"English writers from the later Middle Ages to the mid seventeenth century both venerated and denigrated a body, probably a historical certainly a mythologized, body, multiple "images" of which were burnt, in the summer or the autumn of 1538, publicly or privately, certainly at the order and possibly at the house of Thomas Cromwell, in London. That seemingly definitive act, however, remains ambiguous, and did not by any means end the presence of the Virgin in the life and feelings of England. Catholic historians and theologians have argued that Cromwell, Latimer, and their generation of reformers created a huge and perhaps unhealable wound in the collective psyche of early modern England, creating a "disembodied and defeminized Culture.""