ABSTRACT
Enunciating an apocalyptic language often deployed by Protestant polemicists, Catholic George Marshall vilifies those responsible for the Edwardian Reformation and its iconoclastic destruction of church and ‘grayle’ as ‘cursed men and wicked teachers.’ Provocatively, Marshall also connects the Tudor Reformations to erotic discourse, identifying the abrogation of traditional practices-prayer, fasting, and the mass-with the fact that ‘Cupido and Venus in England beganne / As gods for to governe bothe woman and man.’ Although Marshall deploys these erotic allegories to define Protestant reformation as spiritual fornication, his polemic nevertheless suggests the degree to which erotic symbolism had saturated Tudor religious discourse.
