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
5 - Fades: Elizabethan ruins, tunes, ballads, poems
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 the course of a “perambulation” through Kent around 1570, the Protestant chronicler William Lambarde wrote:
I must needs take cause, highly to prayse God, that hath thus mercifully in our age delivered us, disclosed Satan, unmasked these Idoles … and raced to the grounde all Monumentes of building, erected to superstition and ungodlyenesse: And therefore let very godly man ceasse with me from henceforth to marvaile, why Canterbury, Walsingham, and sundry such like, are nowe in these our days become in manner waste, since God in times paste was in them blasphemed most.
On the opposite side of the country, in a survey of Wales in the early 1540s, the antiquarian John Leland had similarly found the remains of a ruined village “wher the pilgrimage was,” that had served the needs of pilgrims to Our Lady of Penrhys, also destroyed in the Dissolution. Such holy places dedicated to the Virgin as Walsingham and Penrhys fared especially bleakly in the first wave of iconoclastic cleansing, as well as in the first concerted consolidation of iconoclastic laws after Henry's death, under Edward VI, when, for instance, the destruction of Woolpit, initiated in 1538, was completed in 1551. In an era when the Virgin's presence in approved liturgy and devotion was drastically reduced, images torn down or burnt, rood screens – Mary and John flanking the crucified Christ – torn away, desecrated, painted over – though (in a few cases) hidden away by the faithful – the number, and even the accessibility of places dedicated to the Virgin faded.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture , pp. 109 - 135Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011