Chasing the Lady

Responding to intellectual, devotional and liturgical changes in the rest of Europe, the place of the Virgin Mary was reappraised in England during the Reformations of the sixteenth century. It was during a seventeen year period between the publication of the Litany in English under Henry VIII in 1544 and the revised Calendar of the 1559 Prayer Book under Elizabeth in 1561 that a liturgical ‘shape’ to a reformed understanding of the Virgin Mary’s place within worship of the established church was formed. It provided a basis for an ‘Anglican’ theology of Mary, subsequent devotion and liturgical developments in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion.