In this chapter, at least at first, I turn back to “history,” to Sidney's “truth of a foolish world,” and give what I would hope is a fairly consensual account of the place of the Virgin in the first half of the seventeenth century. Then, as I start to interrogate the period's major poetical figures – Donne, Milton, Herbert, Crashaw – I will become more speculative, preparing for a return at the end of the chapter to a more theoretical re-engagement with questions posed by Kristeva, Beattie, Carroll, and others whom I introduced in my opening chapter, and up to whom I have, on and off, “sidled” throughout the intervening chapters.

In the early 1530s, for most English men and women – the exceptions were largely the small though growing minority of reformers and the strong supporters of the royal supremacy, including Cromwell's growing team of humanist bureaucrats – the central beliefs and devotional practices of the late medieval Church must have been a seemingly permanent reality, with the place of the Virgin inextricably engrained in the ideological assumptions and practices of their lives. But we have now moved on three or more generations, through what I have termed the “century of iconoclasm.” Insofar as there is a consensus among modern historians, it is that following the upheavals of the 1530s and Henry's decision to pursue independence from Rome, the Reformation in England was not one momentous change but a series of mainly small, often unremarkable, events that cumulatively constituted a major cultural revolution.