ABSTRACT

Like Father Time in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, filling in the “wide gap” of time (IV, 1, 9) between the destruction caused by King Leontes and the resurrection (or return) of Queen Hermione, I comment in this chapter on the “wide gap” between the destruction of Walsingham in the sixteenth century and its resurrection in the late nineteenth. The comparison between Shakespeare’s play and the shrine is apposite since, as Susan Dunn-Hensley shows in Chapter 12 of this collection, the long interim – in Shakespeare’s play the 16 years of Leontes’ “re-creation,” in Walsingham’s case the process of Protestantization that occurred between the 1530s and the late nineteenth century – contained the potential for later resurrection. As well, the fading of Our Lady of Walsingham as a sacred space centers, at least in part, as Shakespeare’s play does, on families. The Walsingham families in question are the Sidneys, the Warners and Lee-Warners, and (just beyond the scope of this essay, but taking us to the present), the Gurneys. And, of course, before all of these there was the Holy Family itself.