FOR some time now, Renaissance scholars have turned their attention to the ways in which English Protestants refashioned the ancient Christian cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary into veneration of the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth Tudor; indeed, the recognition of the creation of the “‘cult of Elizabeth’ has become a commonplace in Renaissance studies.” Foremost among these scholarly works is Helen Hackett's 1994, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. Earlier in the twentieth century, however, scholars such as E. C. Wilson and Dame Frances Yates had noted the irony that “the English iconoclasts while wrecking the image of the Queen of Heaven” shifted their adoration to “the queen of England,” and the Protestants who destroyed the “bejeweled and painted images of the Virgin Mary” replaced them with “another bejeweled and painted image” of Elizabeth at court. Other critics have argued that “Anglican position” held that sacred images were destroyed as “popish superstition” while “the sacred nature of the royal portrait image was to be maintained,” and thus Elizabeth became “the Virgin Queen of Protestantism,” who “came to be identified symbolically with the Virgin Mary.”

More recently, Gary Waller has written of the development and eventual near extinguishing of devotion to the Virgin Mary in The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture. Waller writes that “traces” and “fades” of the Virgin Mary were “felt long after the so-called Middle Ages were supposedly over.” Waller draws his inspiration from Julia Kristeva’s comment that the Virgin Mary stands as one of the “most powerful” figures in “the history of civilization,” serving as a “combination of power and sorrow, sovereignty and the unnamable.” As an “unnameable,” Waller argues, the image of the Virgin Mary during Early Modern Britain still possesses a “force” that requires “us to search for the non-saids and the unsayables as well as the saids …” These traces and fades are central to Waller's thesis that the period termed “‘early modern’ … might as easily be called ‘late medieval.”

Drawing from the work of these scholars (especially Gary Waller), I argue that, in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, there are a number of venerable women who represent, at least on one level, an impulse to Marian veneration in various forms.