ABSTRACT
Twenty years after the dissolution of the religious houses in 1538, Walsingham had not entirely been eliminated from the national memory. The Elizabethan Church’s homilies could still warn against Our Lady of Walsingham as an “idol,” while the homilies’ primary author, John Jewel, spoke of the blasphemy of regarding Mary as “our lady and goddess.”1 Essentially what the reformers objected to about Walsingham was that the Virgin, not Christ, was regarded as the crucial intercessor between mankind and God. Why, asked Luther, was Mary so venerated when she was at best an example of obedience?2 Or, as it was put more disparagingly by Latimer and others, when she was but a pudding sack or (in a metaphor that would have echoed familiarly in the saffron fields around Walsingham) a “bag of saffron … when the spice was out”?3 The reformers further believed that medieval theology and devotion had over-valued the Virgin by paying idolatrous attention to her body and by sexualizing key events in Mariological history, not to mention adding non-scriptural “events” like the Virgin’s Assumption. At a further level of idolatry, material objects associated with Mary’s body – hair, milk, girdles, clothing – had been accorded a blasphemous degree of power simply because of their alleged physical proximity to her.
