Thomas Tallis served the English kingdom, and the English church, through the reigns of four monarchs and five liturgical cultures. From the beginning of his life to his death, however, and in the face of the wildly shifting theological climates, it seems that Tallis may have retained his personal Catholic faith. As to late in his life, the will of Tallis' wife includes a small bequest to one Master Anthony Roper, probably the grandson of English Catholic martyr Sir Thomas More. It seems Roper, an influential English recusant all the way into Queen Elizabeth's reign, offered "his good favors" to the Tallis family and may have indeed supported Tallis' Catholic compositions. And despite the prevailing Protestant winds that blew across England for much of his life, Tallis' Catholic compositions appear throughout his career. Salve intemerata virgo may be one of the earliest works he contributed to the faith.

Salve intemerata virgo belongs to a rich English tradition of votive antiphons to the Blessed Virgin Mary, stretching back at least to John Dunstaple and Leonel Power. By the 1530s, Thomas Cranmer and other English reformers were attempting to stifle this kind of Marian worship in the English church, but at the commencement of Tallis' career, such pieces were still common, as witnessed by the so-called Eton Choirbook. It is one of a likely three earliest surviving compositions from his hand, existing in a manuscript copy from around the end of the 1520s. His text is a lengthy and sophisticated prayer to the Virgin Mary, replete with rich imagery. As was common in the votive antiphon genre he inherited, Tallis divided the text into two roughly equal sections, one musically set in triple meter and the second in duple. He reflects the structure of his text by creating musical "paragraphs," shifting between the most current Continental techniques of imitative polyphony and other textures such as chordal homophony and thinner passages of free counterpoint. He later returned to the same musical material, crowning his Marian antiphon with a Mass in imitation of its motives.

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