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Marian Revivalism in Modern English Christianity: the Example of Walsingham

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Sean Gill*
Affiliation:
The University of Bristol

Extract

On 19 August 1897, a newly carved image of Our Lady of Walsingham, sent from Rome by Pope Leo XIII, was solemnly installed in the Roman Catholic Church in Kings Lynn. Since no plan of the original medieval shrine survived, the chapel that contained the image was modelled upon the Holy House of Loreto. The following day a pilgrimage led by the parish priest and by Fr Philip Fletcher, one of the prime movers behind the Marian revival, went from Lynn to the Slipper Chapel at Walsingham. This was an important focus of worship since it was the only building to have survived substantially intact near the great pilgrimage site destroyed at the Reformation. In 1934 the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Bourne, led the first annual Roman Catholic pilgrimage to the Slipper Chapel, in which a new image of Our Lady of Walsingham based upon that of the seal of the medieval Priory had been placed. In the intervening years, the Anglo-Catholic vicar of Little Walsingham, the Revd Arthur Hope Patten, had created a similar shrine in the Anglican parish church in 1922, and had gone on in 1931 to build a separate chapel with its own sanctuary of the Holy House of Nazareth.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2004

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References

1 The best recent account of the medieval and modern Roman Catholic Marian cult of Walsingham is A. Williams, ed., Walsingham: Pilgrimage and History (1999).

2 For the history of the Anglican shrine see Peter G. Cobb, ed., Walsingham (1990).

3 Engelhardt, Carol M., ‘Victorian masculinity and the Virgin Mary’, in Bradstock, Andrew,Gill, Sean,Hogan, Anne and Morgan, Sue, eds, Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture (Basingstoke, 2000), 514 Google Scholar.

4 Hole, David, England’s Nazareth: A History of the Holy Shrine of Our lady of Walsingham (1959). 34 Google Scholar.

5 I am grateful for help with sources and for advice to the Revd Peter Cobb, Master of the College of Guardians of the Anglican shrine; also to the Revd Martin Warner, the shrine administrator, for making available to me the only extant set of the publication Our Lady’s Mirror, kept in the archives at Walsingham. I would also like to thank Dom Philip Jebb for allowing me to consult the archives of Downside Abbey.

6 The most revealing assessment is in Colin Stephenson, Walsingham Way (1970).

7 Cobb, Walsingham, 90.

8 Milburn, John, ‘The revival of Marian devotion in the Church of England’, in The Mariological Lectures of Fr John Milbum (1998), 16 Google Scholar.

9 For this subject see Osborne, June, Stained Glass in England (1997), 7991 Google Scholar.

10 Stephenson, Walsingham Way, 90.

11 Quoted in The Ransomer (Autumn 1958), 18.

12 Our Lady’s Mirror (April 1926), 3.

13 Hughes, Anselm, The Rivers of the Flood. A Personal Account of the Catholic Revival in England in the Twentieth Century (1961), 50 Google Scholar.

14 Report of the First Anglo-Catholic Congress, London 1920 (1920), 159.

15 Wilson, H.A., Received with Thanks (1940), 89 Google Scholar.

16 Williams, Walsingham, 106.

17 Downside Abbey: Bishop Riddell to Prior Ford, Downside, 28 May 1900. The Down side archive concerning Walsingham has not yet been catalogued.

18 Ibid., Bishop Charles to the Abbot of Downside, 1 June 1922.

19 Ibid., Bishop Charles to the Abbot of Downside, 26 April 1921.

20 Ibid., Fr Gray to the Bishop of Northampton, 4 June 1930.

21 James, Bruno, Askingfor Trouble (1962), 122 Google ScholarPubMed.

22 For this subject see Hastings, Adrian, ed., Modem Catholicism (1991), 23 Google Scholar.

23 This approach is to be found in Blackbourn, David, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (Oxford, 1983)Google Scholar; and Delaney, John A Woman Clothed with the Sun: Eight Great Apparitions of Our Lady in Modern Times (New York, 1960)Google Scholar.

24 Our Lady’s Mirror (Spring/Summer 1947), 8.

25 Ibid. (Summer 1951), 3.

26 Ibid. (Jan. 1926), 1.

27 Ibid. (Winter 1928), 2.

28 James, Askingfor Trouble, 137.

29 Henson’s biting attack on the ‘pitiable rubbish of the Walsingham processional hymn’, and on the dangers of bringing crowds of both sexes together in an atmosphere of ‘hysterical excitement’ appeared in the Evening Standard, 15 Sept. 1926. Patten regarded it, probably rightly, as something of an own goal, urging his readers to say a ‘Hail Mary’ for its author. See Our Lady’s Mirror (April 1926), 2.

30 Stephenson, Walsingham Way, 153.

31 The Tablet (25 Aug. 1934), 234-8.

32 Our Lady’s Mirror (Winter 1928), 4.

33 A particularly egregious example of a reductionist account of Marian cults is Carroll, Michael, The Cult of the Virgin Mary: Psychological Origins (Princeton, NJ, 1986)Google Scholar. An outstanding recent history that is sensitive to a wide range of interpretations is Harris, Ruth, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar.

34 Our Lady’s Mirror (Autumn/Winter 1947-8).