrims of Walsingham, Anne has not yet shown her political ambitions except in minor ways, and in her wish, voiced at the holy wells at Walsingham, to become queen. So the emphasis almost entirely falls on her sexuality. 14 Cf. Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, “From Good Looks to Good Thoughts: Popular Women’s History and the Invention of Modernity,” Modern Philology 97 (1999), 49. 15 Rohan Maitzen, “ ‘This Feminine Preserve’: Historical Biographies by Victorian Women,” Modern Philology 97 (1999), 381.

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It is at this point in my argument that Strickland’s choice of Walsingham as a background and goal becomes most interesting. For, one might reasonably ask, except at the most obvious level of plot, does Walsingham matter? Does The Pilgrims of Walsingham in any way articulate the early nineteenth century’s sense of Walsingham? Is it a purely arbitrary piece of background? Laurence comments that Strickland “believed strongly in the genius of place as a source of authenticity,”16 and Walsingham is fascinating to her in part because, as a former Catholic shrine, it has something about it that is forbidden, and the continual reminder of the mysterious powers reputedly found at the shrine which is the pilgrims’ goal opens up fissures in Strickland’s moral world that reflect emergent strains in English culture and in the place of Walsingham in the English imagination, of which she seems somewhat aware. While never explicitly embracing any ‘alternate’ perspectives on religion, sexuality, or gender roles, nonetheless these issues, which are stirring in her society, are also struggling to the surface of her romance, and they are at least in part stimulated to do so by the lurking presence of Walsingham. Strickland herself grew up in part in East Anglia, and she stresses that Anne Boleyn, her dark heroine, was Norfolk born, and imagines her having been in her youth a pilgrim to the shrine. This close identification of author, the fair Boleyn, and Our Lady of Walsingham is the key to the disruption that surfaces in the work. The connection between Anne Boleyn and Walsingham plays out in repeated details, suggesting that Strickland is not putting them together by accident. Both have a mixture of attraction and repulsion for the author, not least because of the shared atmosphere generated by sexuality. It would be too far, perhaps, to consider there is a “gynotheological” dimension to The Pilgrims of Walsingham, but like so many layers of the Walsingham stories, it is not far from the surface. In both cases Strickland invites her readers to peer, decorously but nonetheless voyeuristically at them both, and she provides a richly fetishistic display of scenes and information to remind us of the connection. Walsingham is introduced in the first few pages as the royal party decides to take the pilgrimage. The author explains in some detail that “all those who are versed in historical antiquities will remember, that the town of Walsingham in Norfolk was celebrated, throughout Europe, for a chapel, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, which was only second in fame to that of our Lady of Loretto.” In a series of her historical notes appended to the work, some 15 pages in all, Strickland summarizes the history of the shrine. By early nineteenth-century standards, and before the Nichols translation which was published just over a decade later, it is a competent account. It makes reference to both Walsingham’s celebrity and what, good Protestant that Strickland is, she calls the “superstitions and mummeries practiced” there, on which she quotes, paraphrases and then adds comments on Erasmus’s account (357–8). Both Catherine and Henry, Strickland tells us, were devotees “to the especial favour of our Ladye of Walsingham, to whose shrine she had already made one pilgrimage,” while with Henry, “our Walsingham Lady Laurence, “Women Historians,” 131.

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appears to have been a favorite saint; for the chronicles and traditions of Norfolk record that ‘he visited her shrine, in the second year of his reign, walking barefoot all the way from Barsham, a neighbouring village, to present the imago with a costly necklace’.” Never, she says with pride, “was this shrine in higher popularity than during the earlier years of Henry VIII’s reign.” Strickland also tells us “that Henry was zealously bent on asserting the superior sanctity of the Walsingham shrine to that of Canterbury, in which preference here was not only presumably a suspicion of Becket’s anti-monarchism, but “something of gallantry,” in part because the “Norfolk shrine” was dedicated to the first of female saints” (356, 7). Not coincidentally, immediately after we are introduced to Our Lady of Walsingham, we are given a parallel description of Anne. She too is a “native of Norfolk,” one who was “enough of a papist to regard the shrine of Walsingham with reverence, which, in these days, would justly be styled idolatrous,” except it “was the pride and boast of her native county, that county which the sweet remembrance of her childhood told her was the fairest in the world” (7–8). She flirts with the king as he praises Our Lady of Walsingham, “adroitly engaging her to discourse of her native county.” He is “charmed with the freshness of feeling with which she described her remembrance of a pedestrian pilgrimage, that she once made with her grandmother and nurse, in the merry month of June, from Blickling Hall, the place of her birth, to the shrine of our Ladye of Walsingham; and she concluded by vehemently expressing her desire to visit it again.” It is Anne who finally persuades the king to make the pilgrimage, and throughout the journey she and Our Lady of Walsingham are associated. Like the shrine itself, Anne may be beauteous on the outside but she inspires idolatry, leads men into “foul and confusing ways” (23), and ends in destruction and degradation. As with Anne, “a few succeeding years brought the Reformation,” and like her, Our Lady of Walsingham “was cast from her high estate, her Chapel was desecrated, and she was ignominiously trundled to Chelsea, where she was burnt by the orders of Thomas Cromwell.” Strickland then adds the rumor, first recorded in the seventeenth century, and to be reiterated in Catholic polemic, that “this outrage sat heavier on the conscience of Henry than many a worse thing,” and “the dying tyrant repented him, sorely, of the mischief that he had done to our Lady of Walsingham, and bequeathed his soul to her,” waspishly adding that “great doubts must have existed among the Catholic party, whether the Lady of Walsingham would be troubled with the care of it” (356). Both Anne and the Virgin of Norfolk are, in Strickland’s view, sexualized, dangerous, and in their excessiveness, both undermine good taste and sound morals—and both need to be disciplined and finally destroyed. Susan Morrison has argued that Shakespeare’s Ophelia—who, it will be recalled, sang a version of the Walsingham Ballad in her madness—also is a discarded image of Our Lady of Walsingham. Like the ‘image’ from the shrine, she suggests, Ophelia is torn down, ruined, reduced to “waste.”17 In Strickland’s romance, Anne Boleyn is similarly identified with the Protestant view of Morrison, “Ophelia, Waste, Memory,” 178.

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Walsingham. She is bold, colorful, presumptuous and finally both destructive and destroyed. And as with the sexualized Virgin, the center of both her appeal and her corruption is the transgressiveness of sexuality. Strickland’s identification of the two and her own attraction to both produces a deep ambivalence in the romance, one that reverberates well outside the book and points to a growing tension over Walsingham in the nineteenth century. On one level, Our Lady of Walsingham is a harmless, quaint reminder of a superstitious time that is no longer threatening to a well-mannered and moral age: she is merely the “sweet virgin” of Norfolk, whose legends may readily be made, into a “goodly romaunt” like the pilgrims’ tales (10–11). She may at best provide an ideal picture of modesty. Princess Cicely, one of Henry VII’s sisters-in-law, is described as having a “pensive and Madonnalike expression of her downcast eyes, along with appropriate “soft and feminine graces of her whole figure and deportment” (267). Such women do not end up burnt, executed or wasted. They marry the men of their dreams. In The Pilgrims of Walsingham, the king’s sister, Marie, is continually held up as the model of virtue. Pursued, at least with his eyes, by her former suitor, the Emperor Charles, she makes very clear her unshakeable devotion to her slightly more lowly born husband: he plainly perceived, that the peerless object of his passion, his once betrothed but rejected bride, was so devotedly attached to her present husband, the comparatively speaking low-born Brandon, that she would not have exchanged one of his auburn ringlets for the imperial diadem, which Charles would now willingly have laid at her feet. He had ventured to tell her so with his eyes, during the journey from Windsor to Havering Bower, and had received, in return, one of those stern glances of silent reproof, from which, when darted from the radiant eyes of virtuous beauty, many a daring libertine has shrunk back, as much abashed sis Milton’s arch-fiend, when touched by Ithuriel’s spear.(16)

Marriage, like the male gaze, is a restraint on anarchic female sexuality: Strickland’s Protestant moralism therefore holds “marriage to be a more honorable state than widowhood” (64). In the Emperor Charles’s own story, the hitherto virtuous Christina becomes enraptured with a handsome but untrustworthy Moor, and is overcome by his “passionate wooing.” He is, however, a “perilous lover,” with his “evil passion that cannot be called love,” who loosens her formerly wellcontrolled or even unknown passions. When the Moorish forces demand from the Christians a tribute of “a hundred beautiful maidens,” Christina’s fate is to be one of them, and she eventually dies just as her lover—who has (too late) been converted to Christianity—kisses her. She receives and gives the kiss with her last breath. She dies, “her gentle, but o’erburdened spirit” departing at the “same moment” and her Moorish lover is left with “black unbroken gloom” (162, 214–15). The ‘morality’ is clear enough and yet in all these cases of fallen virtue or outright passion, Strickland betrays a fascination not unlike the coy prurience of many medieval martyrdom stories, where as much emphasis is put on the details of sexualized torture as on the triumphantly pious conclusion.

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But Anne is also the “tutelary goddess of the Tudor dynasty” (10–11, 384). For like Anne Boleyn, there lurks in the Catholic superstitions of the Virgin a danger that excessive adulation may produce. Strickland notes that “fair ladies of any age” may “resemble divinities,” especially when like the Virgin of the Annunciation, “they are half-grown girls,” but unless they acquire “the graces and discretion of womanhood,” they may end like Boleyn—and the “Ladye” of Walsingham herself (124). The judicious Christian must therefore always “watch” for signs of moral laxity. Beauty may be a sign of either virtue or corruption. Another of the virtuous Yorkist sisters, Catherine, is described with her “ebon tresses … fair throat … bosom of snow” (268), which beauty signifies her virtue; but to the untutored gaze, Anne Boleyn appears to be similarly seductive: by the fire at the inn, “having removed her cumbrous hood, she was wringing the rain-drops from her luxuriant raven tresses, which she had unbraided and suffered to fall in all their glossy pride down her graceful form” (28). Strickland makes her readers into voyeurs, inviting us to gaze at both women with awe or horror, and reading the externals of beauty for any tell-tale signs of passion and corruption. This, she seems to say, is Woman: alluring, fascinating, dangerous, unless controlled by the authoritative, ever-watchful, male gaze. Order is not threatened if women accept their duties as modest, motherly and discretely spiritual, but allowed to have free rein, any beautiful woman may become like Our Lady of Walsingham in the “days of darkness and superstition” when she became decked out in “pious frauds” and venerated with “gross idolatry” (357, 364). It is not just that, in Strickland’s view, women should not meddle in politics and public affairs. Even Anne Boleyn learned that lesson: in her Lives, Strickland has Anne retiring in her last days to the company of her ladies and cultivating her needlework, just like Catherine before her. The virtue of the retiring domestic life is a constant refrain in her novels and histories. As Hilary Skelding notes, the genre of the historical romance was “particularly associated with the enforcement of a mid-Victorian middle-class notion of separate spheres,” with a woman left as “an effective prisoner within a circumscribed domestic world.” Needlework, in fact, becomes the recurrent symbol in Strickland’s later histories of an appropriate feminine activity, even for public figures like Elizabeth I or Mary Queen of Scots. Whenever she wants to express her approval of a woman’s dutiful self-effacement and abandonment of the public world, she describes her activities in the activities of cross-stitching and embroidery.18 But more serious in Strickland’s eyes than women’s inappropriate political interference, and more alluring, remains the threat of unrestrained sexuality. Katherine Howard is Anne Boleyn revisited: Katherine’s adulterous affairs, says Hilary Skelding, “Redefining the Angel in the House: Evelyn Everett-Green and the Historical Novel for Girls,” Women’s Writing 8. 1 (March 2001), 122. For an illuminating discussion of the gender politics of needlework in Strickland’s histories, see Rohan Amands Maitzen, Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing (New York: Garland, 1998), 78–83. 18

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Strickland in the Queens volume, give us “a grand moral lesson;” they do not just “illustrate the variety of female ambition,” but the dangers of unbridled female sexuality. These three queens—two of England, one, supposedly, of Heaven, at least as constructed in the superstitious imaginations of Papists—show us “the fatal consequences of the first unguarded steps in guilt” which lead to cosmic disaster. Determinedly exemplary, Strickland’s accounts of them all—Anne, Katherine Howard, Christina, and the idolatrous Lady of the medieval shrine—nonetheless generate what we can see as ‘alternate’ feelings and experiences. Strickland clearly sensed in Catholic devotion to the Virgin something of the same lack of restraint that she saw in her exempla of fallen or misled women, and yet could not quite hide her fascination with that extreme passion. This is why Anne Boleyn plays such a major role in the romance and why, at root, Walsingham is chosen as the pilgrims’ goal. Both have the allure of the forbidden. Patricia Spacks writes of how “gossip” in the nineteenth century became not just a pejorative, usually voiced about women by men, but an “alternate discourse … language for an alternative culture.”19 So it is with Anne. Her sexuality is constrained not only by the historical events Strickland is re-creating but also the morality of her author’s class and religion. Strickland can take justified satisfaction in the overthrow of such an idol. But The Pilgrims of Walsingham nevertheless permits these hints of an “alternative” female power to emerge. Marie of France reprimands Wolsey for advocating the use of a ducking stool to discipline a woman’s tongue, indignantly rejecting his “malicious commendations of so vile and barbarous a device, for the silencing of female eloquence” (221). But that is precisely the mechanism that Strickland relies on discovering in the ‘facts’ of history, and finds it in the untimely end of Anne. In simultaneously reproving and exploring Anne’s sexuality, and by identifying her closely with Our Lady of Walsingham, it seems initially that Strickland echoes, even if in a milder vein, the iconoclasm of her Protestant ancestry. For although she acknowledges Anne’s later support of the Reformers, the fair Boleyn clearly embodies the Whore of Babylon, the Scarlet Woman of Catholic idolatry. It is all the more curious therefore that frequently throughout her professional life Agnes (and by extension, Elizabeth) was suspected of Catholic sympathies, even at times of having converted, and as Rhonda Wallace Williams notes, sales of the sisters’ histories tended to dip whenever such rumors surfaced.20 Shortly after completing The Pilgrims of Walsingham, Agnes Strickland took upon herself the task of understanding what Catholicism involved. She corresponded with the Catholic historian, John Lingard, and cultivated a number of Catholic aristocrats. In order “to see Catholic life from the inside,” she lived for two weeks in a “cell” in the Benedictine convent in Hammersmith, expressing some surprise at the limited Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Knopf, 1985), 46, 7. Rhonda Wallace Williams, “The Stricklands and ‘The lives of the Queens of

19 20

England’: A Reappraisal,” unpub. Masters diss. (Stephen F. Austin State University, 1987), 51, 90.

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wardrobe its inhabitants enjoyed. She also paid a visit to Walsingham itself, a place that she referred to as “so celebrated in the annals of superstition,” yet about which she was obviously deeply curious. She dined with the Lee-Warners a number of times, paid a brief visit to the Slipper Chapel (then still a farmer’s barn), and walked to East Barsham Hall, not only the place from where Henry VIII reputedly walked, but which was the home, for a time, of Anne Boleyn herself. She also visited a number of East Anglian Catholic families. Like sexuality, Catholicism and Walsingham itself had the fascination of the forbidden, the liminal. 21 At the end of the pilgrims’ journey in The Pilgrims of Walsingham, they reach the shrine. Strickland passes quickly over their religious devotions, their “orthodox ceremonials,” and they proceed quickly to the “wishing wells.” The transformation from holy well to wishing well, which I discussed in the last chapter, is the culmination of the romance. In the pre-Reformation decade in which Strickland’s story is set, the wells at Walsingham were “holy” not “wishing” wells. But for the purpose of her fiction, Strickland needs to blend the two. “There is a stone square,” she tells us, “with steps, descending to two uncovered wells, called the ‘wishing wells,’” where “the devotees, to our Lady of Walsingham, believed that whoever was admitted to drink of these waters, obtained what their hearts most desired, if wished while the cup was at their lips.” The wells, with their apparent frivolity and yet their rich mythic and sexual associations, are the apt final symbol in the book. They show the apparent surface serenity of Strickland’s views on Walsingham but the suspicion remains that there is something buried underneath that may all too easily escape: The secret cause of all this devotion to the Norfolk shrine may be certainly traced to the Wishing Wells, a superstition, may be of an early pagan origin, since it has survived the catholic worship, for these wells are still resorted to, by young people in Norfolk, who often make parties thither; and among the magnificent ruins, half in play, half in earnest, drink of the waters, in the faith, “that their heart’s dearest wish let them ask it and have.” (348–9)

“Half in play, half in earnest,” transposed to the novel’s anxiety about female sexuality and idolatry sums up Strickland’s sense of Walsingham. Each of the pilgrims’ wishes are, of course, largely predictable: Henry wishes for a son; Catherine starts to wish the same, but instead wishes that her daughter Mary, who happens to come into her mind, become queen; the emperor has his wish for a kingdom confounded by his own sense of decorum when he notes that his glove is torn and wishes inadvertently it would be mended; Brandon and Marie wish a child of theirs would become a monarch—which was to eventually (and Pope-Hennessey, Strickland, ix, 50, 218–21; Williams, “The Stricklands,” 91. For suggestive the ongoing tensions in Victorian England between Catholic and Protestants, see Janes, Victorian Reformation, and Michael Wheeler, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 21

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briefly) be fulfilled by their daughter, Lady Jane Grey’s being crowned queen for nine days after the death of Edward VI; Wyatt wishes for his love for Anne to be fulfilled, a consummation which was at least rumored to have occurred, and as for Anne herself, she “audaciously proclaimed aloud, that she had wished to be a queen.” Of the major characters, Wolsey gets the last word: after Anne’s characteristically brazen outburst, he changes his intended wish to become pope to a more menacing one: “he imprecated a wish of the most deadly import upon her, a wish that was in the course of a few brief years only too fearfully fulfilled on the devoted head of his fair enemy” (349–50). Half in play, half in earnest, the wishes all in some sense come true. It is as if beneath the superstition, Strickland wants us to suppose that Our Lady of Walsingham retains some of her mysterious power, like perhaps the ashes of the Holy House buried under its few inches of grass, soil and rubble. Or, at least her text does; like so many others in the English imagining of Walsingham, before and after the shrine’s dissolution, it says more than it appears or wants to say.

Chapter 7

Re-Catholicization: Walsingham in Literature from Hopkins and Waterton to A.N. Wilson At this moment, a sudden flash of rosy light, suffusing the grey ruins, indicted that the sun had just fallen; and through a vacant arch that overlooked them, alone in the resplendent sky, glittered the twilight star … when from the Lady Chapel there rose the evening hymn to the Virgin.

A ruined abbey, implied religious and class conflict, all reconciled in an aesthetic moment of a once contentious and now elegantly sentimental ritual of music at dusk under the evening stars: in Disraeli’s Sybil, Egremont sums up part of a widespread Victorian nostalgia for a re-invented, aestheticized Middle Ages of idealized ruins, hymns to the Virgin, and the overarching glimpse of the Milky Way, all lingering reminders of a magical world that had seemingly been superseded by a rational, and demurely protestantized society. The ruins of Fountains Abbey (re-named as Marney Abbey) allow Disraeli to present the vanished monks as benevolent overseers of the common people and the new sixteenth-century Protestant aristocracy as oppressors. Yet there is no desire by Disraeli (not least because he was Jewish) to restore the religious beliefs that were represented in the Abbey. The culmination of Strickland’s pilgrims’ visit to Walsingham, it will be recalled from the previous chapter, was at the anachronistically named wishing-wells: as her readers (both of the novel and of her array of sentimental histories written over the following 20 years) knew, her pilgrims’ wishes were indeed granted, though not, at least explicitly, by the intervention of Our Lady of Walsingham, but through the retrospective knowledge of the novelist herself and, as she would have averred, a wise and benevolent Providence, guiding through the centuries the destiny of Protestant England and punishing the over-ambitious and sensually minded, and those who would take any ancient superstitions as more than quaint reminders of a distant past. The nineteenth century, however, brought with it almost as much social upheaval and controversy concerning the Virgin and (by the very end of the century) her great English shrine as had occurred in the sixteenth century. The nineteenth century has been termed “the Marian century,” and “the Age of Mary.” For Roman Catholics in England, it sees the accelerated emancipation of adherents of the Old Faith, and in what Newman and others widely saw as the “Second Spring,” steps taken towards Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil or the Two Nations (London: M.W. Dunne, 1904), I, 83.



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bringing England, as they viewed it, back into the universal Catholic Church, and thus moving triumphantly towards the reclamation of England as the dowry of the Virgin. For Catholic-minded Anglicans, whose numbers dramatically increased over the century, stimulated by the initially Cambridge-based ritualistic movement and then by the Oxford Movement, the Virgin returned, at first decorously and then more enthusiastically, to a prominent place in some Anglican devotion and, if only on the margins of the Church of England, in some developments in liturgy. Landmarks in the nineteenth century included the definition by the Vatican of the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception (1854) and Papal Infallibility (1870). It was also the age of increasing apparitions of the Virgin in Catholic Europe, reflecting an upsurge of popular religion, mainly rural in origin, and usually associated with her appearance to young, country girls. The most notable appearances were in Paris (1830), La Salette (1846), Lourdes (1858), Portmain (1871), Marpingen (1876), Knock (1879), and then in 1917, Fatima. Not all of these—or the increasing (then as now) ‘private’ apparitions or appearances—were accepted equally enthusiastically by the Church or local authorities; however, it was a European-wide phenomenon and at least in part a reaction to what were felt as bewildering social changes in a rapidly industrializing society. For many, the multiple appearances of the Virgin and the triumphant pronouncement of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception reinforced a growing anti-modernist reaction, and strengthened tendencies to believe that a solution to the confusion and turbulence of the rapidly-changing age lay in a return to a simplified past and even simply to exhortations to carry out acts of reparation. The renewal of devotion to the Virgin in Catholic Europe was clearly of political benefit to the Church in its opposition to growing secularization. As John Singleton comments, when a bottle of Lourdes water was claimed by an exorcist to aid in casting out demons it seemed not unreasonable that “many continental Catholics hoped and prayed that the Virgin would prove to be equally effective in the struggle against republicanism, atheism, socialism, and nationalism.” Many Catholics saw the new dogmas as continuing the fights against pagan forces that in earlier centuries had been aided by the Virgin in her interventions, for example against the Turkish fleet at the Battle of Lepanto (1571) in which the forces of the Church took an aggressive stand against an enemy. Marian devotion in nineteenthcentury Europe was generally associated with extreme right-wing causes, antisemitism, and hostility to modernism—a political tendency that actually sits rather oddly with the strong connection in England of Anglo-Catholicism and Socialism, which lasted well into the twentieth century and led to both admirable pastoral work, especially in urban areas, and to a remarkable tradition of social thought that contributed to the growth of the Labour party. But the tradition of  Wheeler, The Old Enemies, 38, n. 91. For a brief overview Denis Gwynn, The Second Spring, 1818–1852 (London: Catholic Book Club, 1946).  John Singleton, “The Virgin Mary and Religious Conflict in Victorian Britain,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 43 (1992), 17.

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Marian devotion’s associations with anti-modernist causes did not diminish over the next century, and well beyond: a typical instance is Bishop Fulton Sheen’s blaming the two world wars on the West’s not heeding the lessons of Lourdes and “inclining instead toward the ‘pagan ideas’ of license (Mill), evolution (Darwin) and irreligion (Marx).” By the mid-nineteenth century, within both of what Michael Wheeler terms the “old enemies,” the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, Mary became a major object of public discourse to an extent that had not occurred in England since the sixteenth century. The Catholic community had undergone 300 years of forced adaptation to political and cultural marginalization, but the 1800s became a “period of almost cut-throat competition between the Churches” over the nature of the Virgin who was “fought over by Protestants and Roman Catholics, who were held in suspicion by both sides.” The vehemence and extremity of the controversies lasted a century and more, reminiscent in spirit, if not in material or human destruction, of the century of iconoclasm that followed the burning of Our Lady of Walsingham and her “sisters” in 1538, as Protestant attacks on idolatry reached an ugly intensification not seen since the 1640s. Reactions ranged from the suspicion that a newly-revived Catholicism was unmasculine and unEnglish—the latter sentiment voiced by John Henry Newman, beatified by the Roman Catholic Church in 2010, before his conversion to Rome—to outright condemnation of what was seen as grossly idolatrous Mariolatry (even occasionally bursting out into riots and public burnings of Marian and other effigies). In addition to theological and polemical attacks, the fear of Marian idolatry overflowed into Protestant poetry and fiction. Many of Charles Kingsley’s novels dramatize the fight against a resurgent papalism and defend the masculinity of English Protestantism against the seductive, pagan, feminine mother-figure of the Catholic idolization of the Virgin, which Kingsley saw as an all too easy diversion from the spirit of godliness and patriotism that had distinguished Protestant England. He paints a vivid picture of deluded Catholics, seduced by the feminine charms of the Virgin, pouring out their passions into the “tender ear” of the Virgin who “can understand all a woman’s feelings,” but who will emasculate the dynamic individualism of British manhood. As some reactions to Strickland and other Victorian women writers showed all too well, such reactions displayed a nervousness about the changing place of women and women’s issues—and, not incidentally men’s insecurities before the power of women’s bodies, that was projected upon the Virgin and her physical David Morgan, “Aura and the Inversion of Marian Pilgrimage: Fatima and her Statues,” in Moved by Mary, (eds) Hermkens, Jansen and Notermans, 54.  Singleton, “The Virgin Mary and Religious Conflict ,” 34.  See e.g., The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman Vol. 22, Between Pusey and the Extremists, July 1865 to December 1866 (London: Nelson, 1972), 68, 117.  Charles Kingsley, Letters and Memoirs I (New York: Co-operative Publication Society, 1899), 104. 

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participation in the Christian story. As in the Reformation, sexual anxieties partly underlay the hostility to the revived powers of the Virgin. Alongside the traditional image of women, reinforced by, if not entirely derived from, a post-Tridentine sentimentalization of Mary as the young, obedient, humble servant of her lord, all too easily personified in the apparitions of Lourdes or La Salette, ideals of sexuality and domesticity played into the emergence of the “Angel in the house” characterized by piety, purity, domesticity and submission to masculine authority, so admired by Victorian patriarchs. For an emergent Victorian feminism, however—Anna Jameson, George Eliot, for instance—the Virgin was a more ambivalent symbol. Suspicious of the ideal of a shy, obedient domesticated Mary, it was paradoxically in the Catholic elevation of Mary as Queen or Empress of Heaven that Victorian feminists often found images of women’s potential power and emancipation. Many saw the value of de-Catholicizing the Virgin and presenting her as a female heroine: a Mary without “Catholic tradition and wearing no royal institutional robes” could the more readily be appropriated by feminists who looked to Medieval and Renaissance representations in art, legends, hymns for evidence of the stories that lay buried beneath what they saw as primitive representations of a deeper human reality, “the living spirit within the ancient beliefs and forms.” So the Madonna could be read not so much as obedient as bold, not merely as a mild follower but a leader. Anna Jameson’s account of the Madonna in art, illustrated by her own drawings, emphasized Mary’s independence, speaking across the centuries through art and story to the present. An emergent aestheticism in Victorian art and architecture also responded positively to the color and theatricality of the ritualistic and devotional revival centered on the Virgin. While Ruskin or Rossetti did not become Catholics—as Ruskin put it, he did not want “to enter into any question as to the truth or fallacy” of the “worship of the Madonna”—it was, he acknowledged, one of the Catholic Church’s “noblest and most vital graces.” The resurgence of Catholicism and its emancipatory or aesthetic admirers offered mid-century England an alternative “system of sacred material culture,” argues Janes, one that challenged the prevailing materialism of Victorian middle class and the comfortable world that the Protestant establishment like Walsingham Abbey’s Lee-Warners had inherited from their pasts. It was as much an aesthetic as doctrinal reaction, a revulsion in taste as much as creed, a challenge to the English imagination and the collective, class-bound fantasy of Englishness as it had been mediated through two centuries of Protestant hegemony. Eighteenth and early nineteenth century antiquarianism tended to be patronizing—Janes terms its dominant attitude “amused disdain”—to the point that medieval “superstitions” like those manifest at Walsingham were widely regarded as representative of primitive peoples’ folk customs instead of “being  Kimberly VanEsveld Adams, Our Lady of Victorian Feminism: the Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot (Athens: Ohio State University Press, 2001), 3.  Wheeler, Old Enemies, 233.

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part of a demonic conspiracy that was bent on world domination.” But by mid century, as the Protestant establishment became alerted to what was perceived as the rising danger of resurgent Catholicism, the Reformation’s hostility and some of its terminology and rhetoric, resurfaced.10 In its mildest form, this new unease took the form of a reverence for the Middle Ages, not as a period of Catholic superstition, but earlier, as an expression of early British or Anglo-Saxon nationalism. The revived interest in the Pynson Ballad fits into this pattern. The date claimed in the Ballad’s opening lines takes the founding of Walsingham back to 1061, to a pre-Conquest Britain, and thus allowed the British Church to be viewed as independent and incorrupt before it was distorted by Rome. Janes quotes an Anglican priest, one N.S. Godfrey (1817–1883), who looked back to a proud “protestant nation” in pre-Norman Britain that had been “compelled to receive the Roman Catholic religion,” and which had been shocked by the “incipient practice of idol-worship” in the Roman Church.11 The dark underside of such a rewriting of history was the surge of Victorian Protestant polemic which returned to the Reformation’s accusations that Catholicism embodied the idolatrous sexualization of Christianity—a return, as far as the Virgin and her cult are concerned, to a hostility to what I have termed gynotheology, seeing the sexualization of the Virgin, and by extension the whole Catholic Church, as a reprehensible characteristic of a resurgent Catholicism that needed to be denounced. In order to describe “the foul and traitorous conspiracy of the Papists,” Victorian anti-Catholic rhetoric frequently focuses, just as Reformation polemicists had, on the connection between idolatry and sexuality. Once again, what is projected upon Catholicism, argues Janes, is the assertion that, no less than in pagan religions, Catholicism was a “masquerade with its roots in the worship of sex.” The rhetoric of combined disgust and delight that he observes in the Victorian iconoclasts derives directly from Reformation polemic, as if (like the Holy House at Walsingham itself) it had been lurking beneath the benign surface of Protestant triumphalism for three centuries and was now being permitted to surge back.12 The Catholic Church and the catholicizing movement in the Church of England provided an identifiable enemy against whom the new iconophobes could act out long-frustrated fantasies of violence and revenge much as their Reformation ancestors had. The re-emergence of what from early in the seventeenth century had been, at first timorously, termed “Anglo-Catholicism” is a major Victorian phenomenon, with revolutionary effects on the worship, liturgy and self-image of the Church of England over the next century and beyond. Its origins are conventionally dated to John Keble’s 1833 sermon on “national apostasy,” and the rapid development

Janes, Victorian Reformation, 128. Ibid., 43, 212. 12 Ibid., 9, 22, 147. 10 11

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of what became known as the Oxford Movement.13 But both a revived interest in ritual and in the history of the English Church as a national Church, ambiguously both Catholic and Protestant, was also underway in the 1830s, not only in Oxford but in Cambridge, and by the 1860s, despite some major converts to Rome, like Newman, the belief that the Church of England was not only unmistakably part of the universal Catholic Church but should look to adapt some of the liturgy, devotions, and popular piety that they developed in continental Europe—including the cultivation of the rosary, the Hail Mary, and Marian invocations within the liturgy—became an insistent, even if still marginal, view. Anglo-Catholicism involved a radical re-invention of the history of the Church of England: it required a downplaying of the Edwardian and Elizabethan Churches’ connections with the continental Counter-Reformation, a search for seeds of Catholic continuities in the post-Reformation era such as the Queen’s conservatism and then Hooker’s cautious conciliar theology and the emerging ritual reforms of the 1630s. The significantly named “Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology” showed Anglicanism to be a product of the seventeenth, not the sixteenth, century and it was necessary to construct a story of survival and transition from the break with Rome until the Laudian counter-reforms. Central to this re-imagining of Church history was Marian devotion. In 1869, for instance, the Anglo-Catholic priest Orby Shipley republished Anthony Stafford’s 1635 Life of the Blessed Virgin—“ a book of genuine English growth, unadapted from Foreign works,” exclaimed its editor—with its a highly-florid rhetoric of praise and adulation.14 In literature, the latter half of the century sees a remarkable revival of Marian poetry, most notably by the Catholic poets Francis Thompson, Coventry Patmore, and especially the convert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the “unpublished laureate of the Virgin,” as Wheeler terms him, as in the magnificent, celebratory “The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe.”15 In the elegiac “The Loss of the Eurydice”—which Hopkins reportedly preferred to his masterpiece, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” which was also occasioned by a shipwreck—he takes Walsingham and its pilgrims as symbols of lost integrity that has made England, his home, now tragically part of “Unchrist, all rolled in ruin,”when once, time was,” it had been a land dedicated “to his truth and grace”; once, he laments, … a starlight-wender of ours would say The marvellous Milk was Walsingham Way And one—but let be, let be: More, more than was will yet be.

John R. Griffin, John Keble, Saint of Anglicanism (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987), 82. 14 Life of the Blessed Virgin by Anthony Stafford, together with the Apology of the Author, and an Essay on the Cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869), vii, xxvii. 15 Wheeler, Old Enemies, 240. 13

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England is like the ship Eurydice, going down, a “fast foundering generation” that is sinking, caused by the Tudor monarchy which had destroyed the “Hoar hallowed shrines.” Why God allows such tragedies is Hopkins’s repeated and anguished question, here and in the greater, longer poem in which Hopkins again evokes the “moth-soft” Milky Way to Walsingham which had once shown the English where truth lay. Writing in Wales, he looks up at the sky and sees reminders of that loss: For how to the heart’s cheering The down-dugged ground-hugged grey Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing Of pied and peeled May! Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night, still higher, With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky Way, What by your measure is the heaven of desire, The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing?

As Hopkins explained to Robert Bridges, “the difficulty” about his oblique references to the “Milky Way” with its Marian associations was that Walsingham had faded from England’s consciousness: the tragedy, he suggested, is that like most of his countrymen, “you do not know that allusion: it is that in Catholic times Walsingham Way was a name for the Milky Way, as being supposed a fingerpost to our Lady’s shrine at Walsingham.”16 Hopkins’s lament for the fading of Walsingham predates the re-emergence of Walsingham as a shrine and place of pilgrimage. Yet it is indicative of ideological shifts that were opening the possibility. Yates points out how intimately the two shrines that developed at Walsingham in the past century were products of their time in that the Roman hierarchy, the Oxford Movement, the surge of continental Marian devotion in Lourdes and elsewhere, the upsurge in reported visions and visitations of the Virgin across the world, and the rise of Anglo-Catholicism, all enabled the energy and resources to bring about the transformation of the village, the “abbey,” and the revival of pilgrimages, societies, relics, intercessions—and, as well, virulent if spasmodic Protestant opposition.17 The story of Walsingham’s revival from the late nineteenth century to the present has been told many times. Although most modern histories of Walsingham take 1897 as the date that marks the start of Walsingham’s revival, in fact the reemergence of the shrine can be dated back to events earlier in the century. In 1829 occurred the first published mention of the Pynson Ballad, though it is not until 1875 that it is re-published in full for the first time. As John Twyning notes, its “auspicious discovery … seemingly washed in on the high tide of Victorian gothic 16 Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works, (ed.) Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 138, 116, 233. 17 For a useful survey, see Nigel Yates, “Walsingham And Inter-War AngloCatholicism” in Janes and Waller, Walsingham, 131–46.

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revivalism,” was seen as an “authentically medieval” remnant which contributed to the eventual revival of Walsingham. Obbard even suggests that it was the Ballad’s publication which stimulated the development of the two earliest English post-Reformation shrines to our Lady of Walsingham: one in the Anglican parish of Buxted in 1887 where the Lady Chapel was built to the ballad’s account of the dimensions of the Holy House, and the other in the Catholic Church at King’s Lynn in 1897 where a holy house, a replica of the casa sancta of Loreto, was erected in the Lady Chapel.18 Another early landmark is the publication, in 1849, by John Gough Nichols (1806—1873), antiquarian, local historian and printer, and a member of the Camden Society (another antiquarian organization which eventually evolved into the Royal Historical Society) of the first English translation of Erasmus’s Peregrinatio since the Reformation. Nichols’s tone is scholarly and sober as he attempts to separate history from legend. He corrects Erasmus on translation details or geographical mistakes; on Erasmus’s depiction of the Shrine, “Ad extremum Angliae finem, inter Occidentem et Septemtrionem, haud procul a mari, passuum fere tribus millibus,” Nichols notes that it is “a description which certainly is far from accurate, and which would be enough to puzzle any commentator, if it was not ascertained from so many other proofs that Walsingham is intended.” On the distance of Walsingham from the sea, he notes that “Erasmus had not preserved an accurate recollection. It is about seven miles from the town of Wells, the nearest port, and eight from the sea.” On the shrine’s income which Erasmus said was mainly drawn from pilgrimages, he notes that in fact, “the priory had considerable landed property,” and on the famous story of the knight rescued by the Virgin from a pursuer, Nichols comments that “some might suspect” he was “drawing upon his invention, or borrowing … from Loretto or elsewhere.” Parts of “the mysteries of Walsingham” recounted by Erasmus, are in fact Nichols suggests, “directly parodied from the famous shrine of Loretto.”19 In such details, Nichols maintains a quiet scepticism towards the miraculous and superstitious. He notes in passing that the fashion of the costume in which Erasmus describes the knight does “not coincide with the date assigned to” the occurrence. On the wells, he notes that the story of being granted a wish is “a modern superstition, or fancy, borrowed from other well legends.” On the beam on which the Virgin had rested, he cannot find the story’s origin, which therefore, he suggests, may have been Erasmus’s own sly invention, and he finds parallels with stories of apparitions of the Virgin in Spain, incidents in which she also sat or rested on some object which later became venerated as a holy relic. On Erasmus’s own skepticism about the relic of the True Cross, he notes that:

18 Twyning, “Walsingham and the Architecture of English History,” 167–84; Obard, History and Spirituality, 88. 19 Nichols, Pilgrimages to Saint Mary of Walsingham, 82–3, 83–4, 88–9.

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few churches of importance, or pious persons of wealth, would be deficient in this very favourite object of devotion. The majority of its possessors were probably unconscious of the circumstance that their good fortune was shared by so many others; but if such an objection was ever forced upon their notice, it was answered in the manner hinted at by Erasmus, that the wood itself, like the widow’s cruise, possessed miraculous powers of self-multiplication.20

He then goes on to note with his own mild version of Erasmian irony that “a favourite American writer of our own times,” Washington Irving, after a visit to Stratford, describes the “fabricated relics of a shrine of modern idolatry,” noting that like the medieval legends of the mutiple pieces of the True Cross, there is “an ample supply also of Shakspere’s mulberry-tree, which seems to have as extraordinary powers of self-multiplication as the wood of the True Cross, of which there is enough extant to build a ship of the line.”21 Nichols’s tone will be contrasted later in this chapter with the ecstatic enthusiasm of Waterton when he goes over similar Marian material and incidents. So it is, to return to the subject of Chapter 5, that by the mid nineteenth century, the Protestantization of Walsingham was starting to be undermined. The metaphor I have used throughout the past three chapters to describe Walsingham is that of burial waiting for re-discovery. It is, however, a metaphor grounded in material details. Beneath the surface of the Abbey ground at Walsingham there was, it will be recalled, the remains of the Holy House, covered over by the wellmanicured grounds of the “Abbey” and only revealed in a mid-twentieth century excavation—or, to use Ackroyd’s term, “disinternment”—as a layer of ash only a few inches below the lush surface of grass. The Lee-Warner family, which may have had little impact nationally but faithfully provided Walsingham with generations of lords of the manor and successive incumbents of the local parish church, decided there was sufficient interest in the provenance of the estate to permit the first post-Reformation survey of at least portions of the remaining ruins and the ground covering what had been the Augustinian Priory. It took place in the early 1850s, and so coincided with the upheaval in the Church of England caused by the Tractarians, the Oxford Movement, and the rise of Anglo-Catholicism. As Janes points out, in the Victorian age, the “romantic attractions of the Middle Ages became combined with the delights of demonising it.” Such a contradiction surfaces in the family’s response to requests to start some archeological explorations of the site. The remnants of the medieval world were, after all, unavoidably associated with Catholicism, and although now for 300 years owned by loyal and respectable Protestants, Walsingham was obviously open to becoming part of what Janes describes as a “fantasised Catholicism.”22 It was as if some power had been lurking Nichols, Pilgrimages to Saint Mary of Walsingham, 104. Ibid., 94. 22 Janes, Victorian Reformation, 10. 20 21

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Priory excavations, 1853–1854. By permission of the Archivist, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

beneath the lawns, gardens, and walks that had to be investigated, if only to show how the intervening centuries and Protestant commonsense had neutralized any power it might once have had. The combined attraction and repulsion of ritualism, ruins, superstition, and legend in the Victorian Catholic revival all surface in the Lee-Warner family’s acknowledgement that beneath their “plantations and pleasure-gardens,” their “gravel walks and shrubberies,” lay threatening reminders of a world that had been repressed and was now, and not just locally but nationally, threatening to return. This combination of confidence and apprehension became public at a meeting in Cambridge in 1854—subsequently published in The Archaeological Journal for June 1856—in remarks by the Rev. James Lee Warner, vicar of Walsingham from 1834 to 1859, and “the nephew of the present possessor of the site,” the Rev. D.H. Lee Warner. He gave an account of both the history of the “abbey,” and in particular of the archaeological investigations he had carried out with the help of the Norwich antiquarian Henry Harrod (1817–1871). Harrod was the author of Gleanings among the Castles and Convents of Norfolk (Norwich, 1857) in which he combined the collaboratively gathered documentary evidence about the excavations at Walsingham with his own drawings. There was clearly some disagreement between the collaborators which may also point to a degree of unease in the Lee-Warner Cambridge lecture. God-fearing and solid Protestant member of the Abbey’s family that he was, Lee Warner looks back to the Reformation for guidance, and quotes the fourteenth Elizabethan Homily, which back in 1562, thundering against idolatry, had singled out Walsingham as a fearsome example,

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even though the Shrine had been ruined 20 years before. By the 1850s, the protestantization of Walsingham is (seemingly) complete. But it is as if 300 years later, Lee-Warner is uneasy before the history of the family’s property: he even uses words from the homily to describe the fallen idol of Our Lady of Walsingham as the “counterfeit Ephesian Diana” in order to distance himself from the (perhaps) once again threatening past. He lists famous visitors to Walsingham, including “the eccentric chronicler, William of Worcester” and “the sceptical doctor, Erasmus,” and, with a gesture towards the Pynson Ballad, at that time little known, mentions the author of the anonymous legend, preserved amidst the quaint archives of the “Bibliotheca Pepysiana.” He then goes on to provide what twentieth-century investigations would eventually discover was only a partly accurate ground plan and sketched reconstruction of the priory. His excavations, he reports, did uncover buttresses and walls, but curiously he asserts that “the precise locality of … the Chapel of the Annunciation, the house ‘arrered with angells handys,’ which … formed the glory of Walsingham in its most palmy days,” the Holy House itself, could “not be exactly established” and was not excavated. Was that surprising assertion superstition or fear? In a later addition to his Cambridge presentation on the excavations, he acknowledges the likely site of the Holy House, and admits that it is to the Holy House that the Shrine “owed [its] splendour.” But almost as if afraid of what might be revealed would be incriminating details of the reformers’ desecration of the Shrine, he firmly states that a successful excavation would be “well nigh impracticable,” and information must be only “gleaned slowly,” a verdict with which his colleague Harrod strongly disagreed. He clearly wishes to prevent any upsurge of idolatrous wonderment should the Holy House be uncovered. While “the shades of the Augustine canons seem,” he acknowledges, “to rise before us,” by “slowly placing” it in the “light of day,” Walsingham would be further immunized from a revival of former superstition, and continue to be simply a picturesque “group of ruins, as grand in actual effect as it is rich in ancient reminders.” Its magic, its potential to evoke any wonder other than that of an admiring visitor, would continue to be neutralized. Lee-Warner’s account simultaneously acknowledges the resurgent threat of the medieval past, and attempts to control its invasion of the present serenity of the family estates and the village.23 The most extensive imaginative treatment of Walsingham in the years following the Lee-Warner and Harrad excavations and the mid-century revival of Marian devotion in England, and before the restoration of the Shrine and pilgrimages in the twentieth century, that can be described if not as a “literary” but certainly an “imaginative” work—in its own idiosyncratic way it would meet Ackroyd’s criteria for expressing the “English imagination”—is the remarkable collection of documents, legends, speculations and polemic that constitute Edmund Waterton’s Pietas Mariana Britannica. A History of English Devotion to the Most Blessed 23 Lee-Warner, “Walsingham Priory,” 115–33. The talk was reprinted in Three Victorian Pamphlets on Walsingham (Bedford: Vintage Publications, n.d).

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Virgin Mary Mother of God, with a Catalogue of Shrines, Sanctuaries, Offerings, Bequests, and Other Memorials of the Piety of Our Forefathers, published in 1879. The author would have been shocked to hear his work described as a fiction, even a work of imagination, but it is an extraordinary re-invention of both Marian lore and legend, including a 60-page assemblage, with sometimes blisteringly indignant commentary, mainly directed against Erasmus, on Walsingham. Edmund Waterton (1830–1887) was the eccentric, spendthrift and often self-deluded son of an equally, though quite differently, eccentric naturalist and explorer, Charles Waterton. Edmund was an antiquarian, and a collector also of titles, uniforms and archaic honors. He describes himself as the descendant of a “male line” of defenders of the Catholic faith, a chivalric knight, the “unworthy but hereditary liegeman” of the Virgin Mary’s Dower (I, 263). He was also a Knight of Malta, a Knight of the Supreme Order of Christ, a papal privy Chamberlain, one of the Scottish archer guard and, a contemporary biographer noted, “in these dresses he liked to display himself.” Claiming descent from St Thomas More, he was educated (as was Hopkins) at Stonyhurst, he acquired over a thousand copies of De Imitatio Christi, and collected ecclesiastical rings which eventually found their way to the Victorian and Albert Museum. A contemporary described him as “gigantic in stature and vast in his proportion,” with a grotesque stammer and a “manner seemingly frivolous”; yet he was regarded as “deeply learned and wellread.” Going bankrupt after his father’s death, he was forced to sell his supposedly ancestral home (to a soap merchant who represented all he found distasteful about the modern age), and living off the charity of his family, he eventually purchased a new estate which he renamed after his family and declared it to be in fact, another ancestral property.24 Pietas Mariana Britannica is an extraordinary collection, which was assembled, as a reviewer noted, with “a deep and reverential love of his subject,” and with “indomitable perseverance in the collecting and arranging of materials.”25 It consists of two books, or parts, paginated separately but published together: the first, a “history of English Devotion to the most blessed Virgin Marye [Waterton’s persistent antique spelling] Mother of God,” and the second a “Catalogue of Shrines, Sanctuaries, Offerings, Bequests, and other memorials of the piety of our Forefathers.” The first is an obsessively organized catalogue of such pseudochivalric categories as “Our Ladye and her Liegemen”—among whom he would number foremost, at least in England, himself and his family—“Forms of Homage”; “Iconography” and “details of common life,” including shrines, churches, organs, flowers, and wells. On the latter, Waterton comments with typically charming sincerity that the water that holy wells supply “is invariably the Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald, Fifty Years of Catholic Life and Social Progress (London: Unwin, 1901), 122; see also www.jss.org.uk/cw/Charles_Waterton/edmund.htm. Accessed June 1, 2010. 25 Anon. review of Waterton, Pietas Mariana Britannica, Reliquary and illustrated archaeologist 21(July, 1880), 56. 24

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best in the neighbourhood,” and that it is “impossible not to believe that at some period these Ladye wells” had been placed under the protection of the Virgin, the “well-spring of life” (I, 192). He then turns to the “Beauty of English images of our Ladye,” her statues, veils, her person and, in a gesture to the medieval blazon, even includes representations of “our Ladye’s feet” (I, 9). The second part of the work, augmented by addenda, lists in alphabetical order by place an enormous compendium of shrines, statues, historical documents, and legendary references, along with many authorial comments, usually designed to defend the authenticity of the stories he assembles—or else blaming their distortion on Protestant heretics’ misunderstanding, motivated by either ignorance or malice. Waterton prefaces the work by setting out his overall dual goal of recreating “England in Catholic times,” and his optimistic anticipation of when once again England would, “as in bygone times,” be continually venerating the Virgin. He bewails the “desecrated churches and plundered shrines, and mutilated images, indelible traces,” and yet optimistically sees as it to be a “pleasant task” to imagine what these ruins might have looked like (I, 4). He is trying to do his “little best to increase devotion to our Blessed Ladye in England’ (I, vii). Marian devotion, he repeatedly affirms, might once again burn as brightly and cover the land “like a mighty cloud” (I, 8). No less than the Protestant Kingsley, Waterton is a patriot, seeing England, as the dowry of Mary, having the national responsibility of spreading her fame across the world through empire and trade and its own distinctively island virtues, including the “enthusiastic worship of Marye,” which, he asserts, is not only “a plant matured under more sunny skies, and little suited to our temperate zone” (I, 4). His tone is ecstatic, sentimental, chivalric, and defiant in turns as he looks at the contrast between “bygone times” when “the Blessed Mother of God was once the Ladye of the land” (I, 4), and the sordid heretical and altogether ugly times after “the Great Apostasy,” the punishment for which he sees in “manufacturing towns” where he shudders to think of young Catholic girls trying to lead “the lives of angels in those hotbeds of iniquity and vice” (I, 146). While he acknowledges there are a few signs of hope that Mary is reclaiming her own—he welcomes the “commencement of devotion to our Blessed Ladye in the Protestant Establishment” (I, 263)—the burden of the “dark ages of apostasy and persecution” (I, 16) still hangs over England as a consequence of “the plunder of the property of God” and the “disgraceful scenes” that followed the libidinous and blasphemous acts of the “sacrilegious robber,” Henry VIII. Waterton paints a melodramatic picture of Henry’s death, excommunicated and with “no priest by his side,” knowing he has put away not only the “sainted “ Catherine but (Waterton claims) his “own natural daughter,” whom he illegitimately begot, lusted after, and married, Anne Boleyn. Henry, says Waterton, “reads the black and damning register of plundered shrines,” especially the desecrated shrines “of the Blessed Mother of God,” where he “caused her venerated images of Walsingham and other places to be burnt.” Waterton quotes Edward Ward, the late seventeenth-century Hudibrastic poet—that “his last words were ALL IS LOST!/ A fearful exit!” So, pronounces Waterton, Henry died “by the just judgment of God the despoiler of ENGLAND: THE DOWER OF MARYE” (I, 219–20).

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Waterton’s combination of aggressive Catholic evangelism and patriotic nostalgia is rooted in a total acceptance of the medieval magical universe before it was disrupted and challenged by the Reformation. In contemplating the contemporary ills that need be cured, he envisages the revival of medieval rituals and customs that seem to him inextricably interwoven with Marian devotion. He suggests, for example, bringing back the ritual of the Beating of the Bounds in order to purge contemporary England of plagues and pests; since we live, he says, “in these days of rinderpest and potatoe disease and the probability of the invasion of the Colorado beetle, the processions of the Gang days according to the ritual of Holy Church, might well be revived” (I,191). In another expression of nostalgia, he sees the ancient ways influencing even the most trivial household details and ordinary relationships: domestic violence and “wife-kicking and wife-beating” could be eliminated since they were “unknown,” he asserts, “in the days when England was Catholic” (I,9). Such is his trust in the all-pervasive power of the Virgin that he has a glowing optimism that all will be restored and that capturing and retelling the stories of past glory will help bring that lost world back. Summarising the obsessive lists and enumerations of Pietas Mariana Britannica leads inevitably to asking whether there is something pathological about Waterton’s obsessions. Yet there is a touching naivete about his enthusiasm that is at some level endearing, and certainly the work provides even for the serious historian a goldmine of searchable sources for Marian sites and remnants. Walsingham itself had not yet been revived when Waterton compiled his book, but he undoubtedly helped prepare the consciousness among both Roman and Anglican Catholics. He reproduces most of the available historical sources on Walsingham, overwhelmingly accepting them all as authentically historical rather than legendary, often finding justification for the most seemingly unlikely events. For Waterton, Marian relics are overwhelmingly “valuable and well-authenticated,” including the Virgin’s milk, items of her clothing, and hair, which he assumes would be “treasured up carefully” (II, 88). He takes a reference to a piece of stone at Bourne, Yorkshire, on which the Archangel Gabriel reputedly stood to greet Mary in the Anunciation, as authentic. There is no sense, he says, in which it might simply be a charming legend; rather it is likely one of the pieces from the original Holy House which had been replaced or repaired at Loreto, whence the original had been taken by angelic hands, and transported on to Walsingham (II, 161). He even speculates whether the altar at Walsingham might also have been miraculously transported from Loreto. Among the relics of the Virgin herself, he is particularly fascinated by her “zona” or girdle, examples of which he acknowledges are found all across Europe. As I argued in earlier chapters, the reformers and their Victorian descendants believed that Catholic theology and devotion had encouraged idolatry by excessive attention to the Virgin’s body, and by venerating the material details, however trivial or apocryphal, of events in mariological history. While discussion of the body of the Virgin and most especially any suggestion of sexuality, her “pryvytes,” as Erasmus had coyly punned, were regarded as both bad taste and blasphemy, the

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veneration of bodily and material objects associated with her body—hair, milk, girdles, for example—were accorded a degree of power, what in the eyes of the Reformers was a blasphemous magic, because of their alleged physical proximity to her or even, because they had been touched to a relic of hers. Again, Janes is a helpful guide to the way accusations of fetishization in devotion to the Virgin re-surface in some Victorian Protestant polemics. He relates the renewed hostility to religious fetishism to a broader contradiction in Victorian ideology: it links, he argues, to increasing fears of commodity fetishism, and a deepening ambivalence over the nature and value of the material in Victorian culture. In both the sixteenth century and Victorian Reformations, we are dealing with an insecure fixation on substitute or supplemental material objects, associated with and derived from a powerful, unapproachable, or vanished beloved. Catholics were accused not only of ostentatious display, but of their alleged overvaluation of material objects; and above all else, at least in extreme Protestant fantasies about Roman Catholicism, they were associated with the corrupt human body. Janes quotes a revealing incident in 1875 when an English newspaper correspondent reported on a progressive Spanish politician’s placing a piece of a dress of St Teresa of Avila in a museum rather than a church. It was, he gloated merely a fetish among other “profane knick-knacks.”26 That had become, in Protestant England, the prevailing view of what once had been venerated as magical objects. For devotees, of course, granting “a certain amount of humanness” to a fetish, as Louise Kaplan notes, is less threatening than beholding the object of devotion directly, and psychologically its is “significantly more reliable than a living person.” When the object of devotion is threatening, dangerous, or unpredictable, “the desire she arouses” can be more safely “invested” in an approved fetish.”27 Devotional fetishization had, of course, long been exorcised from English Protestant religious life (though fetishization of many kinds is arguably a universal characteristic of all devotion and desire) but it had never died in European Catholic life and indeed had been intensified during the Counter-Reformation and had spread and been joined to local religious practices across the world, most notably in the Americas. But it was now, notwithstanding the concerns of a Newman, let alone Protestants generally, returning to England. Waterton includes a 65 page essay on Walsingham itself, easily the longest entry in the second part of his book, a laborious compendium of places with documented associations with the Virgin. Walsingham is, he proclaims, “the most celebrated of all the English sanctuaries of our Blessed Ladye” (II, 155). Nichols had included a variety of historical notes on Walsingham to his 1849 translation of the Peregrinatio, but Waterton’s is the first extensive essay on the Shrine since Erasmus. But the tone is very different. Waterton’s account is held together not only by his overriding mission to detail the glories of Marian England but also by a relentless indignation at what he sees as the cynicism of Erasmus himself. In Waterton’s uncompromising view, the Dutch scholar, however well educated and Janes, Victorian Reformation, 172. Stoller, Perversion, 59; Kaplan, Female Perversions, 35.

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famous, was a cynical, egocentric, ignorant foreigner whose account of the shrine, along with Henry VIII’s libidinous actions, should be held in large part responsible for Walsingham’s fall. Walsingham is described in detail; like Strickland, Waterton clearly prides himself on his detailed research. He draws on Blomefeld’s history of Norfolk, Nichols, and other post-Reformation sources as well as the printed and manuscript sources that were becoming widely available for scholars. But is a highly-selective picture. He gives us an idyllic picture of devoted pilgrims walking across an idealized landscape, even quoting Langland’s vicious satire to support the godliness of pilgrimages (II, 173), and he envisages all across England processions of pilgrims singing and playing bagpipes and giving generously to add to the riches of the priory. On more mundane details of the shrine, William of Worcester’s account is reproduced in detail. It is useful for verifying the shrine’s history and the extent of the Augustinian priory. He then turns to Erasmus and devotes almost half his account of Walsingham to summarizing, combating, and waxing indignant at Erasmus’s account, even returning to express his revulsion when he has ostensibly moved on to a topic on which Erasmus had nothing to say. Among contemporaries, he drew on some of Strickland’s Queens volumes and (with a few scathing comments) Anna Jameson’s volumes on the Madonna in art. He cites the Nichols translation but his goal is not to question but to uphold the magical interpretation of Walsingham. He summarizes the Pynson ballad as a record of historical accuracy: “the chain of evidence,” he concludes, “is enough” (II, 158) for us to accept its story of the Virgin’s appearance: after all, her interventions in events occur all the time, even if in England, not since the Great Apostasy. He looks to Europe and sees the Virgin’s miracles continuing at Loreto, and elsewhere, which would certainly have continued, as he sees it, at Walsingham had not England left the protection of Our Ladye. He recounts the story of Loreto without a trace of skepticism. Belief itself is enough proof is his recurring refrain. Loreto demonstrates, he says, that “our Ladye wished to show that she had no need of human assistance to support the walls of her Holy House,” just as at Walsingham she chose to move the Holy House to its rightful site herself (II, 159). Waterton’s is a world with continuous miracles brought about by the Virgin. The de-sacralization of the universe brought about by sin, blasphemy and apostasy in the reign of Henry VIII is like a cloud over England. But the Virgin and her forces, including (he sometimes adds) her divine Son, are poised to return to reclaim her power. Then, once again, the miracles that occur daily elsewhere would again be evident. He believes that it is his vocation to help bring that about. Waterton’s repeated view is that the blasphemer who helped Henry undermine this natural world of miracle and sign was Erasmus. It is a view echoed 50 years later by Hope Patten, the founder of the Anglican shrine, when in his turn he published an abbreviated version of the Peregrinatio, leaving out those parts he (like Waterton) found to be scurrilous and tasteless.28 Where Hope Patten is simply Alfred Hope Patten, Mary’s Shrine of the Holy House (Cambridge: [R.I. Severs]),

28

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severe and disapproving, however, Waterton is almost uncontrollably indignant. Erasmus is dismissed as “the Dutchman;” Erasmus may be learned, but his “inordinate pride” and his determination “to make a display of his fancied superior acquirements in letters” makes him “jesting and conceited,” “supercilious,” one who loved only to “cast all possible ridicule upon the practices of the Holy faith of which, nevertheless, he was only too glad to continue an unworthy member.” Rather than being a pilgrimage for religion’s sake, Erasmus’s account of Walsingham “is about the greatest abuse of a pilgrimage on record” (II, 164, 180, 165, 201, 177, 180). Waterton sees the “new” humanist learning giving voice to diabolic forces. He identifies both of Erasmus’s interlocutors in different ways as speaking for him—Ogygius, who visits Walsingham, as describing what Erasmus saw and did; Menenimus, the stay at home sceptic, is seen as the corrupted voice of skepticism and destruction that Erasmus brought to his experiences. Waterton faithfully defends Walsingham’s miracles against Erasmus’s skeptical tone. When he comes to the long discussion of the Virgin’s milk, Waterton exclaims indignantly that “most of” Erasmus’s “comments are too impious to quote” (II, 195). Predictably, however, he does spend some considerable time justifying the stories of the milk’s authenticity, commenting that he had rather “appear over credulous than over censorious.” There is no doubt in Waterton’s mind that the milk is authentic; that is the main point, he says, quite apart from all matters of controversy on how it might have come to Walsingham. He speculates, in a wonderful piece of imagining, that “our Ladye spilt some drops of her milk” in the “grotto” at Nazareth, and—citing a number of Counter-Reformation sources which similarly elaborate on the scene–speculates that, “alarmed by the threats of Herod” to new-born infants, her milk may well have dried up, so she retired to the familiar cave where she would feel safe, and “forthwith her milk returned in such abundance that a few drops fell upon the ground.” Given, he affirms, the veneration attached to any object associated with the life and passion of Christ, it is therefore “most natural that the Virgin’s milk “should have come in for a share of that veneration” (II, 200, 201, 203, 205). The consequences of Erasmus’s “fertile and mischievous brain,” according to Waterton, are played out in the “unholy proceedings” of the betrayal and destruction of Walsingham in the 1530s with, he regrets, the tragic connivance of the priory authorities. Waterton prints the key documents: Cromwell’s commissioners’ questions, the prior’s agreement to sign the Act of Supremacy, the dissolution orders, concluding with “the sacrilegious act” of the burning of our Lady’s image in London (II, 206, 212, 217). The destruction of the shrine constitutes a national tragedy: England has abandoned its true vocation, and only now in the middle of the nineteenth century, with the Catholic hierarchy restored, do we see the first signs of national repentance and, Waterton notes triumphantly, a miracle brought about by the Virgin herself, the first hints of the emergence of the Holy House from the excavations at Walsingham. In the tentative moves to uncover the priory, Lee Warner (with whom Waterton had dined) has now opened the ecstatic possibility of the re-emergence of the Holy House. Waterton died a decade before the first moves to re-establish the shrine, but he would have seen them as part of the Virgin’s

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initiative to reclaim her own, perhaps that her chosen people had been punished long enough and that there were sufficient signs of repentance and reparation even in the alienated established church, to turn once again to England. The metaphor of burial and disinternment or resurgence that I have traced throughout Walsingham’s history uncannily re-asserts itself in the modern construction of the shrines. The revival of Walsingham is traditionally dated from 1897, when the first modern Catholic pilgrimage, from King’s Lynn to the Slipper Chapel, took place. From the end of the nineteenth century, both Roman Catholic and Anglican enthusiasts started moves to re-establish Walsingham as a site of Marian pilgrimage, and by the 1920s and 1930s had been successful. The Anglicans did so, without the full approval of the Church’s hierarchy, first in the parish church and then in a more elaborate neo-Italianate shrine built on a privately funded piece of land opposite the Priory ruins, with a “Holy House” that approximately reproduced the dimensions of the one destroyed in 1538. The Anglican shrine was the brainchild of the eccentric, obsessive, Fr Hope Patten, and today continues expanding its facilities, its outreach and, despite Anglo-Catholicism no longer being as powerful in the Church of England as it was before the 1950s, and with a trickle of its supporters “going over to Rome,” it has nonetheless—largely through a more outward orientation—remained a striking presence in the Anglican Church. The Roman Catholic facilities also continue to grow, and now include a hostelry and a new parish church built facing the Friday Market in the village. A new era for Walsingham opened when these two shrines started in the 1980s to move cooperate and often enjoy joint activities as opposed to the rancorous relations that had been characteristic of the earlier period and which included insults, denunciations, and various kinds of scatological pettiness, and which is now epitomized in the joint website for Our Lady of Walsingham. Pope Benedict’s 2010 invitation to disaffiliated Anglo-Catholics to come into a distinctive communion with Rome may ring about a further re-alignment of facilities and personnel. In his novel, English Music, Peter Ackroyd—whose discussion in his Albion of the “English Imagination” I introduced with some degree of skepticism in Chapter 1, but whose term “disinternment” I have adopted—speaks of how special places, by implication all places if they are special for us, speak of how we act out the “same music” throughout history, asserting that “everything has been done before. Everything has been said before. It is the same pattern. It is the same music.” It is as if, by such a view, stories precede the actors in them, as if somehow rituals, words, stories, find men and women to enact them in ways that may most resemble “the unconscious experience of the child or lovers.” Only through “such acts of imagination can we see the images of eternity in the recurrent forms of the world … the archetypal form dwelling in substance.” “That is why,” Ackroyd continues, “we are moved by the features of an ancient landscape, because it provides the best possible approximation to that unchanging identity which is the eternal present.” Past acts and experiences are not necessarily lost in time but can be re-created by imagination and in a sense relived.29 Peter Ackroyd, English Music (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), 131, 165, 225.

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A place like Walsingham lends itself to such an idealistic theory of the interaction of imagination and history. Especially in the twentieth century, a selfconscious effort is made to recreate the underlying experiences that were seemingly destroyed at the Dissolution as if the Reformation had never happened. As Terry Eagleton observes on Ackroyd, his is a view of the imagination that cannot admit change; rather there is a core of permanence, what in the title of one of his novels, he calls “English music.” Such an understanding of the English imagination is intensely place and object-focused, “sensuous and materialist, more Catholic than Protestant,” in a sense ahistorical: as Eagleton comments, in such a view, there is no history involved, since “the English imagination has no history.” The past is a “depth to be excavated within the present,” and the present “a palimpsest through which the spectral lineaments of the long-buried are dimly visible” waiting their revival by the “redemptive rites” of imagination.30 It is a vision that, as I noted in the opening chapter, that may be attractive to a time or marginalized subgroup. But it is a view that needs to be heavily qualified by noting the disruptive, the forced destruction, the ugly violence that can result from the reification of what may be perceived to be “essential” to a place or people. The English imagination has its highly destructive sides, and many are recorded in the ‘Imagination,” in the poetry and fiction of England. These would include centuries of misogyny, Ralegh and Spenser’s brutality towards the Irish, the iconoclasm of both Cromwells, Thomas and Oliver, colonialism, industrialism, slavery, racism, let alone the exploitation of the ecosystem by corporate capitalism, and perhaps, as some Catholics, feminists and traditionalists alike, assert, the abandonment of the supernatural world altogether, a matter I will take up in the final chapter. We all wrestle with how to make sense of our histories, personal and collective. Twentieth-century Walsingham represents one attempt, admittedly from the margins of English society, but nonetheless connecting with powerful stories, to come to grips with that burden. Anglo-Catholicism itself may be seen, not entirely accurately, as one such, largely retrograde attempt to defy modernism. As the movement gathered supporters and confidence, it became increasingly keen to define itself against the liberal secularism of European culture, while remaining very aware of its Englishness (a perspective Waterton shared). Apart from the multitude of hymns, chants, devotional exercises, anthems and other compositions—the sincerity or usefulness to believers is not a question here— few musical compositions related to Walsingham have risen to the level of their predecessors like Byrd or Bull’s. There are also a number of popular novels which have used Walsingham, usually in its medieval guise, as the setting for historical fiction or even contemporary mysteries, and Walsingham does feature as a subject of a number of poems, including one by the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. And in some important poetry and fiction, Walsingham has been the richly symbolic setting for meditations on how we, successfully or otherwise, cope with living in a secular, unpredictable and rapidly changing world. Eagleton, Fish, Spivak, Žižek, and others, 216–9.

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Anglo-Catholicism’s most triumphant literary expression in the first half of the twentieth century was in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and on a somewhat lower level, the fiction of Charles Williams. The two of them help to define the dual traditions of Walsingham that I have argued we see emerging from the contradictions of medieval Mariology, what Williams repeatedly terms the “ways” of negation and affirmation. Barry Spurr points out that had Eliot chosen to live in America or Europe, he would have undoubtedly been a convert to Roman Catholicism: but living in England, he saw the Church of England’s Anglo-Catholic wing as having the responsibility of a historical and cultural mission to provide a difficult age (and him) with the discipline and tradition, “the necessary interdependence of a culture and religion of a people” he believed he required.31 Eliot’s poetry provides us with an often tortured vision of Anglo-Catholic Christianity with its distinctive Marian aspect focused on a rejection of the world and the flesh. Williams, by contrast, a member of the Oxford “Inklings” group, which included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, had family Anglo-Catholic connections. His idiosyncratic fiction, theology, and criticism provide us with a clear contrast—an imaginative, incarnational affirmation of the body, including the sexual body and its energies. Curiously, both Eliot and Williams look back to Dante, Eliot, for an insistence that Beatrice points beyond herself to the Virgin and then to God, Williams, for the affirmation that in some sense the Beatrician vision is itself a vision of the Virgin and of God. For Eliot, the body is to be denied and disciplined, for Williams it is to be affirmed and glorified. As we have seen, even within the Christian tradition, these alternates go back the emergence of the Church from its beginnings in a number of Jewish sects and are intertwined throughout medieval mariology, not least in the alternative traditions of pre-Reformation Walsingham. As the Anglican shrine at Walsingham was taking shape first in the fertile, obsessive mind of Hope Patten, and Anglo-Catholicism was building its presence in the Church of England, Eliot was searching for a poetic that would represent and give shape to the complexities of the age. Spurr’s study of Eliot’s Christianity has shown in great detail Eliot’s indebtedness to Anglo-Catholic beliefs, liturgy, devotions, preoccupations—and some of its idiosyncrasies. The Virgin was at the centre of 1920s Anglo-Catholicism, and from the time of his public profession of Anglo-Catholic faith, Eliot’s poetry is saturated with references to Mary. Spurr points out that Eliot’s specific connections with Walsingham were sparsely documented, but in 1957, he is recorded as making a donation to the shrine, although there is no record of any visit.32 Eliot turned to beliefs and stories that he saw underlying, and so able to give order to, the chaos he saw around him in the waste land of twentieth-century Europe—and in his early poetry they are increasingly stories centered on a redemptive female presence. As Elizabeth Daumer points out, the early poetry is “haunted by a series of voracious, often voluble, semi-hysterical women who, in their capacity to trap, ‘formulate,’ and disintegrate the male speakers of these poems, exhibit maternal Barry Spurr, “Anglo-Catholic in Religion”: T.S. Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2010), xi, 43. 32 Ibid., 78. 31

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power at its most frightening.”33 In “The Waste Land” a mix of female presences, mainly threatening or tragic, swirl around, haunting the imagination of modern men and women, acting as inspiration or satirical commentary on the degradation of the present. In the late 1920s, the Virgin emerges in Eliot’s poetry as if, like the Holy House of Walsingham itself, she had been lurking under the surface, gently erupting through the modernist text with the reminder of older stories that lay behind the unreal world of his early poetry. In Ash Wednesday (1930) the female presence in his poems emerges in multiple roles as mother, sister, daughter, tormenter, loving and stern, all experienced as aspects of the Virgin. As John Gatta notes, the petitions addressed to God at the poem’s beginnings are, by the end, addressed only to the Virgin.34 It is she who points the way beyond the waste land. But the Mary of “Ash Wednesday” is not a simplistically Christian figure. Eliot integrates pagan and mythological stories from Indian, Greek, Sumerian sources. Thus the Virgin incorporates stories of many religions’ goddess figures. She is both the lady who sits beneath the juniper tree, watching the white leopards devour the body, and she is the woman who rescues those parts the leopards refuse. In Daumer’s phrase, Ash-Wednesday shows Eliot’s effort, often troubled and contradictory, to accept the power of maternal subjectivity, through changing women figures; this time, however, they are benevolent intercessors, wise if withdrawn spiritual guides, “shadowy faces and voices, who guide, but also obstruct, the speaker’s arduous turning to God.”35 These are Dantean female redemptive figures, both the hortus conclusus, the sacred sealed garden, and the garden of fertility in the middle of a desert in which the speaker has hitherto resided. She both nurtures and protects: she is Beatrice, the “blessed sister,” and the “holy mother” and as was the case in Walsingham’s revival, she is the “spirit of the fountain,” who is petitioned for rescue at the poem’s end: “And let my cry come unto thee.”36 Above all, in “Ash Wednesday” the Virgin is the patroness of the Way of Negation, the way of transforming the waste land by denial and discipline. Likewise in “Four Quartets,” in the invocation to the Virgin in “The Dry Salvages,” she represents the universal force of nurturing and redemption through suffering that stands as an ideal, whether expressed in Christian, Buddhist or other religious terms, to which men’s stories have so often returned for protection in the face of the violence, unpredictability of the sea and the immediacy of death in an unpredictable universe. The inexorable rhythms of time and change need, Eliot suggests, to be compensated by some force, and he looks to the figure of the Virgin, standing on a promontory looking out at the sea as the symbol upon which we have built our stories of hope. Our life is a river, but all around us is the sea, with its “many voices/Many gods and many voices”: Elizabeth Daumer, “Charlotte Stearns Eliot and Ash-Wednesday’s Lady of Silences,” ELH 65 (1998), 479. 34 John Gatta, American Madonna: Images of the Divine Woman in Literary Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 130. 35 Daumer. “Charlotte Stearns Eliot,” 484. 36 T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971), 95. 33

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We cannot think of a time that is oceanless Or of an ocean not littered with wastage Or of a future that is not liable Like the past, to have no destination

If “the past has another pattern, and ceases to become a mere sequence,” we need, with Krishna, to “fare forward,” and with Mary, the lady “whose shrine stands on the promontory,” and who is asked too pray for all, in Dante’s words: “figlia del tuo figlio,/Queen of Heaven.”37 As a footnote to Eliot’s poetic expression of Anglo-Catholicism, in a poem from the 1950s, deeply influenced by Eliot, Walsingham itself explicitly appears, representing the same sense of power coming from below the surface of a culture that seems to have rejected her, similar to what was allegedly occurring in the revival of Walsingham itself. It is the final section of “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” by the New England poet Robert Lowell—at different stages of his career a convert to Roman Catholicism and then Anglicanism—entitled “Our Lady of Walsingham,” which in its final lines directs its readers to focus on the stern, inscrutable figure of the Virgin at the shrine. Like Eliot’s Virgin, Lowell’s Mary is a figure of negation and denial in the face of a world that has lost its way: There once the penitents took off their shoes And then walked barefoot the remaining mile; And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file Slowly along the munching English lane, Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose Track of your dragging pain. The stream flows under the druid tree, Shiloah’s whirlpools gurgle and make glad The castle of God. Sailor, you were glad And whistled Sion by that stream. But see: Our Lady, too small for her canopy, Sits near the altar. There’s no comeliness At all or charm in that expressionless Face with its heavy eyelids. As before, This face, for centuries a memory, Non est species, neque decor, Expressionless, expresses God: it goes Past castled Sion. She knows what God knows, Not Calvary’s Cross nor crib at Bethlehem Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham.38

Eliot, Collected Poems, 193, 197, 198. Robert Lowell, Poems 1938–1949 (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 23. For

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Lowell’s conversions, see Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 224–5.

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In the 1974 British edition of his poems, Lowell printed this concluding section of his grim meditation on death and human self-destruction as a separate poem, although the 1976 American edition of his collected poems restores the original structure.39 The vacillations about its place in relation to the rest of the poem, and indeed internally, give voice to contradictions not merely in the poet, but in relation to the multiple and competing discourses of Walsingham—transcendence versus immanence, the unapproachability of the stern image of Our Lady versus sacramentalism, austerity versus fetishization. Lowell presents Walsingham as a warning of judgment, emerging through the surface of grim material reality; initially contrasted with the grim, grey narrative of his cousin, Warren Winslow, who was drowned in the ocean, the Walsingham section of the poem asks its readers to “see,” even if what we are given to see appears unapproachable, transcending our horrors and tragedies. Written at the end of World War Two, Lowell uses the ocean, the “earth-shaker, green,” and the whale, the enemy of Melville’s Ahab who haunts the poem and represents a vengeful and destructive masculine God. Our Lady of Walsingham requires abandonment of this world; she calls only for discipline, sacrifice, the acceptance of inevitable pain. Her seeming indifference to the bodily anguish of the human, what Henry Hart calls her “voiceless stoicism,” offers no way of affirmation even to those making their way along the Walsingham Way to venerate the image at the Virgin’s shrine.40 “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” is arguably one of the great poems of the century, a focused gloss on Eliot’s own cryptic but suggestive evocation of “the moment in and out of time” within the local and specific in “The Dry Salvages”: music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses, Hints followed by guesses.

Eliot and Lowell provide striking examples of the way of negation: their vision of Wasingham is not a pastoral retreat, but a place of discipline, withdrawal, even punishment. The body is eaten, drowned, discarded; Our Lady of Walsingham shows only how it may be redeemed through suffering. By contrast, Charles Williams’s visionary novels emphasize not the Via Negativa that animates Eliot’s poetry (or Lowell’s Walsingham elegy) but rather the affirmation of the body and its magical, transformative potential. Between Eliot and Williams, in fact, we can see the complementary (or contradictory) 39 For Lowell’s changes to “The Quaker Graveyard,” see Albert Gelpi, “The Reign of the Kingfisher: Robert Lowell’s Prophetic Poetry,” in Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry, (eds) Steven Gould Axelrod and Helen Deese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 63. See also Barry Spurr, “The Poetics of Incarnation: T.S. Eliot’s ‘shrine’ and Robert Lowell’s Walsingham,” in Janes and Waller, Walsingham, 233–42. 40 Henry Hart, Robert Lowell and the Sublime (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 86.

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traditions of Walsingham itself being played out within Anglo-Catholicism in the first half of the twentieth century. Williams’s direct connections with Walsingham were through his uncle James Charles Wall, for whom he worked early in his career as a reader and editor for Oxford University Press; Wall, an antiquarian and local historian, was an early supporter of the Anglican shrine.41 Williams combined faithful attendance at the Anglo-Catholic parish of St Silas the Martyr in Kentish Town with membership of the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, a Rosicrucian society interested in the combination of mysticism, esoteric religion and magic. Williams’s The Figure of Beatrice, arguably his most important book and one that is still among the most suggestive commentaries on Dante, takes the “Beatrician moment”—Dante’s meeting with Beatrice—as the starting point of the affirmation of divinity apprehended in the body, the “greatest expression in European literature of the way of approach of the soul to its ordained end through the affirmation” rather than the rejection of images, beginning in Dante’s case “with the image of a girl” and expressed through what Dante calls the “glorious and holy flesh.” This is the “Way of Affirmation” through which the lover is able to see the beloved as God chose her, unfallen, celestial, and is inspired to attempt to become part of the vision he has seen—or been given. The Way of Affirmation refers, asserts Williams, not to any unusual human experience, but one that is common, “ordinary yet extraordinary,” involving “adoration of its own proper kind” and not just pointing to but constituting part of the adoration of the Virgin herself.42 It is, says Williams, what Dante famously described when he first saw Beatrice as a young girl, in the la Chiesa di Santa Margherita in Florence, and then when she was older, in stray meetings, and if we are to believe the passionate imaginings of the Kabbala scholar Charles Mirsky, secretly and passionately and even physically before she died.43 “At that moment,” when he sees Beatrice, Dante says, “and what I say is true the vital spirit of life, the one that dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart” knew that “here begins a new life.” Incipit Vita Nova. He is not just momentarily struck but stricken with amazement, and knows not only has his bliss appeared, but also—“Woe is me, wretched! because often from this time forth”— he will be disturbed. He meets her in his poems as he struggles throughout the Vita Nuova to explain what has happened to him, how he loses his wits when he tries to explain to her, and is so afraid that he invents “screens,” others whom he asserts he loves in order to escape the impact of the wonder that grows within him whenever he thinks of her or sees her.44 But she dies. He describes how he struggles through Hell to reach her and meets her in the extraordinary scene in Purgatorio 31, when See e.g., James Charles Wall, Ceremonial Guide to High Mass in Ecclesia Anglicana (London: Talbot, 1900); Devils (Plymouth: William Brendon and Sons, 1904). 42 Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: a Study in Dante (New York: Noonday Press, 1961), 7, 8. 9, 27. 43 Mark Mirsky, Dante, Eros, Kabbalah (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 27, 60. 44 Dante, Vita Nuova, trans. Mark Musa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3–4. 41

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she turns to him and says “Ben Sem. Ben Sem”: “Look on us well: we are indeed, we are/ Beatrice.” She then conducts him throughout the Paradiso, teaching him and cajoling him and teasing and illuminating him—probably, despite Mirsky’s speculations, in ways that she did not in ‘real’ life have the opportunity to do.45 Finally, she departs, fondly but firmly warning him that he gazes on her with such adoring looks that he acknowledges that he may forget the God from whom she has come on her mission. This is the wonder, say Dante and Williams, afforded by the affirmation of the body of the beloved: not just the momentary flash, the shock of recognition, but the recognition that continues to shock. Dante characterizes Beatrice’s effect on him as being smitten, invaded, transfixed; his feelings are sexual, aesthetic, moral, devotional; he acknowledges changes that are occurring in him over which he has no control and which he did not seek. In Heidegger’s famous phrase, he has been “thrown” into being. That she is a woman and not just an idea, and indeed very specifically a woman, is part of the order of things as he presents it. For Dante, being reborn in the new life is something that is caused by the “wonder” of her female, nurturing, erotic, and mothering body. What Williams terms the “theology of romantic love” includes not only the affirmation of marriage as a way to God but also the “second image of the Beatrician kind,” what he terms “substituted love” of subsequent visions of God experienced through sexuality. Williams argued, somewhat tortuously, that the “second image” should not be denied, although we are nonetheless “asked to free ourselves from concupiscence in regard to it.” Dante himself, he observed, was hardly a striking example of monogamy, “considering the extent to which his imagination concentrated itself on one women while he was married to another.” Biographers have inevitably pointed out that Williams himself often experienced such a situation: C.S. Lewis observed that many women fell in love with Williams, who at times saw the sublimation of sexual energy as a way to God, at other times incorporated erotic energy into a blend of mysticism, magic, and esoteric lore, which has not always endeared him to orthodox Christian commentators. A typical view is that he had a “penchant for mythologizing his life” and a “preference for mythic over mundane reality,” which “enabled him to justify and even glorify his forbidden passion.46 A less suspicious reading of Williams is, however, to see him as the explorer of the Way of Affirmation, the expression in relationships of the Incarnation, and thereby connecting with the “alternative” traditions of affirmation of the body that have surfaced, spasmodically but insistently, at Walsingham. For a more recent (and more down-to earth) exploration of Walsingham in fiction, however, I now turn to the writings, this time dating from the late 1970s to the present, of A.N. Wilson. Many of Wilson’s twenty or so novels are set in and around Walsingham, and the Anglican shrine is often mentioned as a symbol of the fascination and complexity of Anglo-Catholicism in the generation after Dante, “Purgatory,” canto 30; Williams, Figure of Beatrice, 101. See David Llewellyn Dodds, Charles Williams (Woodbridge: Boydell Press,

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1991), 156.

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that of Eliot and Williams, when its dynamism seemed to have faded or else been absorbed into a very different religious situation and a very different sense of “Englishness.” Wilson, who is a prolific essayist and biographer as well as novelist, has been a “fellow-traveler with Christianity,” one who “remained and remains on the borders” most of his personal and professional life. I am, he writes, one of the “in-between generation, certainly not able to believe in the way that our ancestors believed, but unable, quite, to forget what it was like when belief was taken for granted.”47 He has written both attacks on and defenses of Christianity and the Church, skeptical and committed lives of Jesus; he has been a professed Roman Catholic, Anglican, agnostic and atheist. Regardless of his changing allegiance or sometimes open hostility to Christianity, Wilson has always been haunted by the stories beneath the dogma. Human beings, he repeatedly claims, are gifted with the need to “mythologize existence, to draw out its shapes, stories, significance,” and further, to ask (and never finally know) whether these stories are somehow inherently in history or whether, in felt necessity or despair, we construct them for ourselves.48 His changing attitudes to the Church has never stopped his fascination for and admiration of Anglo-Catholicism which he described as “one of the bravest and most sustained attacks on the notion that ugliness is a good thing.” The sequence of novels known as “The Lampart Papers,” a sequence about a family’s religious and literary interconnections, takes the distinctive landscape and sky of north Norfolk as its setting and includes frequent mentions of and visits to Walsingham and its “Walsingham Matildas,” to nearby Binham priory, and includes a summer Shakespeare festival which has the Walsingham Madonna as its spiritual patron.49 In addition to the Lampart sequence, Wilson has written a series of novels on the place of religion in English life, ranging from the farcical satire of Unguarded Hours (1978) and Kindly Light (1979) in which the ‘smells and bells’ side of Anglo-Catholicism is gently mocked, with fond but slightly mocking pictures of “Walsingham in the old days” of Hope Patten, to the much acclaimed and moving The Healing Art (1980) which focuses on whether the heroine’s breast cancer has been cured by accident, misdiagnosis, or as a result of a visit to Walsingham and the intervention, direct or indirect, of Our Lady of Walsingham.50 The Healing Art—which has been seen in part as a roman à clef, with portraits of friends and acquaintances at Oxford, including the logical positivist philosopher A.J. Ayer and Wilson’s former wife, Kathleen Duncan-Jones—is Wilson’s preeminent Walsingham novel, in which his lifelong puzzlement about religion is movingly explored. His heroine, Pamela, wonders whether “sometimes the reason for the compulsion” to return to the Christian stories “seemed purely sentimental” or whether there might be something “harder and more real” that draws her in. Or she wonders, “perhaps it had all been sent, or did she mean meant”? (44, 45). Such 49 50 47 48

A.N. Wilson Daughters of Albion, 191; Watch in the Night, 71. A.N. Wilson, Unguarded Hours, 168. Wilson, Watch in the Night, 77, 69. A.N. Wilson, The Healing Art (New York: Penguin Books, 1982).

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questions echo throughout the novel, a moving social comedy, a phrase Wilson used to describe the novels of Iris Murdoch, a close friend and the subject of one of his most distinguished biographies. Two women undergo surgery for breast cancer. One, Pamela, is an Oxford don, Anglo-Catholic but with a strong dose of skepticism. She is given a few months to live, refuses treatment, but not only survives but is shown to be free of all signs of cancer. The other woman, Dorothy, has no particular religious affiliation (or anguish), is supposedly cleared of cancer, but does in fact die of the disease. There has, it turns out, almost certainly been a confusion of the two women’s diagnoses. Despite the likely confusion, we are asked to consider whether Walsingham’s mysterious aura and a miracle of Our Lady of Walsingham may have played a role. When she is ill and believes herself to be dying, Pamela and her AngloCatholic priest friend Hereward go to Walsingham. It strikes her—as it does, indeed, many visitors outside the novel—that it is an uncanny mixture of awe and fraudulence. While she thinks of herself as “a Believer rather than an Unbeliever” (180), Hereward, on the other hand, believes passionately in Walsingham’s power: “I’ve been here every time my life reached a crisis, and I’ve always left it with my difficulties resolved and my mind refreshed.” For him, like Erasmus’s naïve pilgrim Ogygius, “no surer proof was needed of its authenticity: here indeed was the holy well, which since medieval times had had miraculous healing powers,” and which, for him, is “a way of releasing divine grace into the human scene in a way which normally isn’t possible.” Pamela enjoys the day together with Hereward, is sprinkled at the Anglican shrine and drinks the water (48, 49). Still believing that she is going to die, she goes to New York to see an old friend, becomes emotionally involved with a young woman who is pregnant, apparently by an old friend of Pamela’s, and discovers that she in fact does not have any signs of cancer. Coming back to England, she discovers that it is most likely that her records have been confused with the other woman’s. Wilson’s novel does not allow its readers—any more than he allows his characters—to account definitely for Pamela’s cure. Even before she discovers that her records have probably been misread, her faith hovers between a skeptical belief and disbelief. If, as does happen, she is cured, what does that prove? Pamela is herself skeptical about the influence of Walsingham. In New York, she reverts to puzzling over her visit, wondering whether Walsingham was really just a kind of wishing well after all, and whether cancer was no more curable by sprinkling than by crossing ones fingers or touching wood. Yet there seems to be something unprepared happening to her, an unexpected transformation. Is this caused by Walsingham? “Another fine mess you’ve gotten me into,” she muses in New York, where in the Anglican church of the Virgin on 46th Street (known locally as St Mary of the Smoke51), there is a statue of Our Lady of Walsingham (106). I owe this information to Dr Bill Baskin, Associate Provost of Purchase College, State University of New York, whose knowledge of the material details of American Catholicism rivals Waterton’s English knowledge, and to whom I am indebted for many reminders of traditional Catholic practices. 51

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But as Hereward explains, irritated by her doubts and also by his own inability to ‘prove’ any miracles, “prayer can be answered in unexpected ways.” For him, Walsingham’s sprinkling and drinking isn’t like a “wishing-well” (50). It is rather a “way of releasing divine grace into the human scene” (139), and “divine grace” is not easily accounted for in measurable terms. If the visit to Walsingham has played some role, does the change Pamela undergoes come from human causes, from the random events of history, pure fortuitousness, from our stories, or somehow from the Virgin? At Walsingham, Pamela prays that she “should have life and whether she liked it or not, life more abundantly” (52).And that is, mysteriously, what seems to happen. Hereward echoes the question asked by Elizabeth as she meets Mary in the scene of the Visitation, “And whence is this to me, that the Mother of my Lord should come to me?” (140). “Falling in love,” Pamela thinks, as Charles Williams affirms in his theology of romantic love, is a kind of miracle, “much too intense and peculiar,” and it “never happened (or almost never) with people one would have chosen” (108). The unexpected and seemingly inexplicable does happen. She ends the novel married to her priest, pregnant, and as they both look forward to “new life” in a completely other sense than she expected, she does indeed anticipate a life “more abundant.” Is that a miracle?/ the novel asks. And if so, in what sense? What do we mean by “miracle”? Not primarily the instantaneous granting of a wish, whether that might be rescue from an enemy or the building of a chapel? Or is it “all a muddle, not part of a plan, just a series of flukes and currents?” (180). Simply something unpredictable that we single out as surprising but explicable by natural causes? We might think back to the questions asked of pre-Reformation Walsingham by Cromwell’s commissioners about whether the miracles of Our Lady might be explained as natural phenomena. Wilson’s novel observes, perhaps with some regret, that we are living in the largely de-sacralized world that Cromwell’s revolution brought about. Clever and often moving, he highlights the ambiguities and losses of that world and give hints of the stories that have come down to us of the world we have lost, and asks whether such events can be explained. We fall back, Wilson argues, on our stories. The miracles of a post Dissolution world, if they are miracles, are (probably) human ones. In Wilson’s Vicar of Sorrows (1993), another of his farcical moral comedies, one of his characters tries to dissociate Christianity from the overwhelmingly negative views of sexuality that has characterized much of its history, and in somewhat more graphic terms than most writers about Walsingham have used, the confrontation of orthodox and sexualized Mariology in Walsingham’s history is thrust before us by his hero, a wayward and outspoken vicar: “Now Our Lady— nothing against Our Lady, wonderful woman no doubt,” he bursts out, but the early Church was dominated by woman-haters: “Plato was a queer, Plotinus was a queer, St Paul was a queer. They’d never got their noses in a cunt—let alone their cocks. So they spun all these stories about the Parthenos, the Virgin-Goddess” which took away the bodily realities of women, and which somehow must be overcome, as Lisa Isherwood argues, somewhat more decorously, “through the prioritizing of the female body, anatomically and symbolically, in our theological

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worlds.”52 As with Erasmus’s coy joke about the Virgin’s “pryvytes,” there is a serious theological and historical issue behind Wilson’s ribaldry. Jane Caputi points to the historical error of seeing the female genitals as “inferior, animalistic, indless, instinctual, low, dirty, and disgusting”; in truth, she asserts, they are “the mark of divinity upon the body, manifesting forces of desire, ecstasy, exuberance, cyclic movement, creativity and procreativity … Both the penis and the vulva are manifestations of the primal source of being.” Or as Wilson puts it a little more vaguely in Daughters of Albion, sexuality “unites us to the Sacred Fire” in the way Holy Communion or a ray of the sun does.53 In recent years, Walsingham continues to appear occasionally in contemporary poems and fiction.54 Such poems include, notably, “Walsingham,” by the gay Catholic American poet, Dunstan Thompson, who lived his later life in Cley-nextthe-sea so he could be close to Walsingham and whose poem on the shrine contrasts the miracles of the past with the kitsch of the present and even the material world of the past: “For shrines, crowns, teapots, shatter–/But prayer lasts.” By contrast, Martyn Crucifix’s recent prize-winning poem. “An English Nazareth” (2004) looks at the vision of Richeldis from the perspective of the Norfolk workers who must carry out her instructions and contrast their lives with hers: We—who have only our strength to sell And so little here to be thankful for We know well she has never risen From that embroidered footstool …

Her vision, whether invented or real, will be built because she has power over them, and yet it will be theirs: “local men build as we have always built/English wood upon English earth.”55 In popular fiction, Walsingham occasionally attracts writers in the tradition of Agnes Strickland, constructing a romanticized late medieval world, full of miracles, romance, and occasional connections with history. Anya Seton’s Katherine, a melodramatic account—described by an admirer as “possibly the most romantic true love story in British history,” and voted in the top 10 works of fiction by the Isherwood, “Our Lady of Perpetual Succour,” 126. Caputi, “The Naked Goddess,” 195. 54 Other works of fiction including scenes at Walsingham include the mystery by Kate 52 53

Charles, The Snares of Death (New York: The Mysterious Press, 1992), and an historical romance by Brenda Rickman Vantrease, The Mercy Seller (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2007). 55 For Dunstan Thompson, see “Walsingham,” Kenyon Review 25 (1963), 119; Poems 1950–1974 (Bungay: Paradigm Press, 1984) and Dunstan Thompson: On the Life & Work of a Lost American Master (eds) D.A. Powell & Kevin Prufer (Warrensburg: Pleiades Press, 2010); for Martin Crucefix, see An English Nazareth (London: Enitharmon Press), 17. For another significant poem of some interest, see “Walsingham: the Holy House,” The Poems of Rowan Williams (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 65–6.

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Ladies Home Journal and in the BBC’s top 100 books56—of the life of Katherine Swynford, John of Gaunt’s third wife, culminates in a pilgrimage to Walsingham in which Katherine prays for the return of her lost daughter Blanchette. Seton draws (and uses a fair amount of fictional license with) details from Erasmus, and for good measure includes a visit to Julian of Norwich by her heroine. In David Lodge’s The Picturegoers, a pilgrimage to Walsingham provides an amusing incident related to the effort a modern pilgrim must make in a secular world. In Paradise News, Lodge skillfully weaves religious and sexual suggestions together, raising the issue of whether in a postmodern, desacralized world, pilgrimage to a place like Walsingham or Compostela can be a meaningful metaphor, representing more than nostalgia and escape. The novel answers that question very affirmatively but ironically, with a post-modern twist: it ends with a pilgrimage—but to Copenhagen, Kierkegaard’s birthplace, and undertaken not by pious pilgrims but by a sexual threesome. Since the mid nineteenth century, then, Walsingham has become once more a Catholic shrine—though in a world vastly changed from that of the pre-Reformation era. Walsingham’s place in the “English imagination,” in the context of this reCatholicization is, however, far more complicated than what Waterton and indeed later Anglo-Catholic enthusiasts may have fantasized, far more complex than a simple revival and renewal, as its adherents were to claim, whether by divine (or Marian) grace or not. Our Lady of Walsingham may have returned to north Norfolk, but she has been accompanied by both ecstasy and accusation. Walsingham becomes, and remains, no less than its medieval predecessor, a site of competing discourses, a place of “alternate” possibilities. As Tina Beattie expostulates in one of her forthright essays, “Christianity was and is a religion made for and by men. Of course women have played a role, sometimes a significant role, in influencing its development, but in its doctrines, structures of leadership and practices of faith, it is a religion designed to meet men’s expectations on earth as in heaven, and to satisfy their spiritual and intellectual desires.” It’s time, she adds “for a women’s Reformation.”57 The place Walsingham might play in that is the subject of the next chapter.

56 Anya Seton, Katherine: a Novel (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2004); Diane Schoemperlen, Our Lady of the Lost and Found (Toronto: HarperPerennial Canada, 2001), 103-6. http://booksiloved.com/20/Katherine.html. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/ top100_2.shtml. Accessed May 1, 2010. 57 Wilson, Vicar of Sorrows, 381; Wilson, Daughters of Albion, 7; Beattie, “Time for a women’s reformation?” Monday, April 19. tina-beattie.blogspot.com/2010/04/time-forwomens-reformation.html. Accessed January 1, 2011.

Chapter 8

Alternate, Post-modern, Feminist Mary(ies)? Imagining Walsingham Today March 2008: a dozen academics met for a three-day conference at the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, traveling from Aberdeen, Brighton, Chicago, London (both Britain’s and Canada’s), New York, Norwich, Pittsburgh and Texas. They included sociologists, literary critics, art and social historians, and anthropologists. They were Catholic (practicing and ex-, Roman and Anglo-) Protestant, Jewish, Atheist, and religiously indifferent. There was, appropriately enough for a place centered on a mother, one babe-in-arms, with a devoted academic mother and her supportive husband. It was an extremely congenial gathering— attributable, some said, to the distinctive, even uncanny, atmosphere of the shrine and village, as well as to an unusually sunny late winter weekend. Following their meeting, the scholars collaborated on writing what became a collection of essays on the cultural importance of Walsingham, joined by others who had been unable to attend, from Alabama, Australia, New York, and Wales. In fact, 2008 was a typical year for visitors to Walsingham—typical for the later Middle Ages up to 1538, and typical for much of the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first: throughout the year, similar groups, large and small, families, couples, individuals, arrived and filled local hostels, bed and breakfasts, and campgrounds. Most were religiously committed, mainly Anglicans and Roman Catholics, some were simply tourists. There were some self-described pagans. There were occasional placard-bearing Protestant protestors. Sometimes a few policemen were on hand, but (as far as could be ascertained) there were no brutal arrests, and certainly nobody was hung, drawn and quartered. One distinctive feature of these modern visitors was that, unlike their medieval counterparts, they were able to anticipate and continue to discuss their experiences after (and during) their visits on the internet, by e-mail, texting, blogs. But just like their medieval counterparts, while at Walsingham, they gathered in the hostels and pubs, to chat, drink, eat, make future plans, and retire to bed—including some who were married, some nearly so, and some, no doubt, yearning for others far away. The anthropologist Simon Coleman comments that Walsingham is “both tourist trap and sacred shrine.” What do such a mixture of visitors come to see  Walsingham and English Culture: Landscape, Sexuality, and Cultural Memory, (eds) Dominic Janes and Gary Waller (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).  Simon Coleman, “Mary on the Margins? The Modulation of Marian Imagery in Place, Memory, and Performance,” in Moved by Mary, 21.

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Fig. 8.1 The Slipper Chapel, Houghton St Giles. Photograph by permission of John Twyning. today? Religious pilgrims come to one or both shrines, but the centre of attention for visiting twenty-first century Walsingham are the last remnants of the ruined medieval priory—in particular, the 80-foot high window at the east end of what was once a large church. On most days of the year, visitors can be seen touring the ruins and strolling (or processing through) the surrounding village. In the grounds of the “Abbey,” they look at the two wells and the small pool behind the remains of the window; they walk around the few remaining masonry outcrops and peer into what had once been a refectory and an undercroft; they stroll about an extensive area of well-kept lawn and gardens. If they are part of an organized tour or pilgrimage group, or are just displaying their knowledge, they know to stare solemnly at a small raised rectangle of turf about 20 feet long and 10 wide, some 200 paces from the wells, on what had once been the north side of the church. On Sundays and, indeed, if one goes looking, every day, there are religious devotions, sprinklings of holy water with accompanying peels of bells, masses, community singing, processions. In that particular summer of 2008, the little village—a few streets, a market place filled with parked cars, packed teashops, religious souvenir and bookshops, bed and breakfasts, one or two environmentally conscious boutiques—was full of visitors, with groups standing on the narrow footpaths, walking up the middle of the narrow high street, avoiding (usually successfully) buses and cars and bicycles and caravans, and trudging up the incline towards what had once been the Martyr’s Field, looking for the car park.

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Hardly a huge number alongside Lourdes’ five to eight million or Mexico City’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine’s twelve million, about 400,000 visitors that summer—pilgrims and tourists, the dedicated and the curious, perhaps some who just drifted in to see what was there—descended on this small village in north Norfolk. In its understated English way, Walsingham—in 2006 voted in a BBC survey Britain’s favorite religious site—is an intriguing phenomenon to be located in what has been seen as the most secularized country in (at least as the current pope sees it) the world’s most secularized continent. Despite the enthusiasm of its pilgrims and authorities, Walsingham today has a seeming marginality to secular Britain that might have almost satisfied the radical Protestants of the Reformation—but, as if they were afraid that the place retains something of its old allure, their spiritual descendants still occasionally gather in the Common Place and hope that the Almighty takes one more step and utterly destroys the site of “the most popular form of idolatry that ever captured the human heart, the worship of Mary” since, in the words of a scandalized protestor against the ‘mariolatry’ that re-emerged in the nineteenth century and has flourished since, “not in any tongue used by mortals has such a list of impious compliments been given to a woman living or dead.” Two accounts, published on the same day in June 2010, of the Anglican National pilgrimage epitomize something of these opposed understandings of Walsingham. Sara Maitland, writing in the Guardian, speaks fondly of her experience at the “very brash, very noisy, very flamboyant, and very un-Anglican” National Pilgrimage to the Anglican Shrine, and how the event seamlessly integrated “religious practice into quite disorderly pleasures”; the National Pilgrimage is accused, Maitland writes (and in the interests of fairness to all, the Roman Catholic equivalent is similarly celebrated or criticized), “of being vulgar (true), drunken (true), cliquey (true), camp (true), superstitious (true in the sense that it is non-biblical and wrapped up in slightly bogus medieval folk narratives, though in my opinion none the worse for that) and irreverent (profoundly untrue).” It “refreshes the religious parts,” she continues, “that other Anglican practices do not reach. I think they are parts that we need to refresh … You have only to look at the creation to see that if God has taste it is a good deal more like the gaudy brashness of the Walsingham national than it is like choral evensong.” In complete contrast, the “Protestant Old Paths” website wrote of the same event to record the protests of a brave group of about 50 Protestants “witnessing” against “the errors of Mariolatry” and standing up “for Biblical Truth in the midst of such darkness” as Walsingham represents and 

See www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/sunday/features/spiritual. Accessed March 1, 2009.  William Cathcart, The Papal System: From its Origin to the Present Time (Philadelphia: Cathcart and Turner, 1872), 313, 320.  Sara Maitland, “A very un-Anglican Affair,” The Guardian, Friday, 4 June 2010 : www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jun/04/walsingham-pilgrimage-anglicanchristian. Accessed June 5, 2010.

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in particular the culmination of the procession in which “the dolly”—a favorite Protestant sneer at the Image of Our Lady of Walsingham—“was carried through the streets.” Like their opponents, pamphlets, placards and earnest conversations tried to carry their particular message, against idolatry and blasphemy. Even though the striking revival of Walsingham in the past century has inspired many accounts—tracts, pamphlets, guidebooks, biographies, memoirs, devotional readings, coffee table books—as Nigel Yates comments, until the 1990s, such accounts were devotional rather than academic. Semi-official publications like Donald Hole’s history of the Anglican shrine (1939) or Colin Stephenson’s Walsingham Way (1970) provided some analysis of its revival from within the different professing communities; but it was only with the succession of sociological studies by Simon Coleman and his colleagues in the 1990s that Walsingham became the object of serious scholarly scrutiny. Uncommitted scholarship has not always been approved or even noticed by Walsingham devotees: continuing the devotional tradition was a 2007 volume, Sacred Space: House of God, Gate of Heaven, which aggressively stressed the ‘orthodox’ Christian experiences of Walsingham in order to counteract the authors’ concern that the term “sacred space” was being “hijacked by yoga teachers, therapists and the unconventional to suit their own ends.” The editors of the essays from the conference mentioned at the start of this chapter were struck by this aggressive promotional stance, and assured their readers, with Erasmian tongue-in-cheek, that as far as they knew, none of their contributors were yoga teachers or therapists; none were particularly unconventional, either personally or intellectually: and all were distinguished or emerging academics. Nor does the term “sacred space,” the editors gently suggested, belong to any one religious or intellectual tradition. Walsingham itself often proclaims itself as a place for all, and as Maria Kassel observes, the figure of the Virgin Mary herself has historically evoked an even more “fundamental psychological disposition,” a level of experience more “universally human” than even just Christian. Miri Rubin’s study of the history of Mary, Mother of God, points out that she was not just born but made, most intensely in the 400 years during which what became orthodox Christianity emerged from the many Christian sects, both Jewish and Gentile, gathering into itself a number of the miscellaneous strands of religious  http://www.protestantoldpaths.org/2010/06/walsingham-witness-2010.html. Accessed June 5, 2010. See also the account in Dominic Janes, “Queer Walsingham,” in Janes and Waller, Walsingham, 147–9.  Nigel Yates, “Walsingham And Inter-War Anglo-Catholicism,” in Janes and Waller, Walsingham, 131–46.  [Donald Hole,] England’s Nazareth: A History of the Holy Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, rev. edition, Rev. Colin Stephenson (London: Faith Press, 1959); Stephenson, Walsingham Way; Sacred Space: House of God, Gate of Heaven, (eds) Philip and John North (London: Continuum, 2007). The advertisement for the North volume was found at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sacred-Space-House-Gate-Heaven/dp/0826494773, accessed July 1, 2008. For a study of the Anglo-Papalism surrounding Hope Patten see Michael Yelton, Anglican Papalism: A History 1900–1960 (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2005).

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and philosophical belief of late antiquity. From these complex beginnings came also what I have termed the “alternative” understandings of Mary which the lived history of Walsingham readily illustrates. Looking back to the previous chapters, two major themes—Kassel’s phrase “universally human” is perhaps question-begging, but they are at least very deeply rooted in Western history—stand out. One is how Walsingham’s status as a “sacred place” contradictorily both connects and contrasts with the gradual post-Reformation abandonment of the “magical” view of the cosmos, replaced (so it is assumed, and perhaps only in the so-called developed world) since the Reformation by an increasingly de-sacralised view of human life; and second, the issue of women’s sexuality that surfaces throughout Walsingham’s history and which indeed goes back to the very emergence of Christianity from the fringes of the late Roman empire. That issue, the inter-relationship of sexuality and religion, no less than the cosmological or eco-systemic issue, has haunted Western history and remains central to many contemporary struggles. And the two are not unconnected. In what sense, if any, can we take seriously Hopkins’s striking metaphor comparing the Virgin to the air we breathe? Or is she the air we breathe by another name? And how might Walsingham help us to answer these more general and perhaps unanswerable questions, or as Kristeva quips, “dissolve them or at least endlessly and inconclusively elucidate them”?10 Over the past 20 years, pioneering work on Walsingham as a place of multiple, “alternate,” even “subversive,” traditions, has been carried out, as my many references to their studies have acknowledged, by Simon Coleman and his colleagues. Following in his footsteps, as a fascinated observer of Walsingham, both of its history and its re-emergence in the modern world—and as someone perhaps just on one or other side of halfway between ‘pilgrim’ and ‘tourist’—I have made a number of visits to Walsingham in recent years, talking and corresponding with residents, visitors and, in a sense, the shrine itself. Walsingham is widely experienced as an unusual and ‘special’ place, not only by the Christian faithful, but by many who come with some other or no particular religious commitment. Part of Walsingham’s effect, upon which many comment, is a nostalgia that it may easily generate, even among skeptics, for the disappearance of the old magical universe, and indeed part of Walsingham’s appeal to the faithful is precisely its affirmation that that view of Creation was abandoned by faithless and misguided generations and can now be re-experienced and re-affirmed. After sitting in the Anglican shrine’s reconstruction of the Holy House, one otherwise skeptical visitor remarked to me that he now could understand why St Bernard could devote himself to praising the Virgin in the most extravagantly erotic terms, or why St Teresa and so many other women mystics felt their own sexual ecstasies by contemplating the pain of the Virgin embracing her son’s body. The Catholic feminist theologian Tina Kassel, “Mary and the Human Psyche,” 74; Rubin, Mother of God, xvi–xvii. Julia Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 5. 



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Beattie, whose work I have also frequently quoted, contemplating her own unease about visiting Lourdes, warns that “to romanticise Lourdes as a place of holiness and healing would be as simplistic as to write it off as a place of superstition and mumbo-jumbo, for it can be both and neither.” She talks of the liminality of Lourdes, as a place (like Walsingham) that opens up “rituals and life-changing experiences that have a transformative effect on us,” where we can discover we can “enter into states of consciousness, relationships and ways of expressing ourselves which are outside our expectations.”11 At the same time, when at Walsingham, I can also understand why the Protestant iconoclasts were so threatened by the power of what Cranmer and Latimer, like the Lollards before them, saw as the “wyche of Walsingham” and why they felt so strongly that they needed to vandalize, obliterate, and burn in order to rid themselves of her insistent power over them. Perhaps, as Kristeva comments, the English were always an emotionally repressed people, and therefore prone to spasmodic, irrational violence, but the Reformation has much blame for reinforcing that tendency.12 Alongside and often interacting with the nostalgic and traditional at Walsingham can be encountered various expressions of skepticism, sometimes (as A.N. Wilson’s novels elegantly demonstrate) in the same person. It will be recalled from Chapter 3 that Erasmus had gently questioned the properties of the Holy Well’s water as an instance where an event (in his case the curing of stomach pains) could be explained either as a miracle or more empirically. Some 2008 visitors, and not impious or mocking ones, commented that after drinking water from the Anglican shrine’s well they seemed to be visited not by relief from stomach pains but painful visitations from them, while in 2009, the possibility of transmitting swine flu through drinking water from the well was heard in cautious murmurs from some. Miraculous cure or simply material effects? The Virgin’s own intervention, as warning or punishment? The natural (and varied) changes in water itself? Cromwell’s commissioners put it very explicitly in their question, “what proof is there that [the supposed miracle] could not have been worked by natural means?”13 In a dozen or so words the magical universe that had given meaning to Walsingham was being directly questioned. Part of the ecstatic, even hysterical, atmosphere of the Shrine today likely echoes that fear that the skeptics might be right—just as 600 years ago many at Walsingham no doubt suspected as much, as they encountered the new learning and saw, or suspected, where that eventually might lead. Hilary Mantel’s evocative novel on Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall (2009), gives imaginative voice to the emergent empiricism of the Reformation, as the idolatry of the Image was in the process of being replaced by the idolatry of the Word.

Tina Beattie, “An Immense Maternal Presence,” The Tablet, 3 Oct 2009. Kristeva, Feminine and the Sacred, 43. 13 For the text of the Commissioners’ Articles, see Stephenson, Walsingham Way, 62; Gillett, Walsingham, 61–3. 11

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My own equivalent to being caught, as Erasmus was, between the magical and empirical universes was during a journey with my family from the village to the Roman Catholic shrine and Slipper Chapel in Houghton St Giles. It is reached from Walsingham by a very narrow road—really just a sliver on the GoogleEarth map with which I started Chapter 1. On our way there, we were almost overwhelmed by the universe’s unpredictability in the form of a huge truck that bore down on us, occupying at least nine eighths of the road; indeed—to adopt Erasmus’s tone of amused open-mindedness which so irritated the fundamentalists (of all persuasions) of his day, and later—I think we were able to pass only through the intervention of Our Lady herself, though in our case perhaps with the slight aid of a muddy grass verge that seemed to open itself apparently miraculously as we hastily jerked our car onto it. It seemed to get wider and narrower at need, with the help (it must be acknowledged) of some helpfully empirical navigation (“another foot!” “go on, you idiot!” and “just watch that rock!”) from my passengers. In Shakespeare’s All’s Well, That Ends Well, Lafew tells us that “miracles are passed” (III, i, 1); after that escape, I must say I had cause to wonder whether the magical universe might not still be alive. Alternatively, as such heretics as Giordano Bruno speculated, perhaps chance plays a bigger part in the universe than even Erasmus suspected. Such reactions may of course simply be evidence that we all are struggling, even the skeptics among us, not always successfully, against being interpellated into the powerful feelings of an invented tradition, just as medieval pilgrimages were designed to bring pilgrims into a particular understanding of how their experiences connected materially to an originating time and place that gave those experiences into a residual set of stories. Pynson’s Ballad was such an ideological instrument, an attempt to reinforce its readers’ beliefs in a miracle-saturated view of history which could never (apparently) be countermanded and therefore provided its adherents with comfort and security. Like modern tourists, those guided by the Pynson Ballad could see the gate through which the knight was miraculously transported; they could see the site chosen by Richeldis for the holy house, and pace out the distance to the eventual site to which the Virgin had it moved. Such ‘evidence’ for reading Walsingham as a timeless expression of an older magical universe lies all around, and even if they may no longer be ‘true,’ the stories of the magical universe remain comforting and hopeful in a bewildering and often hostile world. Popular Catholicism with its apparitions and miracles remains active. There are daily reports of the Virgin’s appearance in the most mundane situations—in frying pans, on freeway underpasses, on tabletops, in reflections in windows, in hitherto unknown deposits of oil, and especially among the poor or disadvantaged. As in the nineteenth century, at the very least such phenomena point to a crying lack in people’s emotional lives and widespread alienation from a functionalist, corporate world. In its own quiet way, Walsingham is a place that lends itself to a sense of the uncanny and the mysterious. Figure 8.3 brilliantly captures part of the distinctive atmosphere many associate with Walsingham even today—mysterious, richly

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Fig. 8.2 Shrine Garden, Anglican Shrine. Photograph by permission of John Twyning. superstitious, arcane, a place where the air may suddenly part and a vision or apparition walk through, where the uncanny is always potentially appearing. It is a place where Erasmus or Colet may (it is avowed) suddenly appear on an evening walk—or when otherwise sensible visitors may go on a walk to see if that happens.14 Oddly enough, for many, it is the austere Roman Catholic shrine built around the Slipper Chapel at Houghton St Giles and the Chapel of Reconciliation built near the village’s Friday Market that provide less explicit expressions of that profound fantasy of connections to the magical universe; it is the Anglican shrine that remains a “full service Catholic experience” as one of our 2008 conference visitors put it. Vatican II led to a more ‘protestant’ understanding of worship and ministry, “less cluttered, less mystical” in scope, as Charlotte Spretnak puts it rather peevishly, “spare rations, culled by the blades of a ‘rationalized’ agenda more acceptable to the modern mindset,” including the retreat from the Latin mass, the downplaying of cults, and what is seen as a degree of embarrassment before the Baroque extremes of the pre-conciliar Church.15 14 Simon Coleman, “Engaging Visions? Sites and Sights in Contemporary Pilgrimage to Walsingham,” in Janes and Waller, Walsingham in Literature and Culture, 83. 15 Spretnak, Missing Mary, 4.

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“The Age of Miracles”: High St, Little Walsingham. Photograph by permission of Ian Seymour/Luminousowl.

These feelings of the “uncanny” layerings and re-inscribings of history, and the nostalgia for belief that may accompany it—perhaps one manifestation of Kristeva’s “incredible need to believe” as a “distraction” from our current “culture of the death drive”16—are especially strong for me when pausing on the site of the original Holy House, its tantalizing outline slightly raised above the surrounding ground, with (according to the 1961 archeological survey) the ashes from when it was burnt in 1538 only a few inches beneath the surface, or when I have stood where the High Altar was placed in the body of the church, which is where, Erasmus says, the Virgin’s milk was kept: perhaps just beneath the surface there are the shards of the glass or pottery vial that once held that milk. Or did the wreckers toss it into the fire they had lit to burn the wrecked Holy House? Because Walsingham is so visibly and materially ‘there,’ even today, such speculations become eerily plausible. Yet even the most material object at Walsingham—the raised rectangle of the Holy House, the wells, the stones from the destroyed abbeys, the east window itself—cannot “uncover” the past: rather, as Jonathan Gil Harris comments, “we speak in networks within which ... the past is alive; and in its untimely life, that past speaks with and through us in the accents of the present

Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe, xvi.

16

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and, in ways we can never quite predict, the future.” Every one of us, Kristeva, observes, “wants an illusion and insists on not knowing.”17 Nostalgia for a lost magical universe is, however, an insufficient explanation for a more radical (and some would add more serious) eco-theological argument among some otherwise progressive theologians and theorists regarding the desacralization of the cosmos. The last 500 years, so the argument goes, have seen remarkable progress in the material well-being of western men and (far less fully and more slowly) women, though (it needs to be added and often is not) at enormous cost to other whole cultures and their members and dependent on the ruthless exploitation of the eco-structure and therefore the world’s future viability. This mastery, the argument continues, has also been achieved as part of an increasingly masculinist and mechanical view of the universe which has made western men “peculiarly susceptible … to a tendency towards the domination of others, and of women in particular.” European society moved from “having a strong and maternal focus—one in which men and women experienced themselves as continuous with a powerful natural world, and dependent upon it—to being oriented instead towards the fathers.”18 Sara Boss and other contemporary Catholic theologians point to what they see as the tragically empty universe created by Protestantism, which they link explicitly to the Reformation rejection of the Virgin. Mary, says Boss, “who stands for creation in relation to God, and so corresponds to nature in relation to humanity,” has lost the “terrible sacred power she once held in the Christian imagination.” Spretnak claims that the loss of the Virgin from Protestantism was a profound “symbolic link between humans and the larger reality,” and that Western man has subsequently framed “the human story” as a “tragic alienation from the unfolding story of the cosmos.”19 The eco-feminist argument, as it is sometimes called, since it identifies the Virgin with or even as the high point of Creation, the very air we breathe, to repeat Hopkins’s metaphor, is just one of an increasing number of reactions to post-modernism that radically calls into question the optimistic myth of material progress by which the affluent 17 Harris, “Untimely Mediations”; Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe, 106. Here contemplating the site of the Holy House and bringing my ‘presentist’ questions to it makes me take issue with an aspect of Harris’s stimulating work, notably Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) on the relation of time in to material objects which, he argues, are too easily understood as inert but in fact have been and continue to be recycled, re-inscribed, and palimpsested. This perspective obviously overlaps with my own, but seems to underestimate the changing present of the historian and the multiple questions that can be posed from that changing present. For a similar critique of how the “new antiquarianism” as represented by Harris asks that objects somehow “speak for themselves” or asserts “let the pots speak,” see Philip Schwyzer, Archeaologies of English Renaissance Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 31. I owe the reminder to consult Harris’s suggestive observations on time and materiality to Craig Dionne and Michele Osherow, who permitted me to read her review of Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare in advance of publication. 18 Sara Boss, Empress and Handmaid: On Nature and Gender in the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Cassell, 2000), 176. 19 Boss, Empress and Handmaid, 112; Spretnak, Missing Mary, 52.

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western world has probably irretrievably placed its bets on the post-modern (or supposedly post-human) “incredulity towards metanarratives.”20 Taking such an eco-theological argument seriously is different from advocating a nostalgic return to the old magical universe. It is a questioning of the Enlightenment assumptions of nature as if it were dead and available to be exploited and finally, if necessary, destroyed. Mariological eco-feminists see Mary as the unifying symbol of a potentially less destructive relationship between humanity and nature, embodying not only memories of a lost world but hopes for a newer, more creative one.21 What of the other recurring issue on which I have focused in my exploration of the interaction of the imagination and Walsingham? A central argument I have advanced in this book concerns the complex gendered and sexual ambiance of Walsingham. My reading of Walsingham centers on the fact that it was, whether in imaginative legend or in fact, founded by a woman on the vision of a woman’s body. Yet how has the femininity at the heart of Christianity been materialized? Throughout this book, I have raised that question, and in the past 50 years it has become to seem an urgent one. In the 1970s the (formerly) Catholic theologian Mary Daly rejected the traditional image of Mary as the embodiment of centuries of exploitation.22 Her work, along with that of French theorists like Kristeva and Irigaray, has been the inspiration for two generations of feminist theology. Speaking from within the Catholic Church, Beattie argues that “all present constructs of sexual difference” within traditional Christian theology have been “products of masculinity,” and therefore “what poses as the feminine in western culture is in fact the masculine imaginary.” Mary has been, she continues, “an object that can be filled with all kinds of fantasies, which then become the normative way of seeing her.” Male Church authorities have ‘created’ the Virgin in ways that involve the “erasure of the body and especially of the sexed female body.”23 With a level of nostalgia balancing the firmness of her conclusion, Marina Warner concludes her classic study, Alone of all her Sex, as follows: She is not the innate archetype of female nature, the dream incarnate. She is the instrument from the Catholic Church about the structure of Society, presented as a God-given code … For as Barthes has written, “Some objects become the prey of mythical speech for a while, then they disappear, others take their place … “The Virgin’s legend will endure in its splendour and lyricism, but it will be emptied of moral significance, and thus lose its present real powers to heal and to harm.24 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 105. 21 Tina Beattie, A Culture of Life: Women’s Theology and Social Liberation (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 2000), 38. 22 Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: the Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975). 23 Beattie, God’s Mother, 32; Beattie, Eve’s Pilgrimage, 108. 24 Marina Warner, Alone of All her Sex: the Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage, 1983), 338–9. 20

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Warner’s melancholy, only slightly nostalgic, farewell and even Beattie’s fidelity to the Church would find few, if any, supporters among the dominant forces within the Catholic Church and the Catholic wing of the Anglican Church. As Kristeva comments, “the old myths continue to live within us,”25 and unquestionably the dominant interpretation of Walsingham remains what millions of Catholic Christians would defend as the ‘traditional’ image of Mary. Today it is especially seen in the Walsingham authorities’ explicit opposition to the ordination of women, a matter which may well draw some Anglicans associated with Walsingham to go over to Rome, to “cross the Stiffkey,” as one wag put it to me in the Black Bull, even though geographically both the Anglican shrine and the Slipper Chapel are on the same side of the little stream that meanders through the valley. Such a migration has been a temptation within Anglo-Catholicism from the 1830s on. Anglo-Catholics may still describe themselves as “bold, brassy, and believing,” but there are fears that they will be splintered by the push within the Church of England towards further recognition of the priestly vocations of women, in which case, one priest notes, some “will seek the temporary canvas of the Slipper Chapel. Others will hold on to the authenticity of the creaking pipes and the thin walls and ceilings” of the Anglican shrine.26 Yet, what I have shown of Walsingham’s history demonstrates that both within and alongside the dominant discourse of Mariology, there have always existed alternate traditions, and Walsingham, along with the rest of Christianity, has inherited and (despite its official pronouncements) embodies them. “The contradictions,” comments Althaus-Reid, “are many,” and orthodox theology too often “has become the art of erasing them.” In Chapter 2, I suggested that Walsingham’s most powerful alternative pathway centered on the possibilities of a repressed but not entirely invisible female sexuality. From the cultural margins—popular religion, song, drama, as well as the visual arts like painting and sculpture—there were traces in late medieval Walsingham of alternatives in which the figure of the Virgin, despite hundreds of years of repression and exploitation, might have endorsed a more positive endorsement of human sexuality that could have been associated with, not differentiated from, Mary. Althaus-Reid advocates that we look at our history to find “in what has not been said or has been hidden” what she terms the “theological closets.”27 Walsingham has many of those closets. Its imaginative history has enacted in multiple and contradictory ways how it has fallen on women, as Kristeva puts it, to “represent the sacred,” and I have presented it as one place where such closets might have been found and opened. The Virgin has been appropriated for patriotic, class and gendered roles that greatly expand the traditional images of her as virginal, obedient, submissive, and as Beattie observes,

Kristeva, Tales of Love, 61. See the “parable” by Fr David Clues of Willesden, http://frdavidclues.blogspot. com/2010/06/room-and-space.html. Accessed June 1, 2010. 27 Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 87; Isherwood and Althaus-Reid, “Queering Theology,” in The Sexual Theologian, 6. 25

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“almost sado-masochistic celebration of the suffering body.”28 The new theologians are calling for the celebration of alternatives to that dominant tradition. It is therefore fascinating, for example, to see look away from Europe, for instance to Latin American theology and practice, where like fifteenth century Europe, Mariology has traditionally been more important, culturally if not theologically, than Christology. In 2010 on BBC Radio 4, Rosie Goldsmith mounted three short programs, “Thoroughly Modern Mary,” one of which looked at the Virgin as a political force across the world. In 1571, the Virgin was supposed to intervene at the Battle of Lepanto to repel the Ottoman navy; in 2010 she was invoked by a coalition of Lebanese Christians and Muslims attempting to carry medical and other humanitarian material through an Israeli blockade to Gaza in a ship named Mariam. In South America, she has traditionally been identified with the Conquistadors and with various (mainly right-wing) regimes, but more recently, she has become the Virgin of young and single mothers, a symbol of single motherhood and the self-contained sexual power that often accompanies such a life, her independence of male fathering supposedly excluding her from patriarchal control so she “becomes a symbol of resistance to patriarchal values and lifestyles.” Or she can be presented as the divine beloved of queer mariologies, the Virgin who rejects the commodification of the body. She is, as one Argentinian theologian puts it, writing on the Madonna of transvestites, the Virgin of many petticoats.29 Such projections of the Virgin may seem a long way from the narrow vision that is the official Walsingham image. Despite the moving expressions of the current (2010) Administrator of the Anglican shrine, Bishop Lindsay Urwin, that at Walsingham “love” will continue “to be offered in equal measure,” the Virgin is overwhelmingly invoked to safeguard “traditionalist” values. In a July 2010 interview, Bishop Urwin sees Walsingham as standing for the “continuity” of the undivided Church and the ordination of women to the priesthood, and especially the episcopate, as a “discontinuous” practice. What he terms “the Roman Catholic response” of unambiguous objection to women in the ministry—indeed, the Vatican has made the “attempted ordination” of women a grave offence subject to automatic excommunication, and thus putting it in the same category as clerical sex abuse of minors, heresy and schism—is seen to constitute a major “stumbling block” to any kind of Roman Catholic/Anglican unity. When the interviewer noted that Bishop Urwin’s own sister was an ordained Anglican priest, he acknowledged not just the personal pain that caused him but also that he “could be wrong.” But nevertheless he and the Walsingham authorities stand, with the Pope, firmly against women in the priesthood—and Bishop Urwin hoped that there would Kristeva, Feminine and the Sacred, 14; Beattie, Woman, 114. Lisa Isherwood, “Sex and Body Politics: Issues for Feminist Theology,” in The Good News of the Body, (ed.) Lisa Isherwood (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 31; Althaus-Reid and Isherwood, “On Theology, Sisterhood, and Controversies,” in Controversies in Feminist Theology, 79. 28 29

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remain a place in the Church of England for those with firmly held “traditionalist” convictions.30 Behind such uneasiness, and at times real anguish–as when in late 2010 three Angican sisters left for a period of “discernment” concerning entering the Roman Catholic Ordinariate and then in 2011 were received into the Roman Catholic Church—we can sense a continuation of the history of the controversies that have surfaced whenever the counter-dominant tradition of the Virgin’s sexuality has re-surfaced. Beattie argues that had the early Church welcomed instead of persecuting the many female-centered religious movements, like the Collyridians, the history of Western sexuality and gender, and not merely the history of religion, would have been very different. But, especially given the hardening of official Catholic attitudes, to what extent is a “new Mary” possible, a Mary “stripped free of patriarchal interpretation”? Can Walsingham be seen as opening up despite its official position on such matters what Beattie refers to as “what has been ignored and rendered invisible” in the history of the Church, embodying “the relationship between the female body as a rational agent in the production and interpretation of the logical symbols, and the female body as the raw material that men have used to construct a metaphysical edifice of maternal femininity around the symbolic ideal of the Virgin Mary.”31 To help answer or at least re-pose these questions, it is intriguing to look at the material text of Walsingham itself. Reading the present for traces of the past, deciphering the present shrine for hints of its historical unconscious, it is not unimportant that the one standing piece of the priory is the arch. The Walsingham window is a lonely but defiant vulvic symbol, and among its eroded and faded decorations one can indeed pick out mandorla or almond shapes. But across the street in today’s Anglican shrine are more palpable suggestions. The landscapes that we contemplate today display Walsingham as a place of devotion to the female religious experience—that is experience not just by, but of, the female—arguably the oldest stratum of human spiritual experience, “the primal bedrock of our identities,” as Kristeva puts it, one which the Protestants accurately identified, and

See Bishop Unwin’s letter to the Church Times, May 2010: sbarnabas. com/20/10/05/18/Lindsay-urwin writes/. The interview, with Fr Simon Tibbs, is to be found at www.youtube.com/watch?v=J33nHFBaZMk&feature=related For the 2010 Vatican pronouncement on women’s ordination, see John Hooper, “Vatican makes attempted ordination of women a grave crime,” Guardian, July 15, 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ world/2010/jul/15/vatican-attempted-ordination-women-grave-crime. Accessed August 1, 2010. http://ordinariateportal.wordpress.com/2010/12/12/press-release-walsingham-sistersand-the-ordinariate/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter. Accessed December 15, 2010. 31 Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology; Tina Beattie, “A Man and Three Women— Hans, Adrienne, Mary and Luce,” New Blackfriars 79 (2007), 97–105; “Mary in Patristic Theology,” in Boss, Mary: Complete Resource, 75–105; Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, 206; Rediscovering Mary, 31; God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate, 4. 30

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violently repudiated, within Catholicism.32 One of the objections the reformers had to the late medieval cult of the Virgin and—if the homilies are an indication—was that she had been elevated into a pagan goddess: “When you heare of our Lady of Walsingham, our Lady of Ipswich, our Lady of Wilsdon, and such other: what is it but an imitation of the Gentiles idolaters? Diana Agrotera, Diana Coriphea, Diana Ephesia. &c. Venus Cypria, Venus Paphia, Venus Gnidia.”33 These views, curiously enough echoed today in some official Catholic pronouncements, remain deeply suspicious of any combination of the “maternal and the carnal” associated with the Virgin which, Kristeva notes, in the Reformation and today, “fundamentalist monotheism” has “considered pagan or diabolical.”34 Intriguingly, the architecture and design of the twentieth-century Anglican shrine, including its garden, reinforces the quiet but insistent focus on the female. Does it do so by design or is it more at the level of the cultural unconscious, made manifest in behavior that is justified not by gendered associations but by drawing on ‘traditional’ Christian symbolism? Behind dogmas always lie deeper realities. One might argue that the mandorla motif is strikingly explicit in the contemporary image of Our Lady over the altar in the Holy House: an almond shaped orifice surmounted by a semi-circular ‘mons’; from the orifice formed by the drapes proceeds the Virgin and child as if being born from the all-powerful vaginal canal, the lips spread by the emerging figures. Outside the church, the same symbolic ingredients, so appalling to the Protestants (then and, as Janes has shown, now) are evident (see figure 8.5). Even if the gardens of Walsingham are not strictly laid out as a mandorla, nevertheless, entering them, with the weaving paths and interwoven fronds of flowers, shrubs and herbs, one encounters myriad reminders of the female, with all the vital parts not precisely in the recognizable anatomical places, but perhaps re-arranged like a Picasso painting, its parts highlighted, thrust forward, and above all to be entered, revered, even to be worshipped. Beattie speaks of how we need a “feminine syntax shaped around the contours of the female body, in a way that subverts the phallogocentrism” of “masculinist culture,” and that a masculinist culture and theology “will be structured around values of sacrifice and denial while a feminine culture might be structured around values of fecundity and desire.” She quotes Augustine, that Mary’s body symbolizes the virgin soil of paradise, “the body of the earth, the matter of creation restored to its state of original goodness … nature prior to human creation (and implicitly to male cultivation, for it is Adam who is charged with cultivating the earth and it is the male agent that is excluded in the annunciation).”35 It is mildly ironical that it is the Roman Catholic theologian who most suggestively points to the rich symbolism, its possibilities and tensions, which can be seen in the Anglican shrine’s garden. Designed by the local garden designer Tessa Hobbs in 2005, it has been termed 32

34 35 33

Kristeva, In the Beginning, 42. Certain Sermons, 155. Kristeva, Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, 21. Beattie, God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate, 127.

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“the most famous Mary garden in the world.” It is laid out to incorporate both traditional Marian garden symbolism and details of plants and flowers associated with the Virgin. Around the church are blue irises, Madonna lilies, lavender and columbine. As an Orthodox admirer observes, it is a “reflection of the belief that the Annunciation happened in a garden but, of course, Mary herself is the garden.” The symbolism draws on the medieval painting (and literary) genre that incorporates symbolism from the Song of Songs: she is the hortus conclusus, fertile yet restricted, and “represents the life we have lost and continually yearn for.” Some early theologians, including St Maximos the Confessor, Theophanes the Confessor, and Dionysius of Alexandria, dated the very Creation to March 25, what became the Feast of the Annunciation. Especially in springtime new life is represented by snowdrops (Candlemass bells), primroses (Our Lady’s frills), jonquils (Joseph’s staff), campion (Mary’s candle), lily of the valley (Our Lady’s tears), borage (the Virgin’s face) and violets (Our Lady’s modesty).36 But the garden’s symbolism, like that of the Song of Songs, is more intimate and bodily. There are the scents of the herb garden, the spring of water near the shrine’s center, and most recently, an addition to the garden, entitled, “the enigma” on the Shrine’s website, seems to encourage such a reading, in what might be called delicate Erasmian suggestiveness. Femininity is associated with fecundity and creation, not deprivation. Behind the garden metaphor is a rich symbolic background derived from the Garden of Eden and the Song of Songs. Discussing the Garden in the JudaeoChristian tradition, Northrop Frye observes that before the creation of Eve, Adam—or more properly, “the adam,” derived from the feminine root “adamah,” meaning “earth”—“can have been at best only symbolically male.” So even before Eve, it is the garden itself that represents the female, but it takes the creation of Eve—who, says Frye “is the supreme and culminating creation”—to provide the story of human creativity, as opposed to “a repressive morality founded on a sexual neurosis” and gender hierarchy represented in the first reaction after eating the forbidden fruit, that of shame. In this complex story, Woman and the Garden are inseparable, symbolic “of the fact that humanity cannot be redeemed in isolation from nature,” despite the ideology of patriarchal social dominance. In the Song of Songs the garden symbolism is further developed to evoke the insight that that spiritual love grows from the erotic and extends to nature. As Frye comments, “the bride-garden metaphor works in the opposite direction by of associating nature and love, and I doubt if it is an accident that feminism and ecology have moved into the foreground of social issues at roughly the same time.”37 There are interesting parallels between Walsingham’s symbolic garden with the house and gardens at Ephesus, now in Turkey, a place of Marian devotion, loved 36 I draw on the following website for these details: margaret-zakachurina.blogspot. com/2009/11/walsingham.html. Accessed December 1, 2009. 37 Northrop Frye, Words with Power: Being a Second Study of The Bible and Literature, (ed.) Michael Dozani (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 203–4, 225.

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Fig. 8.4 The “Enigma,” Anglican Shrine garden. By permission of Graham Howard, Official Photographer, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. also by Muslims, who go there regularly to venerate her whom they call Meryem Ana, the only woman to have a book named after her in the Quar’an.38 At Ephesus, Mary Meryemana (Mary’s House) is a tranquil spot, surrounded on all sides by lush greenery. The house is small, with the characteristic vulvic entrances and mandala decorations and a series of fountains where you can sip water that supposedly has curative powers. Hundreds of messages and petitions to Mary are placed in metal grates, written on handkerchiefs, paper, tissues. Ephesus is reputedly the place where Mary spent her last years and, according to legend, where she ascended into heaven, and, of course, dropped the famous girdle to Thomas as he rose, an event celebrated on August 15. The Third Ecumenical Council took place in 431 in the 38 Mary gives Sura XIX its name and is its central figure as the mother of Christ who is termed Issa ibn Maryam—“Jesus son of Mary.” Seemingly drawing in part on the Protevangelium the Quar’an recounts Mary’s birthing experience as occurring under palm tree and near a spring of water which miraculously bubbles under her feet. See Neal Robinson, “Jesus and Mary in the Quar’an: Some Neglected Affinities,” Religion 20 (1990), 161–75.

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basilica in Ephesus where the title Mother of God was formally applied to Mary in an attempt to oppose the Nestorian heresy. But Ephesus had long been a major center for worship of Artemis (the Roman Diana), and even earlier goddess figures. Emphasizing Mary helped make Christianity more attractive to the Ephesians, and many of Artemis’s titles were taken and were adapted to Mary, including; “Queen of Heaven,” “Divine Virgin,” and “Mother of All.” 39 The garden at Walsingham, then, is an artful evocation of the multiple (and contradictory) symbolism of Marian devotion. But the heart (though that is the wrong, or rather a displaced, anatomical metaphor) of the shrine—the reproduction of the original Holy House, England’s Nazareth, a small room at the west end of the church itself, with a flowing art deco reproduction of the Virgin, and surrounded by hundred of candles, most placed there by visitors and petitioners. This is the ecstatic center of the shrine, as its equivalent was for Erasmus, opening up the “pryvytes” of the Virgin. This is surely where the speculations of feminist theologians like Beattie are at their most powerful. When the attendants, the “canons,” at Walsingham offered to show Erasmus the Virgin’s secrets, her “pryvytes,” they spoke more than they knew—although Erasmus certainly seems to have known something of what “more” meant. As Beattie puts it, looking back at the theological battles of early Christianity, at times one feels that the wrong parties won out, and that Christian and western history might have been very different had some of the early Church’s theological battles ended differently: we might, she says, have a “different version of the same story, based on the recognition that the narrative of the Christian life might unfold differently from the perspective of women.”40 Such an argument may remind one of Agnes Strickland’s attempt to control the rampant but seductive sexuality of Anne Boleyn, but it also points to the tension, sometimes creative, sometimes destructive, that lay at the heart of medieval Walsingham. Quite aside from such speculations, today’s Holy House always strikes me not just as ecstatic but also curiously domestic and nurturing. That too seems to open up something we can observe about the ‘alternate’ tradition of medieval Walsingham. Outside this center of the shrine (shimmering and seemingly to pulsate with all the glowing candles), pilgrims are invited to write three objects of prayer on small slips of paper, for selection for the daily prayers for intercession from the Virgin. The statue (what the Protestants called and, from Janes’s observations still call, the “idol” or “dolly”) is surrounded by hundreds of typed and scribbled petitions on small rectangles of paper. Cursory glances suggest there are no grandiose or apocalyptic petitions for victory over the Saracens or the Conversion of the Jews, as there might have been centuries ago; rather they were personal and domestic— my sister Agnes, pray for her; in memory, mother; help my son Alistair. In other 39 I owe the parallels between Walsingham and Ephesus to Craig Dionne. See also P. Eugene Poulin, The Holy Virgin’s House: The True Story of Its Discovery (Istanbul: Arikan Yayinlan, 1999). 40 Beattie, God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate, 50, 175.

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words, the only visible difference from pre-Reformation times is the apparent lack of tributes from the obviously rich and powerful—ostentatious jewels or gold (Erasmus, we might recall left a poem in Greek, and later mocked the keepers of the shrine for thinking it was in Hebrew)—though their modern equivalent can be seen in the tasteful elegance of the buildings, the immaculate upkeep of the grounds, the extensive ongoing renovations, and (after signing up as a Friend of Walsingham) the insistent series of polite letters which I have subsequently received asking for financial support. I have stressed the sexual and the domestic, and above all the sense of a religious experience centered on women’s core experiences. But, as one of my self-styled pagan colleagues argued, right in the middle of the garden, on a slight hill, are erected, as a reminder that this was not some benevolent pagan goddess-centered religion but Christianity—all too often expressed as masculine, patriarchal, misogynic—three crosses, as if reminding pilgrims of the ultimate male control. He described them to me as “sepulchrally white,” and “stark in their threat.”41 Certainly, reading through a lens provided by feminist meditations on Mariology, they appear unmovingly masculinist in their hard humorless angles, peering down upon and disciplining the dignified but colorful and ever-changing female life beneath. The shrine garden powerfully exemplifies the tension between the “Petrine” and “Marian” traditions in Christianity which Beattie sees as dualistic, hierarchical, and de-legitimating women’s experiences.42 Quite apart from the argument she makes, the crosses in the Walsingham garden certainly set forth the elements of orthodox mariology. Analysts and psychotherapists probing into the origins of personal trauma and dysfunction are not always believed by the subject, even if the analyst (he or she) is supposedly the One Who Knows. Literary and Cultural Studies scholars suffer even more extreme skepticism from their audiences. The authorities of medieval (and contemporary) Walsingham would probably regard my interpretations as foolish nonsense. Indeed, they might think similarly of theologians like Beattie, Ruether, Johnson, Isherwood and others, let alone thinkers like Kristeva who define themselves as post-Christian. Orthodoxy did (and does) assert that all mariological power and devotion are subservient to and expressions of the redemptive power of the Son of God who hung on the central cross, and that the devotion to the Mother exists only for the glory of the Son. But contemporary ethnographic studies of marian shrines stress that a feminist theology and distinctive women’s devotions can co-exist, even if uneasily, alongside the insistent masculinity of orthodoxy— and perhaps more, help to transform that tradition, which is the goal of many feminist thinkers. “Feminist theologians,” writes Kathleen Coyle, “are already 41

“Stark” is in fact a term much favored by Walsingham pilgrims to describe the effects of the crosses in the garden: see e.g., www.ourjo.org.uk/opinions030717.html; www. walsinghamanglicanarchives.org.uk/kenfisherreminiscences.htm. Accessed June 1, 2010. 42 Tina Beattie, New Catholic Feminism: Theology and Theory (New York: Routledge, 2006), 133–7.

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Fig. 8.5 Modern protestors, Common Place, Walsingham. By permission of Dominic Janes. finding cracks in the long Christian tradition … that developed at a terrible price as regards the natural affections of men and women … the search has already begun for an alternative tradition,” one that no longer “cripple” men and women through a “removal from their bodies,” and will do so “through the prioritizing of the female body, anatomically and symbolically.”43 There will be “no true peace and reconciliation in the Church, until the men of the Church,” argues Beattie—and her argument can be extended well outside Christianity to those like Kristeva, inhabiting the stories of a post-Christian world—“make peace with their own sexuality and with woman’s incarnate capacity to be part of the sacramental revelation of God.”44 What is heartening about the history that I have tried to trace in this study of Walsingham is the surprising and unpredictable ways in which changes may occur. So I conclude on a note of hope and curiosity. I started this chapter by mentioning a March 2008 conference. In May 2008 an announcement was made by the Art and Reconciliation Trust to commission a sculpture by Paul Day, to 43 Kathleen Coyle, Mary in the Christian Tradition from a Contemporary Perspective (Leominster: Gracewing, 1993), 101; Isherwood, “Our Lady of Perpetual Succour,” 126. 44 Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, 183.

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be placed close to the site of Chelsea Manor, once Thomas More’s home, and given in 1538 to Thomas Cromwell. It was, most likely, to Chelsea Manor that the Image of Our Lady of Walsingham was brought and burnt along with her other “sisters.” The initial plans for the sculpture, a memorial to the medieval shrines destroyed in Chelsea during the English Reformation in 1538, and designed to express contrition for the destruction of 1538, was based on the design on the surviving arch of the priory at Walsingham.45

45

http://www.artandreconciliation.org/1000projects.htm. See also http://www. indcatholicnews.com/artreco432.html and Carla Power, “Enough sledge hammer conversions,” [London] Times, May 2, 2008. Accessed September 28, 2008, at www. timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article3863363.ece.

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westernorthodox.com/western-rite . Accessed July 1, 2008.

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Index Ackroyd, Peter ix, 6–7, 132, 159, 161, 168–9 Alanus de Rupe 51 Althaus-Reid, Marcella 48, 192–4 Althusser, Louis 7 Anglo-Catholicism ix, 115, 152–3, 155–7, 159, 166–80, 181, 184, 192 Anne, St xi, 57 apparitions 15, 18, 48, 51, 152, 154, 158, 187,188 Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) 42 Aristotle 6 Aston, Margaret 67, 71, 92, 97 Augustine, St 44, 195 Baskin, Bill xii, 177 Beattie, Tina x, 6, 7–8, 12, 13, 33, 43–5, 47–50, 54, 60, 63, 180, 186, 190–95, 198–200 Becket, Thomas 4, 31, 65, 72, 133, 145 Benedict XVI, Pope x, 168 Bernard, G. W. 69, 70, 80, 93 Bernard, St 51, 77, 185 Bexley, Rood of 40 Bilney, Thomas 69 Blomefeld, Francis 26, 125–6, 139, 166 Boleyn, Anne 70, 80, 133–7, 139–49, 163, 198 Boss, Sara Jane 190, 194 Boutefort, Sir Ralph 29 Bromholm 18, 93 Brookshire, Bradley xi, 102–5, 106 Browne, Thomas 9 Bugslag, James 23 Bull, John 102, 104–5, 169 Byrd, William 102–5, 113,169 Calvin, John 32, 66, 73, 77–8, 122 Camden, William 125, 130, 134, 158 Canterbury 4, 5, 23, 31, 40, 97, 133, 145, 169

Caputi, Jane 48, 179 Capgrave, John 54 Carroll, Michael P. xi, 4, 14, 17, 22, 28–9, 31–4, 43, 44, 45, 67, 116, 124 Catherine of Aragon, Queen 133–49, 163 Catholic Revival 151–80, 183–5 Caviness, Madeline 49 Chapman, Alison xi, 105, 107, 111–14 Charles V, Emperor 135, 141, 146 Chaucer, Geoffrey x, 4–5, 15, 25, 64, 65, 70, 82, 133, 135, 138 Chester plays 53–4 Christocentrism 12, 29, 36, 55 Clément, Catherine 44 Coletti, Theresa 54 Coleman, Simon xi, 10, 12, 18, 21, 31, 44, 52, 58, 60, 181–2, 184–5 Collyridians 47, 194 Cottman, John Sell 126 Court of Venus 70 Coyle, Kathleen 199–200 Craig, Leigh Ann 31, 57, 59–60 Cranmer, Thomas 79–80, 186 Crashaw, Richard 98–9 Crashaw, William 42 Croft, P. J. 117–19 Cromwell, Thomas 5, 8, 11, 21, 29, 33, 37, 40, 62–3, 66, 68, 72, 79–84, 93–6, 131, 167, 169, 178, 186, 201 Crucifix, Martyn 179 Cuffel, Alexandra 43 Daly, Mary 45, 191 Dante Alighieri 44, 139, 170–72, 174–5 Daumer, Elizabeth 170–71 Day, Paul 200–201 Defoe, Daniel 125 Dickinson, J. C. 1, 13, 14, 18, 20, 21, 33, 66 Dionne, Craig 11, 190, 198 Disraeli, Benjamin 151 Dolan, Frances 121–2

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Dowsing, William 3 Duffy, Eamon 61, 69, 70, 73, 81, 94, 96, 97 Eagleton, Terry 6–7, 132, 169 East Anglia 1, 3, 5, 14–16, 18, 20, 21, 26, 32, 35, 50, 51, 52, 54–5, 59, 82, 85, 97, 104, 120, 144, 149 Edwards, Philip 91 Eliot, George 154 Eliot, T. S. x, 170–73, 176 Elizabeth I, Queen 5, 92, 97–101, 114, 121–2, 141, 147 Ephesus 47, 196–8 Erasmus, Desiderius ix, x, 5, 11–12, 14, 17–18, 40, 48, 65–85, 120, 124, 126–7, 129, 133, 139, 144, 158–9, 161, 162, 164, 165–7, 177, 179, 180, 186–9, 198–9 Eriksen, Anne 11 Fakenham 2, 21, 26, 27, 125, 131 feminist theology 6–7, 22, 34, 43–5, 47, 49, 55, 169, 190–96 fetishization 41–2, 75–6, 165 Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler 45–6 Fitzwilliam Virginal Book 102, 104 Foxe, John 51 Franciscans 21, 27 Freud, Sigmund 44, 64, 122 Frye, Northrop 196 Gatta, John 171 Gibson, Gayle 14, 34 Gillett, A. M. 2, 5, 17, 29,33, 63, 69, 83, 85, 92, 93, 94, 97, 186 Glancy, Jennifer 43, 46–7, 49, 76 Goldsmith, Rosie 193 Gordon, Walter 73–4, 82 Granger, Penny 51–2 Gray, William of Reading 40 Greeley, Andrew 116 Gresham, Richard 95 Greville, Fulke 98, 118 Gurney family 124–5 gynotheology 37, 46-64, 144, 155 Hailes, Abbey 14, 32, 70, 84, 93 Harris, Jonathan Gil 189–90 Harrod, Henry 160–61

Haskins, Susan 50 Henry III, King 93 Henry VII, King 66, 69 Henry VIII, King 5, 15, 68–70, 78–9, 93, 133–6, 163, 166–7 Hildegard of Bingen 55, Hill, Carole xi, 57 Hobbs, Tessa xii, 195 Hobsbaum, Eric, and Terence Ranger ix, 10, 12 Hole, Donald 184 Homilies 5, 39, 40–41, 161, 195 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 156–7, 162, 185, 190 Howard, Philip, Duke of Arundel 97–101, 113, 118 iconoclasm xi, 5, 35, 37, 40, 72, 75, 91–4, 131, 148, 153, 169 idolatry xi, 5, 8, 24, 37, 40–42, 61, 66, 69, 74, 79, 92, 94, 101, 113, 115, 121–2, 126, 130, 145, 147–9, 153, 155, 159–61, 164, 183–4, 186 imagination ix, 5–7, 39, 54, 69, 83, 85, 111–13, 116, 117, 132, 135, 144, 148, 154, 161–2, 168–71, 180, 190–91 indulgences 15, 33–4, 68, 70, 124 intercession 114, 122, 157, 198 “invented tradition” ix, 8, 10–12, 14–18, 21, 34, 37, 41, 47, 55, 92, 108, 115, 122, 126, 128–9, 151, 179, 187 Ipswich, Our Lady of 8, 35, 41, 67, 84, 94, 129, 195 Irigaray, Luce 191, Isherwood, Lisa 43, 45–7, 178, 192, 193, 199, 200 Jameson, Anna 154, 166 Janes, Dominic 130, 149,154–7, 159, 165, 184, 195, 198, 200 Jantzen, Grace 55 Johnson, Elizabeth 7–8, 45, 77, 199 Julian of Norwich 55–6, 59, 180 Kahrl, Stanley 51–2 Kaplan, Louise 76, 165 Kassel, Maria 184–5 Kempe, Margery 23, 25, 56, 59–60

Index Kingsley, Charles 153, 163 Kristeva, Julia ix, 8, 44, 122–3, 185–6, 189–96, 199–200 Lake, Peter 53 Lambarde, William 51, 97, 98 Landale, Scilla xi, 97 Langland, William 25, 39, 61, 166 Latimer, Hugh 11, 36, 41–2, 62–3, 121, 186 Laurence, Anne 138–9, 144 Lee-Warner family 124–32, 149, 154, 159–63, 168 Legh, Thomas 82 Lewis, C. S. 4, 170, 175 Lingard, John 139, 148 Lodge, David 180 Lollards 22, 25, 39, 40, 44, 58, 67, 70, 74, 75, 186 Loreto 2, 4, 16–17, 158, 164, 166 Lourdes 152, 153, 154, 157, 183, 186 Lowell, Robert x, 172–3 Lowthe, William 66 Luther, Martin 15, 66, 80, 111–12 Lydgate, John 50 McAvoy, Liz 59 McCormick, Kathleen xii, 31 MacCullough, Diarmaid 14 Magdalene College, Cambridge 1, 161 Maitland, Sara 183 Maitzen, Rohan 143, 147 Mantel, Hilary 186 Marie of France, Princess 135, 143, 146, 148–9 Marks, Richard 16, 20, 35 Marshall, Peter 49, 69, 81, 84–5 Marshall, William 80 Mary I, Queen 135 Matheson, Peter 131 Meredith, Peter 52 “Milky Way” see Walsingham Way Mirsky, Charles 174–5 More, Thomas 40, 67, 201 Morley, Thomas 103–4 Morrison, Susan Signe xi, 56–9, 62–3, 80, 112, 145 Nettuno 94 Newman, John Henry 151, 153, 156, 165

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Nichols, John Gough 71, 126–7, 144, 158–9, 165–6 nostalgia x, 23, 39, 97, 101, 103–7, 110, 113–14, 123, 125, 129–30, 151, 164, 180, 185, 189–91 N-Town Plays 51, 53 Obbard, Elizabeth 2, 16, 158, Ordinariate, Anglican x, 168, 194 Orthodoxy, Eastern 8–9 Osherow, Michele xi, 60, 190, 198 Oxford Movement 115, 152, 154–6, 159 Parish, Helen 92 Parsons, Robert 91 Paston family 23, 104 Patten, Alfred Hope 12, 20, 166–7, 168–70, 176, 184 Patten, John 97 Pembroke, Countess of (Mary Sidney) 118, 123 Percy, Bishop 25, 105–6, 111, 129 Peraino, Judith 55 Pestell, Tim 15–16 Peters, Christine 67, 70, 91 pilgrimage ix-xi, 4–5, 9, 10–18, 21–37, 39, 50, 65–85, 118–19, 91–7, 105–22, 125–9, 133–50, 156–61, 166–8, 177, 180, 182–5, 187–8, 191–2, 198–200 Price, John 82 Protestantism 4–6, 8, 13, 22, 35–6, 41–2, 49, 51, 53, 61, 69, 73–4, 79, 80, 84, 85, 92–98, 108, 110–14, 115–32, 134, 136, 142–9, 151, 153–65, 169, 182–6, 190, 194–5, 198 Protevangelium 34, 49, 53, 197 Psychoanalysis xi, 22, 45, 64 Pynson Ballad xii, 1, 4, 10–18, 20, 23, 25, 27–9, 32–5, 39, 40–41, 50, 70, 74, 101, 132, 155, 157, 161, 166, 187 Questier, Michael 53 Ralegh, Sir Walter 105–10, 113–14, 118, 119, 121, 123, 128, 169 Recusants 97, 101, 103–4, 131 Reformation 4, 6, 8, 11–12, 14, 17, 23,25, 27, 34, 41–3, 48, 53, 61, 63, 67, 69–70, 72, 74, 75, 78–82, 93, 100, 103–4,

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112, 116, 122, 130, 131, 132, 145, 154–6, 158–60, 165, 169, 180, 183, 185, 186, 190, 195, 199, 201 relics 4, 9, 14, 21, 25, 29–36, 39–41, 57, 58, 66–84, 93, 94, 157–9, 164–5 Rex, Richard 81–2 Richeldis de Faverches 1, 11, 13–17, 20, 28, 32, 74, 179, 187 Robertson, M.L. 79–80 Rubin, Miri ix, 49–50, 55, 184 Ruether, Rosemary 43, 199 Ruskin, John 154 Scharberg, Jane 45–6 Scherb, Victor 52 Schwartz, Regina Mara 43 Schwyzer, Philip 129, 190 Scott, Walter 135–6, 138 Seton, Anya 179–80 sexuality 8, 24, 39, 41, 45–62, 75–8, 156, 175, 178–80, 185, 191–200 Shagan, Ethan 70, 93 Shakespeare, William 3, 71, 83, 92, 100, 102–7, 110–14, 120, 134, 139, 145, 176, 187 Shell, Alison xi, 99, 126, Sidney family 97–8, 101, 116–24 Sidney, Philip 98, 102, 118 Sidney, Robert, 2nd earl of Leicester 114–24, 130 Simmons, James 138–9 Simpson, James 36, 63, 92 Singleton, John 152 Skelding, Hilary 147 Southwell, Richard 84 Southwell, Robert 84 Spenser, Edmund 98, 108, 122, 136, 139, 169 Spretnak, Charlotte 91, 131, 188, 190 Spurr, Barry 99, 170, 173 Stafford, Anthony 156 Steinberg, Leo 49 Stephenson, Colin 2, 17, 22, 32, 83–5, 94, 96, 184, 186 Strickland, Agnes x, 5, 26, 65, 116, 127, 133–50, 151, 153, 166, 179, 198 Strickland, Elizabeth 133–4, 138 Strickland, Jane Margaret 134 Swanson, R. N. 33, 41

Taverner, Richard 80 Taylor, John 25 Theweleit, Klaus 45, 61,128 Thompson, Dunstan 179 Tiffany, Grace 122 Tottel’s Miscellany 143 Trent, Council of 42, 46, 49, 63–4, 73 Twyning, John xi, 115, 157–8 Urwin, Lindsay 193 Vatican II, Council of 12, 188 Virgin Mary Assumption of the Virgin 52, 75 “alternate” Marys 47–64, 144, 148, 170, 180, 183–200 cult of the Virgin x, xii, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 14–37, 39–64, 66–8, 70, 75, 78, 82–3, 91, 93, 99, 101, 108–9, 113–18, 144–5, 151–68, 177–9, 183, 185–6, 190, 192–6 girdle(s) of the Virgin 57, 75, 76, 84, 143, 164, 197 Immaculate Conception 63, 76, 151–2 Quar’an, Virgin Mary in the 197 Vowell, Richard 96 Waller, Gary 43, 48, 187–9 Walsham, Alexandra 126, 129–30 Walsingham, Priory, shrines, and villages “Abbey” 5, 8, 114, 117, 118, 124–32, 154, 157, 159–60, 182 Anglican shrine and holy house x, 4, 12, 14, 168–9, 170, 183, 185, 195, 198 Augustinians 15, 16, 18, 21, 84, 159, 161, 166 Common Place 27, 52, 95, 183, 200 dissolution 5, 8, 40, 70, 81, 84, 92–7, 991–100, 115, 116, 167 excavations 9, 16, 20, 160–62, 167 Friday Market 27, 52, 168, 188 gardens xii, 12, 92, 125–6, 129, 131–2, 160, 171, 182, 188, 195–9 guilds 51–2, 68, 97 Great Walsingham, village 2, 125 Holy House (medieval) 4, 8, 10, 13, 18–21, 32, 35, 58, 61, 67–8, 71–4, 84, 93–8, 101, 112, 113, 131, 134, 150, 155, 158–9, 161, 164, 166–8, 171, 179, 189, 190, 198

Index image of the Virgin 4, 41, 71–2, 94, 167 Knight’s gate 29–30, 158 Little Walsingham, village 2–4, 9, 11, 15, 21, 23, 27, 30 52, 57, 64, 81, 85, 92–3, 97, 101,116, 117, 125, 157, 161, 168, 181–3, 187–8 Martyr’s Field 94–5, 98, 182 milk of the Virgin 4, 31–2, 50–51, 53, 71, 75–9, 82, 83, 93–4, 125, 164, 165, 167, 189 miracles 4, 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 21, 24, 27–9, 33–4, 36, 39–42, 52, 53, 54, 61, 67, 70, 78, 82–5, 92, 124, 131–2, 166, 167, 177–9, 187, 189 poems 70, 99–101, 105–14 relics 4, 9, 14, 21, 25, 29–36, 39–41, 57, 58, 66–84, 93, 94, 157–9, 164–5 ruins 3, 20–22, 40, 85, 92, 93, 97, 102–8, 110, 117, 125–6, 128–9, 145, 149, 156, 159–63, 168, 182 Roman Catholic shrine x, 12, 158, 168, 183, 186, 188 Slipper Chapel 12, 27, 149, 168, 182, 186, 187,188, 192 St Laurence’s chapel 18, 31, 82 Stiffkey River 3, 24, 27, 192 wells 4, 9, 12, 14, 18, 21, 23–5, 29, 31, 33–4, 41, 58, 67, 71, 74, 116, 126–9, 131, 139, 143, 149, 152, 158, 162–3, 182, 189 Walsingham Ballad ix-xii, 14, 101–14, 118–23, 129, 139, 145

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Walsingham Conspiracy 94–5 Walsingham, Francis 101, 103 Walsingham Way (“Milky Way”) 2–4, 21–2, 26, 50, 57, 61, 100, 106, 125, 133, 135–7, 151, 157, 173 Ward, Benedetta 124 Ward, Edward 163 Warner, Marina 191–2 Waterton, Edmund x, 1, 31, 34, 50, 63, 76, 151, 159, 161–9, 177, 180 Weber, Max 116 Wheeler, Michael 149, 152, 153–6 William of Worcester 18, 68, 71, 161, 166 Williams, Charles x, 44, 170, 173–6 Williams, Raymond 60 Williams, Rhonda 148–9 Williams, Rowan 169, 179 Wilson, A. N. x, 3, 6, 10, 12, 24, 175–9, 186 Wingfield, Robert 93 Winstead, Karen 54 Wolsey, Cardinal 81, 93, 135, 137, 141, 148, 150 women’s ordination 42–3 Wood, Elizabeth 95 Wroth, Mary 118, 120 Wyatt, Thomas 135, 137, 142–3, 150 Yates, Nigel 184 Zwingli, Ulrich 72–3