The Introduction begins with a fax which Seamus Heaney sent to Professor Eamon Duffy (Cambridge University) in 2001. The fax was a response to Duffy’s book The Voices of Morebath, in which he tells the story of the desacralising of a small Catholic community during the English Reformation. Heaney’s response to the book draws parallels between the medieval world of Morebath and the world of Mossbawn, where he grew up and which was foundational to his experience of Catholicism and his growth as a poet. I draw attention, in particular, to the centrality of Marian devotion for the parishioners of Morebath and for Heaney as a child. What Heaney’s fax shows is the emotional purchase which Catholicism continued to exert upon him long after he had moved away from adherence to religious orthodoxy or practice. By placing Heaney’s engagement with Catholicism in a broader historical context than has been the case up until now, I show how it operates in ways other than social and political, concluding that Catholicism remains foundational to Heaney’s work at the level of what I call a felt sense.

Before his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Hopkins acquired a copy of the Vulgate Latin Bible for future use and returned his copy of the King James Bible to his unhappy father. From a Bible-centred Protestant perspective, much of the doctrine on which he was to meditate as a Jesuit poet is non-scriptural, and could be described as Catholic accretions. This chapter reveals that Catholic versions of the Bible underwent revision down the centuries, as Protestant versions did, and that Victorian Catholics were not forbidden to read the Bible. A new Holy Catholic Bible is adorned with an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary in glory. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary was promulated in 1854, further widening the gap between Protestant and Catholic teaching. But for Hopkins, the unpublished laureate of the Blessed Virgin, the (unscriptural) Immaculate Conception lay at the heart of his faith.

This chapter locates a shift in beginning in the seventh century in which the power to halt quakes began to move away from collective repentance and toward saintly intercession. First, it examines the seventh-century Life of St. Symeon Stylites the Younger, a Syrian pillar saint with ties to Constantinople. It focuses in particular on hymns recorded in the Life for earthquakes that purportedly caused them to cease when sung by the holy man. The chapter shows how seventh-century Byzantines could have constructed the role of the saintly intercessor when faced with natural disasters. Next, it analyzes changes in Constantinople’s earthquake commemoration rite in the eighth century, specifically the introduction of the Theotokos as the city’s chief protection against earthquakes. Eighth-century liturgical editors borrowed from the rites commemorating the enemy invasions of Constantinople in 623, 626, and 717–18, in which the Theotokos was remembered to play a prominent role in protecting the city. It shows how the earthquake commemoration liturgy no longer saw earthquakes as divine judgment against the sin of the city, but as outside threats to the city for which powerful heavenly intercessions were needed.

Chapter 3, “Invoking the Name of Mary,” reconstructs the resonance of Marian invocation for charm participants of the late-Saxon period. While the elaborate monastic cult of the Virgin had not yet spread into popular devotion at this time, the Church urged Christians to trust Mary with their needs. It taught the people that she would advocate for them in response to their prayers. Church festivals, liturgy, homily, and poetry expose laity to narratives about Mary’s intervention on behalf of the faithful. The Mother of Christ could intercede with her son; the Queen of Heaven and Hell could command saints and overcome the devil. Charms that invoke Mary call on her by name, relate stories about the Virgin’s miraculous bearing of Christ, and prescribe her Magnificat or Masses said in her honor. Through the operation of charms’ semiotic systems, the Virgin known from vernacular and ecclesiastical traditions becomes immanent for the charm audience. By identifying the ways in which Mary is invoked, this chapter demonstrates Mary’s contributions to remedies for acute physical and spiritual conditions.

Alchfrith may have been associated with Lindisfarne. This prayer, probably dating from the end of the eighth century and addressed to the Virgin Mary, is found among a set of Gospel extracts and other prayers in the so-called Book of Cerne.

The presence of the Catholic Church and the imposition of religious beliefs and practices onto the newly found inhabitants of the Americas was perhaps one of the biggest catalysts of transition during the early modern period. This chapter focuses on the literature that was produced for, and by indigenous peoples within the religious realm. It considers different discursive genres that are emblematic of the transitions that natives experienced when they were into close and sustained contact with religious institutions, such as plays for conversion and evangelization, sermons, catechisms, spiritual biographies, and other prescriptive literature.

This chapter demonstrates that girls were active participants in early English dramatic cultures. It reveals girls performing everything from medieval religious plays to Tudor civic pageants to the Stuart court masques. Challenging long-held assumptions about when girls took to the stage, it surveys the evidence of the girl player, including payment for girl performers, eye-witness accounts of girl performers, stage directions that call for girls, paintings that depict girls performing, and plays and masques explicitly composed for girls. It charts the specific history of girls performing in plays about the Virgin Mary in England and in France, and finally turns to Romeo and Juliet, revealing how Shakespeare consistently draws on Marian themes in his characterization Juliet, engaging with as well as memorializing a longstanding dramatic tradition of the girl player that had recently been suppressed by the Reformation.

The earliest preserved painted icons in the Adriatic date from the thirteenth century.In fact, apart from Rome, the entire Latin West seems to have embraced icons simultaneously overnight as soon as they started coming in great numbers from Byzantium following the capture of Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204. This chapter argues that the Adriatic was particularly responsive to these painted icons because it had already embraced Byzantine relief icons in the eleventh century. The examination includes both the material and written evidence for the existence of icons in the eleventh-century Adriatic, such as the extant marble Hodegetria icon from Trani and the recorded commission of a gilt silver icon for Siponto Cathedral in 1069. When it comes to Dalmatia, this investigation looks into a donation document recording five icons, one of which was made of silver, in a church built and furnished by a Croatian dignitary in the 1040s. The analysis demonstrates that by the thirteenth century, the Adriatic was conditioned by relief icons to embrace easily portable painted icons reaching its shores after the fall of Constantinople and that this area as a whole experienced a strong prestige bias towards Byzantine artefacts.

In the early seventeenth century, an English Catholic priest whose identity remains obscure penned a remarkable sequence of forty-four sonnets based on the Marian titles of the Litany of Loreto. The sequence relies heavily upon tradition for its content (the author goes so far as to annotate his sonnets with sources for his claims about Mary) and upon repetition for its themes and verbal texture. In these sonnets, the poet seeks to reanimate Marian devotion in order to combat what he sees as the disruptions and discontinuities of the Reformation. His poems studiously avoid offering new ideas, for novelty is, in his view, the project of the Protestant Reformation. Instead, his sequence proposes that litany prayer and devout repetition constitute a form of sacred memory, one modelled on a liturgical understanding of memory and re-presenting, that may ensure the continuity of tradition despite the Reformation's threats.

This chapter asks where and how Rome (and, by extension, polemics self-consciously characterized as reactions against Rome) figures in efforts to determine what the living owe to the dead, and what the dead can do for the living. Latin occupies a controlling position within this inquiry; so, too, do texts that cast the world of the living as the home of the dead; so, finally, do Reformation-era debates about the soteriological stakes of praying for the dead. These topics span a period of time in which Rome is the gravitational centre of a sequence of massive upheavals in vernacular piety and attendant debates about the relationship between the living and the dead. The chapter argues that interpreting these debates as facets of the fact of Rome alerts us to the role that the human voice plays in probing the limits of mortality and the nature of the human as such.