On 20 January 1574, at about 7.00 p.m., Alexander Nyndge, one of the sons of William Nyndge, a gentleman of Herringwell, Suffolk, suddenly went into violent paroxysms. Edward Nyndge, Alexander’s brother, intervened. Edward was a Cambridge graduate and a former fellow of Gonville and Caius, and his University education had apparently prepared him for just such an emergency. He immediately declared that Alexander was possessed by an evil spirit and summoned the villagers to come and pray for his brother’s recovery. As the praying continued, Alexander’s convulsions grew worse; a half dozen men had to hold him in his chair. Meanwhile the onlookers were praying extemporaneously. Suddenly someone invoked both God and the Virgin Mary. Edward pounced on this remark and admonished the crowd that such prayers offended God. The evil spirit, in a voice ‘much like Alexanders voice’, chimed in, endorsing the propriety of the prayer. But ‘Edward made answere and said thou lyest, for ther is no other name under Heaven, wherby we may challenge Salvacion, but thonly name of Ihesus Christe’. This point settled, Edward proceeded to organize his brother’s exorcism.

Evidence of devotion to the Virgin Mary in the restored Catholic Church of the reign of Mary Tudor survives in numerous religious texts published from 1553 to 1558. These sermons, catechetical texts, primers, and books of devotion and polemic were written to aid the restoration of early modern Catholicism in England after twenty years of religious tumult. By considering how these texts treat devotion to Mary, it is possible to answer two questions. First, was the cult of the saints in Marian England, particularly that of the Virgin, ‘one of [t]he abiding casualties of the preceding reformations’, as Ronald Hutton has argued from the few gilds and pilgrimage centres restored during this period? Secondly, does devotion to the Virgin present any clues as to the nature of the Marian Church? Did it hark back to the Church of the 1520s? Did it embrace much evangelical belief and eschew much traditional religion, as Lucy Wooding argues in her recent monograph? Or was it akin to the Catholic Reformation in Europe? In order to answer these questions, it would be useful to begin by evaluating two texts that possessed semi-official status in the Marian Church, the use and frequent printing of which were encouraged by the likes of Cardinal Pole: Bishop Edmund Bonner of London’s catechetical work, A Profitable Doctryne, and the Wayland Primer, both printed in 1555.

William Perkins and William Bishop, two of the leading spokesmen for their respective religious traditions in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, clashed in print over the status of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as well as a number of other issues. They were formidable adversaries. Perkins, the most widely-read English Protestant theologian of the day, helped to make Cambridge University a centre of Reformed thought and practice. Bishop, an Oxford-trained theologian with extensive experience and associations on the continent, eventually became the first Roman Catholic bishop in England since the death of the last surviving bishop of Mary I’s reign. Though discussions of the Virgin Mary were not major themes in the books of either writer, their views on this subject are significant in showing how the two traditions developed, in competition with each other, during this phase of the long English Reformation.

In the winter of 1755, Giacomo Casanova, doing time in the Venetian jail known as the ‘Leads’, spent a disturbing week absorbed in the only reading matter available, a volume which he judged a work of’heated imagination’ and of’chimerical and monstruous visions dressed up as revelations’. It was enough to induce repeated nightmares. ‘On sleeping’, he recorded,

After the disruption of French Catholicism during the Wars of Religion of the second half of the sixteenth century, the Catholic revival of the seventeenth century famously involved a restoration of Marian piety. When the second monarch of the new Bourbon dynasty, Louis XIII, had dedicated the kingdom to the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1637, the long- and anxiously-looked-for male heir to the throne, the future Louis XIV, was finally born in 1638, easing a sense of crisis which was as much political and religious as purely familial. The widowed Queen Anne of Austria, regent for her son from 1643, subsequently ordered the building of the great Parisian shrine of Val-de-Grace. Yet the conspicuous Marian devotion of the French Catholic revival did not emerge in isolation, but rather in relation to a new and intense Christocentric piety. Central to the latter was the leading figure of the revival, Pierre de Berulle (1575-1629), founder of the French Oratory, and subsequently cardinal. The nature of his piety also led to concentration on the priesthood, seen as an essentially male imitation of Christ. In that further context a second major figure must also be considered, Jean-Jacques Olier (1608-57), who was certainly influenced by Berulle. But in one historic interpretation that influence was altered, in the direction of a Christian pessimism, by the process of transmission via a third figure, Charles de Condren (1588-1641). Yet the relations between these persons and their priestly and pastoral piety may be open to another interpretation, and one in which the place of a complementary Marian devotion has considerable implications for the much-debated history of seventeenth-century and subsequent French Catholicism.

We begin with an image, and a story. Explanation will emerge from what follows. Figure 1 depicts a huge wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, once the figurehead on the prow of a ship, but now on the high altar of the church of Saints Vittore and Carlo in Genoa, and venerated as Nostra Signora della Fortuna. On the night of 16-17 January 1636 a violent storm struck the port of Genoa. Many ships were wrecked. Among them was one called the Madonna della Pieta, which had the Virgin as its figurehead. A group of Genoese sailors bought this image as part of the salvage washed up from the sea. First setting it up under a votive painting of the Virgin in the harbour, they repaired it, had it repainted, and on the eve of Corpus Christi brought it to the church of San Vittore, close by the port. A famous blind song-writer was commissioned to write a song in honour of the image. Sailors and groups of young girls went through the streets of the city singing and collecting gifts. The statue became at once the focus of an extraordinary popular cult, thousands of people arriving day and night with candles, silver crowns, necklaces, and crosses in gratitude for the graces which had immediately begun to be granted. Volleys of mortars were let off in celebration. The affair was managed by the sailors who, in the face of mounting criticism and anxiety from local church leaders, directed devotions and even conducted exorcisms before the image. To stem the gathering tide of visitors and claims of miracles, and to try to establish control, the higher clergy first questioned the identity of the statue (some held it to represent, not the Virgin, but the Queen of England); then the statue was walled up; finally the church was closed altogether. Still, devotees climbed into the church, and large-scale demonstrations of protest were held. The archbishop instituted a process of investigation, in the course of which many eye-witnesses and people who claimed to have experienced miracles were interviewed (giving, in the surviving manuscript, rich detail of their responses to the image). Eventually the prohibition was lifted, and from 1637 until well into the twentieth century devotion to Nostra Signora della Fortuna remained strong, with frequent miracles or graces being recorded. So here we have a cult focused on an image of secular origin, transformed by the promotion of the sailors into a devotional object which roused the enthusiasm of thousands of lay people. It was a cult which, significantly, sprang up at a time of unrest in the city of Genoa, and which thus focused pressing issues of authority. The late 163os witnessed growing tension between factions of ‘old’ and ‘new’ nobility, the latter being marked by their hostility to the traditional Genoese Spanish alliance. Hostilities were played out both within the Senate and in clashes in the streets of the city. The cult of Nostra Signora della Fortuna grew up in this context, but survived and developed in subsequent centuries, attracting devotion from all over Italy.

One of the defining characteristics of Victorian culture was its insistence that women were naturally maternal. Marriage and motherhood were assumed to be the twin goals of every young woman. Those who did not bear children were termed ‘redundant’ (perhaps most famously in W.R. Greg’s 1862 article, ‘Why are women redundant?’), yet were still assumed to have maternal instincts. Equally significant to Victorian culture was its Christianity. Notwithstanding the fact that only about half of the English and Welsh actually attended religious services, the presence of an established Church, the frequency with which political and religious questions coincided, and the certainty that England was (as one clergyman confidently expressed it) illuminated by the ‘very sun-shine of Protestantism’, combined to make Victorian culture Christian, and moreover, Protestant.

In her article on the nineteenth-century Marian revival, Barbara Corrado Pope examines the significance of Mary in the Roman Catholic confrontation with modernity. ‘As nineteenth-century Catholics increasingly saw themselves in a state of siege against the modern world, they turned to those symbols that promised comfort’, she writes. Inevitably the chief symbol was Mary, whom the ‘patriarchal Catholic theology’ of the time held up as embodying the ‘good’ feminine qualities of chastity, humility, and maternal forgiveness. But there is another side to Mary that emerged as even more important and effective in the struggle against what many Catholics perceived as contemporary errors, and this was the militant figure embodied by the Immaculate Conception. The miraculous medal, an icon of Catherine Laboure’s vision of the Virgin treading on a snake, popularized this concept. The crushing of the snake not only had a connection to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception; it also symbolized victory over sin, particularly the sins of the modern world. ‘Thus while the outstretched arms of the Immaculate Conception promised mercy to the faithful, the iconography of this most widely distributed of Marian images also projected a militant and defiant message that through Mary the Church would defeat its enemies’.

In the Catholic Church throughout the world, the cult of the Immaculate Heart of Mary is one of the most widespread forms of modern Marian devotion, expressing a dominant mood within contemporary Catholicism.’ For its devotees, the heart of Mary is almost literally ‘the heart of a heartless world’, and indeed, the image of the world - the globe of the Earth - is central to the cult.

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.

In 1960 the Anglican philosopher Austin Farrer preached a sermon ‘On being an Anglican’ in the chapel of Pusey House which must have amazed his hearers. It began gently enough; but halfway through, the tone changed. Human perversity had rent the unity of the Church with schisms and heresies. How could he, ‘truly and with a good conscience’, stay in the Church of God? ‘Only by remaining in the Church of England’.’ Farrer put down two markers for his Anglican identity. One was stated briefly and with restraint: ‘I dare not dissociate myself from the apostolic ministry.’ It was the other that must have startled his congregation:

IN a double monastery located near the important pilgrimage place of Lalibela, two nuns I had been interviewing suddenly asked me, ‘Why don’t you ask us about Mary?’ They wanted to tell me about how she cared for them, loved them, and answered their prayers. ‘Whatever we ask her she will give us’, they stated. Mary was important for the Ethiopian Orthodox believers I worked with; it became obvious that Mary has an exclusive place in Ethiopian devotion in general. Most of the time, Ethiopian Christians relate to Christ as a distant saviour and turn to Mary in dealing with their daily lives. Mary is pure in both body and soul, a human being without sin, so that Christ becomes the union of divinity and humanity.