Walsingham and the English Imagination by Gary Waller (review)

The reader of this book is advised to plod past its beginnings—which have needed copyediting—to find its riches in the sections on the Renaissance and modern periods. Many pages are taken up with feminist criticism, not enough with symbolic anthropology. Many footnotes derive from trawling websites, too few on medieval Marian shrines. Masquerading in these early sections as a scholarly book, it is really about—and participating in—modern folk culture in connection with medieval Walsingham. On p. 9, an unfootnoted comment that the Orthodox strangely saw William’s Conquest as a “Crusade” is not so strange given that the Viking Normans were at the same time conquering Sicily and Jerusalem and that their Conquest of England had the authority of the pope with his banner embroidered with the Roman Keys. On p. 15, Waller lists the presence of Richeldis in “modern guidebooks, sermons, tourist tours, wall plaques, teaspoons, fridge magnets, coffee mugs, DVDs, blogs, websites, Facebook pages, brochures and information to visitors and pilgrims,” repeating this with Julian’s cat on “fridge magnets, coffee mugs, silver brooches, and tea-towels!” (p. 55). When deciding whether the Holy Houses of Loreto or of Walsingham were earlier, he remarks, as argument, “Italians, as we know from football, movies (and, not to mention, scholarly studies of popular Italian Catholicism like Carroll’s) are somewhat prone to exaggeration. And vulgarity” (p. 17). He notes the first authentic contemporary documents referring to Our Lady of Walsingham are for Henry III’s gifts to her, including, in 1246, a golden crown (p.22). (The official documentation for the House of Loreto notes its arrival to that location as 1294.) In other words, Waller contextualizes medieval Walsingham with the modern, not the medieval, period.

I puzzled over the disparity between the “medieval” sections of the book and Waller’s later more excellent material, then realized that the title, Walsingham and the English Imagination, creates a blind spot concerning the Middle Ages, which had a pan-European culture through universal Catholicism that this author cannot understand or accept. Ernst Robert Curtius had understood this universal aspect in his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter, 1948/53), Julien Benda earlier speaking against nationalism as The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (Trahison des clercs, 1927/55).

Folk religion, often centered on the archetypal figure of a woman or of a house within a house or both (as at Einsiedeln or Uropa or the Porziuncula or the Santissima Annunziata), has great potency, better explained by anthropologists such as Carl Jung (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1968); Victor and Edith Turner (Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 1978); and James and Renata Fernandez, than by structuralist and feminist theorists. In such a perspective, the blending of Diana of Ephesus, Isis of Egypt, and Mary of Nazareth is legitimate. One might mention the recent Wellcome Institute’s “Infinitas gracias” exhibition or the ex votos at Montenero in Tuscany or those at Einsiedeln in Switzerland. (Waller instead speaks of late Marian apparitions, from 1830–1917, not the earlier ones contemporary to Walsingham’s; p. 152.) The original Walsingham would have been festooned with candles to the measure or weight of people, ex votos, etc.

Waller next sees Marian Walsingham as subsumed into the figure of Norfolk’s Anne Boleyn, largely by way of the nineteenth-century Canterbury Tales, Pilgrims to Walsingham, written by Agnes Strickland. He, however, omits much discussion of Anne’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, as the Virgin Queen of England’s intense state secularization purloined from the Virgin Queen of Heaven, with Elizabeth I’s innumerable portraits in great farthingaled skirts reflecting the great encompassing cloak of the now destroyed Mariolatrous idol, burnt before Cromwell’s house in Chelsea in 1538. But Waller’s book becomes a delight when it discusses snatches of music, especially Ophelia’s mad song from Ralegh’s ballad, which hauntingly and nostalgically use both the tune of “As you came from Walsingham...