Gary Waller, "Walsingham and the English Imagination"
English | ISBN: 1409405095 | 2011 | PDF | 250 pages | 4 MB
Drawing on history, art history, literary criticism and theory, gender
studies, theology and psychoanalysis, this interdisciplinary study
analyzes the cultural significance of the Shrine of our Lady of
Walsingham, medieval England's most significant pilgrimage site devoted
to the Virgin Mary, which was revived in the twentieth century, and in
2006 voted Britain's favorite religious site.
Covering Walsingham's origins, destruction, and transformations from the
Middle Ages to the present, Gary Waller pursues his investigation not
through a standard history but by analyzing the 'invented traditions'
and varied re-creations of Walsingham by the 'English imagination'-
poems, fiction, songs, ballads, musical compositions and folk legends,
solemn devotional writings and hostile satire which Walsingham has
inspired, by Protestants, Catholics, and religious skeptics alike. They
include, in early modern England, Erasmus, Ralegh, Sidney, and
Shakespeare; then, during Walsingham's long 'protestantization' from the
sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, ballad revivals, archeological
investigations, and writings by Agnes Strickland, Edmund Waterton, and
Hopkins; and in the modern period, writers like Eliot, Charles Williams,
Robert Lowell, and A.N. Wilson. The concluding chapter uses
contemporary feminist theology to view Walsingham not just as a symbol
of nostalgia but a place inviting spiritual change through its potential
sexual and gender transformation.
