Although they are written from the heart of the Elizabethan Protestant court, the Walsingham poems by Walter Ralegh and Robert Sidney provide evidence of the fading but still intense, even paradoxical, presence of the Virgin in Protestant England. Not merely behind the poems but also in some sense inhabiting them is the medieval tradition of veneration of the Virgin. However, they are also, along with hundreds, probably thousands, of poems written in early modern England, deeply influenced by another medieval tradition intimately connected with the Virgin. For three centuries much of what Foucault termed “confessing” and writing “the truth” of human sexuality had been mediated through a multi-leveled discourse, at once a rhetoric and a psychology, derived from (or foisted upon) the poetry of Petrarch – what became known as Petrarch(an)ism. It was a fashion that came to England late. Furthermore, it came laden with deeply embedded Catholic associations, and a rhetoric that borrowed heavily from Mariology. The common rhetoric shared by religious devotees and love poets alike had been fully acceptable in Italy, France, Spain, and elsewhere in Catholic Europe. But it entered the English court in the 1520s and 1530s, around the same time as the impetus to reform gathered momentum and, most germanely, when “idolatry” had become a matter of enormous controversy. For the rest of the sixteenth century it was the most fashionable poetical rhetoric for court lyrics and, following Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella (1581–2, published 1591), became a dominant mode not merely of poetry in English court circles but, as it had across Europe, of understanding desire and its interactions with the self and the wider social world.