Walsingham in Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to Modernity

Dominic Janes, Gary Waller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351874038
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Walsingham was medieval England's most important shrine to the Virgin Mary and a popular pilgrimage site. Following its modern revival it is also well known today. For nearly a thousand years, it has been the subject of, or referred to in, music, poetry and novels (by for instance Langland, Erasmus, Sidney, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Eliot and Lowell). But only in the last twenty years or so has it received serious scholarly attention. This volume represents the first collection of multi-disciplinary essays on Walsingham's broader cultural significance. Contributors to this book focus on the hitherto neglected issue of Walsingham's cultural impact: the literary, historical, art historical and sociological significance that Walsingham has had for over six hundred years. The collection's essays consider connections between landscape and the sacred, the body and sexuality and Walsingham's place in literature, music and, more broadly, especially since the Reformation, in the construction of cultural memory. The historical range of the essays includes Walsingham's rise to prominence in the later Middle Ages, its destruction during the English Reformation, and the presence of uncanny echoes and traces in early modern English culture, including poems, ballads, music and some of the plays of Shakespeare. Contributions also examine the cultural dynamics of the remarkable revival of Walsingham as a place of pilgrimage and as a cultural icon in the Victorian and modern periods. Hitherto, scholarship on Walsingham has been almost entirely confined to the history of religion. In contrast, contributors to this volume include internationally known scholars from literature, cultural studies, history, sociology, anthropology and musicology as well as theology.

Chapter 1

Introduction
Walsingham: Landscape, Sexuality, and Cultural Memory

Dominic Janes and Gary Waller

This collection of essays grew out of a conference held at Walsingham in spring 2008. Some of us had written on Walsingham before; for others, it was an opportunity to extend their research into new areas. Walsingham is a place with a complex history and mythology that goes back over 1,000 years, and in different (and contradictory ways) all the participants felt something of its aura. Walsingham has inspired not only religious devotion – today, as in the Middle Ages, hundreds of thousands of visitors and pilgrims visit this village in north Norfolk with its multiple shrines dedicated to the Virgin Mary – but also a rich tradition of poems, fiction, songs, ballads, musical compositions and folk legends, solemn devotional writings and hostile satire.¹ At certain periods of its history, Walsingham has seemed to be set aside and revered as a holy place, a focus of strong natural and supernatural forces; at other times, and sometimes simultaneously, it has attracted fierce opposition, even violent destruction, most notably at the Reformation, when the priory and holy relics were destroyed, its riches seized, and the famous “image” of Our Lady of Walsingham taken to London and burned, condemned as idolatrous and superstitious by the newly ascendant Protestant authorities.

Walsingham has been invoked by writers and musicians across the centuries, from Langland in the fourteenth century and Erasmus and More in the early sixteenth; Shakespeare refers to it in the early seventeenth, about the time when it inspired two of the greatest masterpieces of English keyboard music, the so-called “Walsingham Variations” by William Byrd and John Bull. It was the subject of one of the most poignant and widely adapted ballads in early modern England, which was “rediscovered” during the eighteenth century’s reinvention of medievalism. Finally, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, as part of the renewal of Catholicism in England, Walsingham was revived as a pilgrimage site (and often vilified almost as much as during the Reformation). As part of Walsingham’s modern revival, it once again attracted major literary figures like Hopkins, Joyce, Eliot, and Lowell. Today it is both a place of pilgrimage and a tourist site, a small village that wears its medieval origins gracefully (as well as profitably). It features the impressive ruins of the original Augustinian priory and a Franciscan friary, twin holy wells, and outcrops of medieval buildings and walls; it has an elaborate neo-Italianate twentieth-century Anglican shrine complete with replica Holy House, multiple chapels, another holy well and elaborate gardens and pilgrim accommodations; and, a mile away, a Roman Catholic shrine built around a revived medieval chapel. In 2006 Walsingham was voted Britain’s favorite religious site in a survey carried out by the British Broadcasting Corporation.² As one of our contributors, Simon Coleman, has shown in many ethnographic studies, Walsingham today generates feelings of curiosity, reverence, and awe from a remarkable variety of people, ranging from the devout to the skeptical. It still has the power to attract public vilification from radical religious groups who gather in the village to revile the activities there just as their Protestant ancestors did 500 years ago. It is the frequent subject of devotional and tourist blogs and of popular devotional literature (including poetry by the current Archbishop of Canterbury), and is even the setting for popular mysteries, both historical and contemporary. Finally, in a development that would surely remind Reformation iconoclasts of the worst excesses of worldliness by which they were so appalled, it now provides on-line shopping.³

Up to now, scholarship on Walsingham has focused largely on its theological and devotional interest. A recent volume, Sacred Space: House of God, Gate of Heaven, for instance, brings together essays that are explicitly designed to affirm the Christian experiences of Walsingham. “The term ‘sacred space’,” the publicity for the book claimed, “has been hijacked by yoga teachers, therapists and the unconventional to suit their own ends. In this book the approach is more orthodox and is Christian.” By contrast, the focus of our volume is not, except incidentally, theological or devotional. It is, we hope, stimulating and not merely “unconventional”; and none of its contributors, as far as we know, are practicing therapists or yoga teachers. In fact, in the past two decades, a varied and stimulating scholarly discussion has begun to develop on the broader cultural importance of Walsingham, from which our essays have benefited and to which they contribute. The editors of the recent collection Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe attest that serious study of the issues we raise about Walsingham has, more generally, been notably lacking.⁴ Walsingham has, indeed, never been accorded significant notice outside the strictly religious world until this volume. Its greatest lack has perhaps been that of a poet capable of writing a “Walsingham Tales” to celebrate it for a broader audience as Chaucer did with the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury in his Canterbury Tales. In the 1520s Erasmus published, in Latin, a witty and at times scathing dialog based on his visits to Walsingham which, when translated into English in the middle of the Reformation controversies, came to have significant political impact, yet it never developed the literary cachet of Chaucer’s work. In the mid-nineteenth century Agnes Strickland “penned” (the appropriate term for a work of such sentimentality) The Pilgrims of Walsingham, or Tales of the Middle Ages: An Historical Romance (1835), which may have captured a little of the Victorians’ rediscovery of Walsingham but did it no favors as a literary work of any merit.

The intention of the scholars represented in this volume, both in our conference and in the publication itself, was not to repeat the chronological story of the birth, life, death, and rebirth of the shrine (a sequence that has been recounted many times and which is briefly summarized below), but to explore the broader roles that Walsingham has played in English literature and the broader culture. We focus on Walsingham’s cultural impact: the historical, anthropological, sociological, architectural, and literary significances that it has accumulated for the best part of 600 or more years through the exploration of interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives.

Both in our conference and here in this collection, we have divided our discussions into three thematic sections: Part I, “Landscape and the Sacred”; Part II, “The Body and Sexuality”; and Part III, “Cultural Memory: Architecture, Literature, Music.” Ultimately, we see this thematic arrangement of the chapters as making possible a richer understanding of Walsingham as a cultural artifact than can be obtained through a more traditional chronological approach, although each of the main historical periods in which Walsingham has been a significant presence (medieval, post-Reformation, Victorian, and modern) is represented by a number of chapters. Our three thematic sections seek to examine, firstly, the significance of Walsingham’s location in relation to the sacred and more broadly to England’s changing geographical and political landscape; secondly, the body, sexuality, and related concerns, with gender and the family as sites of analysis of a place that is sacred to the paradoxical figure of the fertile Virgin; thirdly, ways in which Walsingham has been reinterpreted (and reinvented) in music and literary texts over the past 600 years.

Historicizing Walsingham: Three Vignettes

In the remainder of this introduction, we provide a brief historical overview of our subject, using three vignettes from key periods in Walsingham’s history. We then provide brief synopses of the individual chapters. For over 800 years, Walsingham (more precisely, the village of Little Walsingham, so designated not by size but because it was founded after its immediate neighbor, “Great” Walsingham) has been the subject of powerful and contradictory stories or, as Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger put it in their influential volume The Invention of Tradition, of competing “invented” narratives of the past.⁵ One of our contributors, Simon Coleman, who pioneered the contemporary study of the shrine and the village, and who was the first scholar to discuss it in terms of “invented traditions,” has often noted that there has always been “something” about Walsingham that has prompted a recurring need to narrativize (and renarrativize) its history and aura.⁶ Some of the most striking stories in Walsingham’s history concern its supposed miraculous origin, which is summarized below; another set of repeated narratives focuses on the suddenness and unexpected destruction of 1538 and its aftermath when England’s religious houses were dissolved by order of Henry VIII, and how to many that event signaled the “loss” or “disappearance” of the Virgin Mary from England in the post-Reformation era.⁷ Yet more stories have arisen from the conflicted story of the shrine’s revival in the past 100 years and how that remarkable phenomenon connects with its former fame. All of these periods feature centrally in the chapters in the present collection. Indeed, part of the fascination of Walsingham today lies in the visible continuities between the twenty-first century and its earlier history. Notwithstanding an eighteenth-century facade, the manor house, or “Abbey,” of Little Walsingham visibly grows from the ruins of the medieval priory, and Erasmus’s substantially accurate account, written in the 1520s, could even be used as a partial guide to the site today.⁸

The frequently told story of Walsingham’s origins provides the historical background of and much of the mythology behind the essays collected here. Between the mid-twelfth century and 1538, Walsingham became the most important center for the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary in England and, it is frequently claimed, in Europe. It was a pilgrimage site with a mystique centered on its Holy House (reputedly a replica of that at Nazareth), twin holy wells, a vial of the Virgin Mary’s milk, and other relics (including St Peter’s knucklebone). As the essays by Stella Singer (Chapter 2) and John Twyning (Chapter 11) explain in more detail, it had a history of apparitions, miracles, and visits by kings, queens, lords, and pilgrims from all over England and parts of Europe, and enjoyed a steady accumulation of riches, lands, and jewels. It possessed a statue of the Virgin and child, the “image” of Our Lady of Walsingham, which, over the centuries, became the primary objective of pilgrims’ veneration. If the common saying – supposedly dating from before the Norman conquest, though documentable only back as far as Edward I – were true, that England was the “dowry” of the Virgin, then, by the mid-fifteenth century Walsingham was its most glittering jewel.⁹

The Pynson Ballad

Our first vignette goes back to the origins of the shrine. For its “origins,” however, we go not to the eleventh century, but to the fifteenth. The legend of Walsingham’s beginnings is recounted in a poem, the so-called Pynson ballad (named for its printer, Richard Pynson).¹⁰ The Pynson ballad is to be distinguished from the sixteenth-century “Walsingham ballad,” which is also important in the history and cultural importance of Walsingham and is the subject here of essays by Bradley Brookshire (Chapter 13) and Alison Chapman (Chapter 14). The fifteenth-century Pynson ballad is preserved in a four-page verse pamphlet, today found uniquely in the Pepys Library of Magdalene College, Cambridge (though in the past century often reprinted) and published around 1496, though datable from internal references to about 30 years earlier. In earnest ballad stanzas, it relates the miraculous events by which it alleges that Walsingham was founded. The story goes that in 1061 (a date probably chosen to precede the Norman conquest) a rich woman, Richeldis de Faverches, a “noble wydowe” living in Walsingham Parva, a small village tucked away in the remote Norfolk countryside, had a repeated vision or dream in which the Virgin Mary took her “in spyryte” to Nazareth and instructed her to build a replica of the Holy House “at Walsyngham … unto my laude and synguler honoure.” According to the ballad, the house was planned, and two plots of ground were singled out by “a miracle of our ladys grace,” staying dry when the rest of the surrounding ground was “wet with dropes celestyall and with sylver dewe.” The Lady Richeldis had, it seems, to make a choice between them, and she chose one situated near two wells (which can still be seen on the property). But the workmen mysteriously found themselves unable to erect the building. The next morning, after a night of prayer, she found that she had made the wrong choice (as Michael Carroll points out, medieval Madonnas were often tricksters¹¹) and that the Virgin, presumably through the medium of angels, had moved the house to the other well. Historical records support only a very few details of this story. On the matter of the date, for instance, as the most recent archeological survey (1961) puts it, the recorded evidence, “as opposed to ballads and later pious wishes,” seems to point to a date early in the twelfth century.¹² Simon Coleman points out in Chapter 6 that there were complex theological, historical and mythical narratives offered by the site and its officiants for wanting the earlier date to be true – in particular in order to be able to show that the shrine pre-dated the Norman invasion and to establish priority over the Holy House of Loreto in Italy (a comparison on which Carroll comments in Chapter 3). Most pilgrimage shrines, both Carroll and Coleman argue, possess originary stories like those in the Pynson ballad: they typically include “miraculous” origins, in this case indicating that Walsingham was chosen by the Virgin herself; a famous powerful devotional object, image, or statue; continuing evidence of the divine presence in the form of miracles; and some manifestation of natural magic in the immediate surroundings, such as holy wells.¹³

By the late fifteenth century, then, around the time when the Pynson ballad was written, this little Norfolk village had become a destination for thousands of pilgrims. Its allure was centered not only on its miraculous origins, but on the presence of relics of the Virgin and other saints. Coleman describes the “prophylactic” effect achieved through direct physical contact with objects that had themselves “been touched to the holy,” as Kathleen McCormick puts it, even (as in Erasmus’s mocking of the belief) a piece of wood at Walsingham on which the Virgin had stood, rested, or leaned on.¹⁴

The most important relic at Walsingham was a vial of the Virgin’s milk, supposedly brought ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Music Examples and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Walsingham: Landscape, Sexuality, and Cultural Memory
• PART I: LANDSCAPE AND THE SACRED
• PART II: THE BODY AND SEXUALITY
• PART III: CULTURAL MEMORY: ARCHITECTURE, LITERATURE, MUSIC
• Select Bibliography
• Index