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.