ABSTRACT

As one travels the Milky Way to Walsingham, the constellation of its important buildings stands as a reminder that one is navigating a space of construction, destruction, and reconstruction manifest in the shrine and its surroundings, that whatever story one tells about Walsingham can only ever be an incomplete story. And yet a collection of ruined, recollected, and re-imagined “centres of devotion” that are unified in neither style nor doctrine serves to memorialize the story of English Christianity and its relation to the wider culture in a way that is most fitting for a place as intimately connected with that story as Walsingham is.