Julia Kristeva calls the Virgin a “combination of power and sorrow, sovereignty and the unnameable,” making up “one of the most powerful imaginary constructs known in the history of civilization.” This book explores aspects of the poetry, drama, tales, ballads, and something of the theological and polemical religious writings that expressed and explored, in complex and contradictory ways, that “powerful construct” immediately before and during the Reformation period in England. Rather ambiguously we have come to term this period “early modern,” but it might as easily be called “late medieval,” since what I term the Virgin's “fades” and “traces,” felt long after the so-called Middle Ages were supposedly over, nonetheless had their origins in the medieval period and their transformations often loop back to earlier, only gradually emergent, social practices there. I tie these aspects of the period's ideological history together with what I hope is a lightly worn but distinctive presentism that arises from an ongoing dialogue with certain aspects of contemporary thought, especially psychoanalytic cultural criticism, the sociology of popular religion, and recent Catholic feminist theology, some of which is influenced by Kristeva herself.

The year 1538 when, as part of the dissolution of religious houses in the late 1530s, a number of “images” of the Virgin were taken to London in the late summer or autumn and burned, is the fulcrum of my study.