The late medieval cultus of the Virgin Mary was a morass of intertwining tropes that offer testimony to the vibrancy and fluidity of western Christianity’s contemporary character: Theotokos, Second Eve, Mother of Mercy, Stella Maris, Empress of Hell, and so forth. Some of these motifs were paradoxical: the submissive ancilla domini, for example, also fought in defence of Rhodes in 1480. Some, such as the swooning co-redemptrix and the Virgin who was immaculate from conception, were contested and still-developing. So rich was the Mariological landscape at the end of the fifteenth century that it imposes two questions on modern scholarship: how did such a heterogenous cultural symbol evolve, and what happened to that symbol when the Reformation confronted it? It is to the second question that Lilla Grindlay makes a welcome contribution in Queen of Heaven, asking, ‘did the influential, devotional symbol of Mary really vanish from the nation’s incipient Protestant consciousness?’ (p. 2). Grindlay focusses on two seemingly self-contradictory Marian tropes, the Virgin of the Annunciation and the Queen of Heaven, which had co-existed before the Reformation, to suggest that Protestantism set them in opposition. Queen Mary was degraded in the subsequent contest since there was no place for the Assumption or Coronation in the minds of divines ostensibly committed to sola scriptura, and consequently both of these motifs were ‘obliterated’ from Protestant liturgy. Elsewhere, however, they remained culturally significant literary signifiers, often in contradistinction to Mary the humble handmaid (the tendency among reformers to reproduce things they had despoiled in order to decry them can also be seen in Elizabethan images of iconoclasm). Grindlay finds the image of the Queen of Heaven deployed on both sides of the confessional divide in polemical writing and also in more ambiguous devotional work such as the poetry of Elizabeth’s ‘saucy godson’, Sir John Harington. A key contribution of the book is, therefore, to further revise the history of a Virgin who allegedly disappeared as a consequence of the English Reformation.

There is a proclivity among literary scholars to account for Mariological developments through psychoanalysis at the expense of theological or even pastoral explanations. Grindlay here instead offers a close reading of selected texts with careful and apposite contextualisation. She begins (Chapter 1) by laying out the evolution of the doctrines of the Assumption and (with less detail) of the Coronation, from apocryphal texts, through the visions of Elisabeth of Schönau to their description in the sermons of John Mirk and in English mystery plays. Next, Grindlay shows the objection to and subversion of Mary’s title of ‘queen’ in Protestant sermons and the writing of William Perkins and George Downame (Chapter 2). Protestants portrayed the Virgin’s regal authority as that of an overbearing mother (in his Annotations, Erasmus had poured scorn on the popular notion that because Christ had been an obedient child he was still doing whatever his mother asked fifteen-hundred years later). William Fulke and John Jewel were among those deploying the Jews of Pathros in Jeremiah 44, who worshipped ‘a queen of heaven’, to criticise Catholic veneration of Mary. By contrast, Protestantism affirmed the humble and obedient Virgin. Grindlay develops the discussion around this ‘bifurcation’ in two chapters (3 and 4). Firstly, she explores ‘logocentric’ forms of iconoclasm in Pasquine in a traunce and The Faerie Queene; secondly, she analyses the evolving presentation of Mary as an obedient ‘conduct-book woman’ from Juan Luis Vives’ Instruction of a Christian Woman to Dorothy Leigh’s The Mother’s Blessing and Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Having moved (in Chapter 5) into more recusant territory with John Constable’s poetry and explored another distinctive Mariological trope, that of the Virgo lactans, Grindlay concludes with two chapters (6 and 7) focused on English post-Reformation Catholicism. In the first, she assesses the reinvigorated rosary devotion of the Jesuits which reasserted the Queen of Heaven as intercessor par excellence, before considering the poems of the Catholic martyr Robert Southwell in which Mary appears to lose her role as advocate.

This is a thoroughly stimulating volume, clearly written and helpfully sign-posted throughout that demonstrates Grindlay’s erudition as a literary scholar. It makes a helpful contribution to the field of English Reformation studies and offers interesting insights for those studying gender in the early modern period. The themes of the sub-heading—Assumption and Coronation—fade away, perhaps inevitably during the discussion on Mary as a godly Protestant, but also in the context of Constable’s sonnets and the rosary devotions. Grindlay recognises that her discussion ‘is frequently situated in dialogue with medieval iconography’ (p. 5) but seems to overlook some medieval discourse. The iconography of the Coronation originates in twelfth-century England, and some discussion of the contested positioning of Mary at her investiture, enthroned next to Christ or kneeling submissively before the Trinity, may have helped demonstrate the fluidity of established motifs going into the Reformation period. Grindlay appears to regard the relationship of rosary piety and meditative methodology as a Loyolan innovation, whereas the rosary book had been developing as a tool for sincere meditative practice from the fifteenth century (consider the 1538 injunctions which proscribed ‘saying over a number of beads, not understood or minded on’).Footnote ¹ The Assumption directly connected to Mary’s immaculate status, which made her the perfect human being and, as such, was frequently cited in defence of the character of women: a consideration of her place in querelle des femmes literature such as Robert Burdet’s verse Dyalogue Defensyve for Women agaynst Malycyous Detractoures (1542) and Jane Anger’s proto-feminist Protection for Women (1589) may have constructively informed the discussion on the Virgin as an aspirational figure in nascent Protestantism. Regardless, Grindlay convincingly presents what she calls the ‘plurisignification of the Virgin’s image’ in late Elizabethan and Jacobean culture. She has produced a lucid and thought-provoking book and her accessible style means that Queen of Heaven should appeal to the general reader as well as scholars of English Mariology.