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Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. By Helen Hackett. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995, xii + 303 pp. $39.95 (cloth).
Helen Hackett's Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen is an extended investigation of a specific claim now routinely advanced by scholars of the English Reformation-that a cult of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth replaced the discredited cult of the Virgin Mary. The claim, as Hackett explains in the book's introduction and epilogue, was first made in embryonic form in the 1930s and 1940s by E.C. Wilson and Frances Yates, whose investigation of the Virgin Queen revealed evidence of a "sixteenth-century idolisation of Elizabeth [that] seems to have disturbed them as sacrilegious," (p. 235). Wilson posed a question. Was it possible, he asked, that English men and women "unconsciously transferred [to Elizabeth] some of the adoration which by rights of strict inheritance was due a far holier virgin?" (Wilson, quoted on p. 8). Wilson noted the difficulty of proof in such a matter, yet concluded, "the evidence justifies the belief that so it was," (p. 8).
More recent historians have repeated and expanded Wilson's claim. Roy Strong's The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (1977) suggested that the substitution of queen for virgin was the result, at least in part, of intentional government policy. This affirmation fits well into the agenda of recent revisionist historians, such as Christopher Haigh,...