ABSTRACT
In her study of queen-making during the Wars of the Roses, Joanna Chamberlayn examined the process through which Elizabeth Woodville, a widow with two children, came to be cast as a virgin bride at the time of her marriage to Edward IV in 1464. There were a number of contributing factors: the coronation ceremony and ordo in which the association between queenship and virginity were made clear; the spectacle of the pre-coronation ceremonies in which Elizabeth took on the role of the Virgin Mary; and the later portrait of Elizabeth which made visual reference to the Madonna of Mercy.1 As a precedent for the casting of a widow as a virgin bride, Chamberlayn cited the Encomium Emmae of 1041-2 (London, BL Add. MS 33241), in which Emma, queen first to Æthelred II and then to Cnut, and mother of two at the time of her second marriage, is both described and depicted as a virgin.2 Anglo-Saxonists have been rather less willing to accept the allusions to virginity in text and image as being either intentional or, if intentional, of any special significance; however, viewed in relation to the discourse of virginity that was to become so prominent in the later Middle Ages, they merit further consideration.
