The demolition of the shrine and the dispersal of its contents at Walsingham was a singularly earth-shattering act of ruination. The Holy House and church surrounding it have been reconstructed from their image as transmitted in the wax seals of the medieval abbey. Despite all the care, in the replication the originals have been reduced to the merest façade of what they once were (see Fig. 4.4). Reappearances can be deceiving.
The chapel had an elaborate foundation legend. In the account as recorded much later, a Saxon noblewoman and widow experienced three times in 1061 a vision in which the Virgin first transported her mystically in a true flight of fancy to the Holy House of the Annunciation in Nazareth. Then, the Mother of God bade her to honor the announcement of the Incarnation by erecting in Walsingham an exact replica of the home. It would not be easy for her to determine the building site and achieve the construction. For her pains, the visionary was assured that when built, the shrine would enable all those who sought succor there from Mary to receive it. The prediction came true. Between the mid-twelfth century and 1538, Walsingham became one of the most heavily frequented sanctuaries to the Blessed Virgin in England and even in the Christian world. The connection with the unveiling of the birth of Jesus meant that
the Latin prayer known as the Hail Mary was held in special reverence at the chapel and later at the priory on the spot. Among many relics, the holy place was particularly renowned for a phial that allegedly contained milk from the Mother of God.
Fig. 4.4 The remains of Walsingham Priory, Norfolk. Photograph by John Armagh, 2011. Image from Wikimedia Commons, © JohnArmagh (2011), CC BY-SA 3.0, http://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:WalsinghamPriory.jpg
Fig. 4.5 The Walsingham Virgin and Child. Seal (obverse), late twelfth to early thirteenth century.
Cambridge, Archives of King’s College. Image courtesy of King’s College, Cambridge.
Most germane to the story of Our Lady’s Tumbler is that the Holy House in Walsingham contained a wooden majesty, with Mary on a throne with the infant Jesus seated on her lap. The effigy may have been a Black Virgin or Black Madonna, so called because of its dark hue, an artistic application to the Mother of God of the “I am black but comely” image of the Bride in the biblical Song of Solomon—the closest that the Middle Ages came to the late twentieth-century trope of “black is beautiful.”
In any event, the carving was annihilated close to a half millennium ago. Yet despite its disappearance hundreds of years before now, we can still form a picture of the Walsingham statue thanks to a representation of it on a seal from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century (see Fig. 4.5). Other portrayals are found on the badges of lead or pewter that were retailed as souvenirs to pilgrims. Such tokens could prove that a person had completed a pilgrimage to a given destination. In addition, they could convey the grace of the Virgin to those who encountered them. Other similar keepsakes included pewter flasks. These vessels contained water from the holy wells that were located not far from the shrine. In many regards, these objects functioned as amulets.
The foot traffic of pilgrims to what became the Augustinian priory grew extremely heavy in the late Middle Ages. Walsingham developed into the principal Marian destination in England. The growth in movement gave rise to a rat-a-tat drumbeat of criticism even before the Reformation. In 1356, the Archbishop of Armagh delivered a sermon in which he denounced worship by those who failed to distinguish between a Madonna and the Virgin Mary in heaven herself. By his lights, images of this sort included the representations of Saint Mary at Lincoln, Newarke in Leicester, and Walsingham. Further, he charged the custodians of such holy places with fomenting miracles so as to pad their own coffers. A chronicler described how the Lollard iconomachs slurred the Virgin of Walsingham by calling her in vernacular English
“the Witch of Walsingham.” These followers of John Wycliffe protested against the custom of referring to the cult image as “our dear Lady of Walsingham” rather than as
“our dear lady of heaven.” Likewise, they condemned it as “vain waste and idle to trot to Walsingham rather than to each other place where an image of Mary is.” To such dissenters, an image is an image is an image: local images and relic cults have no point.
The Renaissance humanist Erasmus gives a detailed picture of Walsingham and his observations when he made a pilgrimage to the site in the summer of 1512, in appreciation of the success that the Church scored against the schismatic King Louis XII of France. The Dutchman’s portrayal of his experience is far from altogether positive. He characterizes the community as depending wholly on revenue from pilgrims. His account of their moneymaking machine is acerbic and sharp-tongued, with flashes of hilarious comedy. His hard-edged description of the shrine gives vent to his distaste for the popular devotion of the late Middle Ages. In his finickiness, he shrank back from the physicality of the practices that the canaille pursued. Thus he conjures up vividly, and mostly not flatteringly, the lighting, smells, and even
tactile qualities of the objects and spaces involved in the expression of lay piety. In other words, he executes the mental process of sensory integration, by which he makes meaning from information collected by his senses. This is what common sense is all about. He describes the windowless chamber where the image was domiciled, probably with curtains or a canopy billowing around it. This separate space was the original Holy House, which by Erasmus’s time had been encased in a far larger chapel.
In it, the light of shimmery candles reflected from scores of gold and jewel objects, alongside masses of humbler oblations. Erasmus gives us to believe that despite all the blazing tapers, the inner sanctum offered to the spirit more heat than light.
As a pilgrimage site, Walsingham may be usefully compared with Loreto. The Italian town is by many accounts home to the Holy House. This structure purports to be the home in Nazareth in which Mary was born and raised, received the Annunciation, and lived during the childhood and after the ascension of Jesus. The little building has drawn pilgrims since at the latest the fourteenth century. It was transported, so the story goes, from the Virgin’s hometown on the wings of angels to rescue it from infidels. The timing may not be purposeless. The movement began only three years after 1291. That date saw the toppling of Acre, the tail end of the crusader kingdoms in the Holy Land. The retreating campaigners could have transported with them from Nazareth stones from the edifice where the angel Gabriel broke the news to Mary that she would conceive and become the Mother of God. Alternatively, they could have brought back the trauma of having abandoned the house and other important sites to the Muslims. They could have assuaged at least partially the hurt of loss through wish-fulfillment, in the fantasy of the angelic levitation.
Whatever the historical realities of the building and its move, the Holy House offered within the bounds of the European landmass a destination for Christian pilgrims who could no longer venture safely into the Holy Land after the collapse of the crusader states. It became notable in the late fifteenth century. After the destruction of Walsingham, it had every basis on which to surge in popularity. At first, the Holy House was a simple edifice. The chief adornments were a statue of the Virgin beside an altar and a blue-painted ceiling spangled with golden stars. Eventually, the domicile was enclosed within a larger building, and the image of Mary shifted to a plush, jewel-lined niche. This Madonna is held to have been a Black Virgin. A holy card from 1899 illustrates the scene in tacky pastel colors, with a German legend,
“Miraculous Transportation of the Holy House to Loreto” (see Fig. 4.6).
Despite undeniable parallels between Walsingham and Loreto, the two shrines diverged in major ways. For one, the scale of the Holy House of Nazareth in the Italian hilltown differed substantially from the one in England. In contrast, the dimensions of the Santa Casa (to use the Italian name for the stone building in Loreto) corresponded reasonably closely to those of the fourteenth-century Slipper Chapel in Walsingham (see Fig. 4.7). This other church, so called because it marked the point at which pilgrims removed their shoes to trudge in their stocking feet to the Holy House itself, was located about a mile south of Walsingham proper.
Fig. 4.6 Postcard depicting the miraculous transfer of the Holy House of Loreto (Milan, Italy: Tipografia Santa Lega Eucaristica, 1899).
Fig. 4.7 Postcard depicting Slipper Chapel, Walsingham (Norwich, UK: Jarrold & Sons, early twentieth century). © Jarrold & Sons. All rights reserved.
The pilgrims to the settlement in Norfolk included royalty, who made sumptuous gifts for the maintenance of the staff as well as for the adornment of the sanctuary. As elsewhere, candle devotion was central to the cult of the Virgin at Walsingham. By no mere coincidence, the statue of Our Lady there was taken away to be consumed by fire in the aftermath of a royal injunction in 1538, “Forbidding the Placing of Candles before Images and Other Superstitious Practices.” Tapers figured largely in the monarchs’ generosity to the shrine. King Henry III, the first royal to come, paid at least thirteen visits, with the initial one in 1226. In 1240, for the feast of the Virgin’s Conception, he ordered two thousand votives to be burned there and at Bury St.
Edmunds. In 1246, he commissioned a golden crown to be placed upon the head of the Madonna at Walsingham. In 1251, he spent the feast of the Annunciation on pilgrimage there, and made the gift of both two silver candlesticks and a valuable chasuble of red samite. King Edward I betook himself to the shrine twice, the second time on Candlemas Day in 1296. The candlelight can be pictured easily that would have coruscated when the feast of this holiday was celebrated. King Henry VII came no fewer than four times. King Henry VIII of England, who was responsible for the demise of the statue and much else in the community, paced barefoot two miles to reach the site in 1511, made lavish donations there, and kindled a candle before the Madonna in March 1538.
The character Avarice in William Langland’s late fourteenth-century personification allegory Piers Plowman takes a pledge that reflects the author’s reprobation of the motivations that propelled pilgrims to make the trek to Walsingham. The mention of a peregrination there had a special cachet. Of course, worshipers also journeyed to other sites relating to the Virgin in England as well as on the continent. For example, rich documentation survives on Marian pilgrimage in late medieval and early modern Germany. Such voyages eventuated in an unalterable syllogism:
pilgrimages led to shrines, and such holy places (above all, ones connected with Mary) centered upon images. For the reformers, the counter-syllogism was patent: to end such veneration, desacralize its objectives. The corollary was equally unmissable:
to desecrate sanctuaries, destroy Madonnas. In the Reformation, modernizing meant de-Madonna-izing.
Toward the end of 1538, the reformist bishop of Worcester Hugh Latimer (see Fig. 4.8) notoriously decreed that the image of the Virgin in his diocese—and others, including the one at Walsingham—should be charred. Latimer addressed the letter in question to none other than to Thomas Cromwell, chief minister of King Henry VIII.
The bishop’s aspiration was soon fulfilled. The incineration of the carvings, and the shutting down of all shrines in England, were concomitants to the suppression and dissolution of the monasteries. Henry VIII ordered these draconian acts in 1536 and 1539, and Cromwell oversaw them as agitator-in-chief. The aftereffects included the abandonment and devastation of many abbeys. The figure of Our Lady of Walsingham was abducted to be put to the torch; the swank sanctuary was first despoiled of its
gold and silver ornaments and then dismantled; and the priory and its dependencies were largely razed and abandoned. The sites and image of Our Lady that can be seen today are anything but original. Rather, they have resulted from a Marian revival in Britain that has been supported by the papacy since the late nineteenth century.
Fig. 4.8 Unknown artist, Hugh Latimer, late sixteenth century. Oil on panel, 55.9 × 41.9 cm.
London, National Portrait Gallery. Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
All rights reserved.
The Madonnas that have been enumerated were neither the first nor the only ones to suffer the fate of destruction. When the impetus to remake the fabric of the Church was taken very literally, many others were denuded of their garments, irreparably mangled, or even summarily destroyed in expressions of iconoclasm by the riffraff. In England, a hard-edged campaign was waged against what was regarded as Mariolatry, the according to Mary of worship due to God and God alone.
The first bout of statue-tory abuse extended to the removal in 1535 of an Our Lady’s girdle, worn by expectant mothers to help them in their pregnancies and especially in childbirth. Often effigies suffered radical mastectomies in which their breasts were stabbed or hacked off. Their arms were severed and their faces defaced. The representations of the infant Jesus that they held were cut away. In 1581, for instance, the Virgin and Child along with other figures were subjected to what might be called holy (or unholy) vandalism wrought upon the Cheapside Cross in London. In a renovation, the Madonna was replaced by a semi-nude image of the Roman goddess Diana. Later, the Mary was reinstalled but after twelve nights she was de-crowned, beheaded, and shorn of her offspring. Another relatively late manifestation of the
iconoclasm came in 1578, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, nearly two decades after she succeeded her Catholic half sister Mary to the throne in 1559. While touring Norfolk near Thetford, the ruler made what was presented as being a chance discovery.
In a hay house, she happened upon an image of Our Lady that she considered an idol, and she had it carbonized.
The sixteenth century lacked most of the devices that are for the taking today to record and document such barbarism visually. Yet around 1570, an unknown artist captured a scene of iconoclasm within a picture painted with oil paints. The panel depicts the young King Edward VI receiving the blessing of a bedridden Henry VIII and the Pope, who along with the monks to his right is being crushed by the Bible (see Fig. 4.9). Through a window, reformers are visible outside. The two nearest tug on ropes to tip and overthrow a statue of the Virgin and Child. Not only in England did what could be called Mariaphobia express itself in anti-Marian iconoclasm. In Germany, one excruciating act of such Madonna mayhem put in the crosshairs not a statue but a painting. An artwork of the Virgin and Child by the artist Hans Holbein the Elder suffered destruction in the cathedral in Augsburg in 1537. In some locations, images of Mary became the objects of literal tugs-of-war between opposing factions of Protestant reformers and Roman Catholics.
What have been nicknamed “cults of battered Marys” arose. All over Europe, Protestant hooligans would subject to misuse and mutilation Madonnas that would be rescued and sometimes repaired by Catholic handymen of holiness. Thus, specific representations of Our Lady endured abuse in Paris repeatedly, in Geneva, and in the English College Chapter of Valladolid (see Fig. 4.10). Mistreatment of a similar sort was supposedly meted out to depictions of the Virgin during conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in the nineteenth century in England. By the mid-seventeenth century, a census of images would have found their number and distribution pared back sharply because of iconoclastic reformers.
In the 1650s, a Jesuit tallied over one thousand Marian shrines, providing for each a brief history and an engraving of its Madonna (see Figs. 4.11 and 4.12). The four-digit headcount is remarkable. As a sequel, the author drew up a discrete index containing a subsection listing wounded Virgins, as well as taxonomies of weapons wielded against them, portions of the likenesses that suffered thuggery, types of damage, and kinds of action taken by Mary in response to the contusions. A roll call taken in the early nineteenth century in France would have tabulated another sharp drop, since the French Revolution brought about the destruction of the effigies and relics that had outlasted the Reformation. Across the ages, Madonnas that have demonstrated a special capacity to withstand persecution have become the objects of popular devotion, legends, and superstitions. We will see medieval images that demonstrated impressive skills as proto-survivalists, but for the present let us focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Fig. 4.9 Unknown artist, King Edward VI and the Pope, ca. 1575. Oil on panel, 62.2 × 90.8 cm.
London, National Portrait Gallery. Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London. All rights reserved.
Fig. 4.10 Nuestra Señora de la Vulnerata. Statue, sixteenth century. Valladolid, Real Colegio de San Albano. Photograph by Rubén Ojeda, 2010. Image from Wikimedia Commons, © Rodelar (2010),
CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nuestra_Señora_de_la_Vulnerata.jpg
Figs. 4.11 and 4.12 Title page and title illustration of Wilhelm Gumppenberg, Atlas Marianus sive de imaginibus Deiparae per orbem christianum miraculosis, vol. 1 (Ingolstadt, Germany: Haenlin, 1657), with
Virgin and Child on the Holy House, and beams showing its westward movements.