Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- I 1538 and after: the Virgin Mary in the century of iconoclasm
- THE VIRGIN MARY IN LATE MEDIEVAL CULTURE TO 1538
- FADES, TRACES: TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE VIRGIN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
- 5 Fades: Elizabethan ruins, tunes, ballads, poems
- 6 Traces: English Petrarchism and the veneration of the Virgin
- 7 Traces: Shakespeare and the Virgin – All's Well That Ends Well, Pericles, and The Winter's Tale
- 8 Multiple Madonnas: traces and transformations in the seventeenth century
- Works cited
- Index
8 - Multiple Madonnas: traces and transformations in the seventeenth century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- I 1538 and after: the Virgin Mary in the century of iconoclasm
- THE VIRGIN MARY IN LATE MEDIEVAL CULTURE TO 1538
- FADES, TRACES: TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE VIRGIN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
- 5 Fades: Elizabethan ruins, tunes, ballads, poems
- 6 Traces: English Petrarchism and the veneration of the Virgin
- 7 Traces: Shakespeare and the Virgin – All's Well That Ends Well, Pericles, and The Winter's Tale
- 8 Multiple Madonnas: traces and transformations in the seventeenth century
- Works cited
- Index
Summary
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.
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- Information
- The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture , pp. 181 - 209Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011