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.

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.

It begins with an apprentice lawyer leaping for his life to a ship escaping a hostile and dangerous London. Leaving his friends perishing at the ruthless hands of fire-brandishing Catholics, he makes a solemn vow: to one day wield revenge. After years of haunting nightmares, he returns a man full of dreams to protect Queen Elizabeth and rid England of the Catholic menace once and for all. He must convince the powerful government to spy for information – knowledge is power. In 1570 this is a formidable task as the realm jitters with religious turmoil, his beloved Queen is besieged by murderous plots and Her court swarms with cutthroat traitors. Truth and treachery are happy to hide perilously in the gloom of corridors and secretive deeds, so Francis Walsingham must hatch his plans from the shadows. Into the seething uncertainty of a divided realm, Walsingham must go to daring lengths in recruiting a group of misfit Agents, Court Riders, Rhyming Whores and Bear Wrestlers to establish the first Secret Service – the Bond of Protection. As he becomes a mastermind in outfoxing the lethal Brotherhood, Walsingham's grip on the traitors tightens but he narrowly misses capturing their dangerous leader, Ridolfi. He soon discovers treacheries run too deep in the government and his own life now depends on convincing the Queen those closest to her are the most threat. His reputation, the Queen's life and Protestant England must all be saved.