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25 1 Queen Elizabeth I had problems with three Marys: first, her monarchical predecessor; second, her cousin from Scotland; and, third, the Virgin Mary, who was venerated by devotees of what English Protestants called “the old religion.”1 Before she became queen, Elizabeth was imprisoned in the Tower by Queen Mary. In the middle of her reign she was politically menaced by the presence in her kingdom of the exiled Queen of Scots, in line to inherit the English throne in the event of her death (by natural causes or by assassination). Throughout her reign, as she projected her power and authority symbolically, she in effect competed as “Supreme Governor” of the English church and as idealized monarch with the Virgin Mary as an object of reverence. She survived to be crowned monarch in 1558. She kept a tight rein on Mary, Queen of Scots, and finally, in the face of real and fabricated plots, consented to her execution for treason in 1587. Elizabeth replaced church images of the Virgin Mary (especially on rood screens)2 with her own royal symbols and countenanced the creation of a personal cult constructed of materials from Catholic Marian devotion and Petrarchan erotic idealism.3 As Miri Rubin explains in her comprehensive study, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary, over the many centuries in which Mary developed as a focus of devotional attention, she served several functions for Christians: She was conceived as a mediator for the prayers and petitions of the faithful; she was portrayed as a protector of individuals, groups, and even whole countries (the last in the case of Spain of the Reconquista era);4 she was a model for personal religious behavior for both men and women; and she was an exemplary figure of loving maternity and affective Arthur F. Marotti Marian Verse as Politically Oppositional Poetry in Elizabethan England 26 Arthur F. Marotti responsiveness. In the early Byzantine era Mary was celebrated as Theotokos , or “God-bearer,” and later as “Mother of God,” the second identity portrayed , for example, in carved statues of Mary that open up to reveal the figures of the Trinity within her body, making her the “Great Mother,” a virtual goddess. Mary also had a function as the enemy of heretics and nonChristians (especially Jews)—a role that allowed her use as a sponsor of religious persecution, anti-Semitic violence, and colonial brutality. Ubiquitous throughout the Christian world in the many churches named in her honor, in the religious feasts dedicated to her (particularly that of the Assumption), in the Marian shrines or pilgrimage destinations associated with ongoing miracles, in the reported visions and dreams of famous saints, and in such scattered supposed relics as the pieces of her garments and samples of her (dried) milk, Mary was a feminine presence at the heart of Christian (and, in the post-Reformation era, Roman Catholic) belief and practice. Regarding Marian devotion as idolatrous, for some good and some bad reasons, Reformation (especially non-Lutheran) Protestantism sought to displace Mary in the devotional economy of Christianity to strengthen the individual believer’s unmediated relationship with God.5 In 1538 the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, a visit to which Erasmus described in one of his colloquies,6 was destroyed by royal command, part of a program of cultural eradication of Catholic practices.7 Queen Elizabeth’s later effacement of Mary as an object of reverent devotion, then, was in line with the reformist agenda of the English Protestant church,8 although her assumption of aspects of the religiocultural status of the Virgin could look suspiciously like the cultivation of a new form of idolatry.9 In any event, Mary and Elizabeth were cultural rivals. One of the effects of this situation is that expressions of Marian devotion could be intended and/or understood as politically oppositionist acts. Although the production of poetry addressed to or about the Virgin Mary generally (and drastically) declined in early modern England,10 Marian verse was written during the reign of Queen Mary and later on the Continent by Catholic exiles and at home by embattled recusants during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth, King James I, and King Charles I. Most of the poems written during the reign of Protestant monarchs were either circulated in manuscript in Catholic social networks or printed on the Continent for importation into England. Setting these poems against the background of what preceded them, I concentrate here on Elizabethan Marian...

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