"As Lyndal Roper states, the body of the Virgin was a "litmus test of the separation of the divine and the human" for Catholics and Protestants and what became their "radically differenyt theologies of the body." All sides of the Reformation struggles agreed that deep and mysterious powers had been attributed to the Virgin and to relics and places especially associated with her. For Catholics such attributions were, with the exception of some marginal and pardonable exaggerations and a little corruption, truthful and reflected God's purposes; for Protestants such claims were false and demonic, slippages into paganism and evidence of the irredeemable corruption of the Roman Church. Reformers generally acknowledged Mary as God's chosen instrument, but rejected what Latimer saw as the: foolish opinion and the doctrine of the papists, which would have us to worship a creature before the Creator." The continental reformer Melanchthon regretted that "in popular estimation the blessed virgin has completely replaced Christ"; Bishop John Jewel referred to the blasphemy of regarding Mary as :our lady and goddess"; William Perkins attacked the view of Mary as "a Ladie, a goddesse, a queene whom Christ her sonne obeyethin heaven, a mediatresse, our life, hope, the mediccine of the diseased"; it is, he thundeers, a blasphemy that "they pray unto her thus" The degree of hostility toward Mary varied greatly across Reformation Europe in both time and place, with Lutherans more amenable to modifying rather than radically reducing her rle, but a not uncommon note in Reformed polemic was that under papist superstition - in the words of Puritan polemicist William Crashaw, who, along with his son Richard, will be mentioned frequently in this book - "the paps of a woman" were blasphemously "equaled with the wounds of our Lord, and her milke with his blood," even though "the holy scriptures speak no more of her, but as a creature," and, in a significant slur, as merely "a woman.""