Winifred's Well explores a moment when Britain's oldest continuous pilgrimage site was threatened. A 1917 mining incident suddenly diverted the flow of water from the healing well that predates Lourdes by at least seven centuries. The journey to recover this forgotten story of the well and its protectors draws together the author, the heir of an old Welsh family, and even a contemporary Archdruidess-each seeking in a different way. The journey ends at a rarely seen underground lake that lies beneath a mountain in rural Flintshire. Extensively researched, the book interweaves the story of Lady Anna Maria Mostyn with the author's present-day search for the physical and spiritual sources of St. Winifred's Well. Lady Mostyn's crusade to save the well from powerful mining interests at the turn of the twentieth century has a contemporary ring. And the legend of St. Winifred, mingled with elements from the deep Celtic past, offers ground for exploring the primal fascination with powerful watersources that cuts across time and culture. With the resurgence of interest in Celtic spirituality, it is surprising that no book in print has the remarkable well at Holywell as its focus. Winifred's Well unfolds the evocative power of the place as the author came to experience it-through chance meetings, discoveries, recovered documents, and unexpected connections. The book is illustrated with original photographs and historical images from the author's collection.

This book visits the fact that, in the pre-modern world, saints and lords served structurally similar roles, acting as patrons to those beneath them on the spiritual or social ladder with the word "patron" used to designate both types of elite sponsor. Chapman argues that this elision of patron saints and patron lords remained a distinctive feature of the early modern English imagination and that it is central to some of the key works of literature in the period. Writers like Jonson, Shakespeare, Spenser, Drayton, Donne and, Milton all use medieval patron saints in order to represent and to challenge early modern ideas of patronage -- not just patronage in the narrow sense of the immediate economic relations obtaining between client and sponsor, but also patronage as a society-wide system of obligation and reward that itself crystallized a whole culture’s assumptions about order and degree. The works studied in this book -- ranging from Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, written early in the 1590s, to Milton’s Masque Performed at Ludlow Castle, written in 1634 -- are patronage works, either aimed at a specific patron or showing a keen awareness of the larger patronage system. This volume challenges the idea that the early modern world had shrugged off its own medieval past, instead arguing that Protestant writers in the period were actively using the medieval Catholic ideal of the saint as a means to represent contemporary systems of hierarchy and dependence. Saints had been the ideal -- and idealized -- patrons of the medieval world and remained so for early modern English recusants. As a result, their legends and iconographies provided early modern Protestant authors with the perfect tool for thinking about the urgent and complex question of who owed allegiance to whom in a rapidly changing world.