Oxford and the surviving Marian imagination of medieval England

There are cities in Europe where the Virgin still reigns visibly from stone and glass. England, after the Reformation, often feels different. Marian England became an England of absences: smashed statues, whitewashed walls, emptied niches, mutilated rood screens, shattered marbles, destroyed shrines. One frequently encounters not Mary herself, but the trace of where she once stood. A notable exception is Oxford.