History
Anglo-Saxon England sheltered many shrines to the Virgin Mary: shrines were dedicated to her at Glastonbury in 540, Evesham in 702, Tewkesbury in 715, Canterbury in 866, Willesden in 939, Abingdon before 955, Ely in 1020, Coventry in 1043, York in 1050, and Walsingham in 1061. By the High Middle Ages there were sixteen shrines to Mary in Suffolk alone, the shrine to Our Lady of Grace at Ipswich receiving its first recorded mention in 1152.
The shrine became important during the High Middle Ages. In 1297 the daughter of Edward I, Princess Elizabeth, married the Count of Holland in the shrine.
Between 1517 and 1522, Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon paid separate visits to the shrine, as did Sir Thomas More and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who was born in Ipswich.
The shrine was suppressed during the English Reformation, and its famous statue was taken to Chelsea to be burnt, along with the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham on 20 September 1538. There are no eyewitness accounts of the statue actually being burnt, although it is documented that the statue arrived at Chelsea. Regarding the image, Thomas Cromwell's steward wrote to him that he had received it, with 'nothing about her but two half shoes of silver'..
A wooden statue of the Madonna and Child displayed in the local church of the Italian seaside town of Nettuno closely matches various descriptions of the Ipswich statue. There is also evidence in the Netunno archives that a statue arrived there from Ipswich in 1550.
It was classified as being in the English iconic style in 1938 by Martin Gillett, an historian of 13th century iconography. Although the statue had been altered (a throne had been replaced and the posture of the Christ child had changed), details such as the folds in the material and Christ's position on the right rather than the left knee suggest that the statue came from England.
The statue is known locally as "Our Lady of the Graces" or "The English Lady". During restoration work on the statue in 1959 an inscription was found on its back with the words IU? ARET GRATIOSUS, a rendition of the Marian phrase, "Thou art gracious". Ipswich was the only Marian shrine in England dedicated to Our Lady of Grace. Even more striking, when Martin Gillett first examined the statue in 1938, it was wearing two half shoes made of English silver, just like those described by Thomas Cromwell's steward 400 years before.
There are two theories as to how the statue may have reached Italy. One theory is that it was sold by an English official (perhaps Thomas Cromwell) instead of being burnt, although it is not clear why it would have got as far as southern Italy.
The second theory is that the statue was rescued by English sailors before it could be burnt, and smuggled on board a ship. In the Mediterranean they met a storm and took refuge in Nettuno and they donated the statue. Moreover,a scientific analysis of a sliver of wood from the base of the statue has been found to have a high salt content - proving that it had at some point been in contact with seawater or sea spray.
The shrine itself was destroyed, although it survived in legal deeds as a boundary description until the eighteenth century.
Read more about this topic: Our Lady Of Ipswich
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