"The reformers perceived the necessity of wholesale cultural revolution and (if possible) the rooting out not just the "structures," but the "feelings" attached to them, to use Raymond Williams's distinction. Their goal was to destroy the images and idols within people's minds. Getting it out of their heads, not just destroying buildings and sending tens of thousands of monks and nuns out into the community, was therefore crucial to the revolution. But the "fantassie of idolatrie" might be so deeply rooted, the reformers feared, that "idolatrie will neaver be left till the said images be taken awaie." Cromwell instructed his agents to remove popular "idols" as discreetly as possible but to highlight what could be presented as obvious fakes, the "certain engines and old wire with rotten sticks," which could be used for propagandist purposes. Reformers jeered that the destruction of some of the more dubious relics and images - the Blood of Hailes and the images of Our Lady of Walingham and her sisters among them - did not provoke the once revered objects to respond, retaliate, or miraculously escape: "Throw them down thrice, they cannot rise, not once to help themselves." With some successes in exposing "idols" and "false reliques," it became easier to make the case that all relics and images were fakes and needed, in the words of a 1535 Proclamation, "utterly to be abolished, eradicated and erased out.""
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The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture
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