The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture

This book was first published in 2011. The Virgin Mary was one of the most powerful images of the Middle Ages, central to people's experience of Christianity. During the Reformation, however, many images of the Virgin were destroyed, as Protestantism rejected the way the medieval Church over-valued and sexualized Mary. Although increasingly marginalized in Protestant thought and practice, her traces and surprising transformations continued to haunt early modern England. Combining historical analysis and contemporary theory, including issues raised by psychoanalysis and feminist theology, Gary Waller examines the literature, theology and popular culture associated with Mary in the transition between late medieval and early modern England. He contrasts a variety of pre-Reformation texts and events, including popular mariology, poetry, tales, drama, pilgrimage and the emerging 'New Learning', with later sixteenth-century ruins, songs, ballads, Petrarchan poetry, the works of Shakespeare and other texts where the Virgin's presence or influence, sometimes surprisingly, can be found.

Preface; 1. 1538 and after: the Virgin Mary in the century of iconoclasm; Part I. The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval Culture to 1538: 2. The sexualization of the Virgin in the late Middle Ages; 3. The Virgin's body in late medieval poetry, romance, and drama; 4. Walsingham or Falsingham, Woolpit or Foulpit? Marian shrines and pilgrimage before the Dissolution; Part II. 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 and beyond; Works cited; Index.