Anglican Iconography | Our Lady of Walsingham.
Our Lady of Walsingham
This icon depicts our Our Lady of Walsingham with our Lord holding a 2019 Book of Common Prayer. It was designed by Kunstmalerei Hinz for the Parish Church of St. Mark’s.
“Had there been a grain of virtue or public spirit in Henry the Eighth, these noble buildings [the Holy House at Walsingham] need not have run to ruin.”
Our Lady of Walsingham is undoubtably the most well known English depiction of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Although other Anglican Marian depictions existed both before and after the Reformation, Our Lady of Walsingham remains the most iconic. Unlike other Marian Apparitions, Our Lady of Walsingham is decidedly incarnational in its emphasis. This has made it a common Marian depiction across contemporary churchmanships within the Anglican Tradition. The image itself is rooted in a medieval shrine founded in 1061 by Richeldis de Faverches. It is said that Richeldis received a vision of the Blessed Virgin requesting that a replica of the Holy House at Nazareth be built in Norfolk—Walsingham. This Holy House later became one of the great pilgrimage sites of medieval Christendom – especially for the English Faithful. Later a Seat of Wisdom type image of the Virgin was housed in the shrine along with a holy well. Though the shrine was destroyed at the Reformation – but never forgotten – devotion was revived within Anglicanism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially through the work of Fr. Alfred Hope Patten. Since the restoration of the shrine, Our Lady of Walsingham has typically been depicted in statuary based on the image Fr. Patten replaced in the restored shrine. Some classic examples are as follows:
Although sacred images have a long and lasting legacy within the Anglican Tradition, “icons” (in the Byzantine style) are rather new. Yet, they are everywhere. For small parishes, these icons are simply more accessible than traditional Western statuary. Byzantine iconographers are ubiquitous and this places “icons” well within the reach of any parish’s beautifying efforts. There is nothing wrong with this, but it does require caution and attention to detail. The real difficulty with purchasing Anglican icons is acquiring ones that remain faithful to the tradition without feeling overly “Eastern.” We wanted to avoid this. We carefully sought out an iconographer who could paint an icon more congruent with Western worship. To make this all the more evident, we requested that the Gospels held by our Lord resemble the 2019 Book of Common Prayer utilized in our Worship.
