Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England

Edith Snook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351871488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

A study of the representation of reading in early modern Englishwomen's writing, this book exists at the intersection of textual criticism and cultural history. It looks at depictions of reading in women's printed devotional works, maternal advice books, poetry, and fiction, as well as manuscripts, for evidence of ways in which women conceived of reading in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Among the authors and texts considered are Katherine Parr, Lamentation of a Sinner; Anne Askew, The Examinations of Anne Askew; Dorothy Leigh, The Mothers Blessing; Elizabeth Grymeston, Miscelanea Meditations Memoratives; Aemelia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum; and Mary Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania. Attentive to contiguities between representations of reading in print and reading practices found in manuscript culture, this book also examines a commonplace book belonging to Anne Cornwallis (Folger Folger MS V.a.89) and a Passion poem presented by Elizabeth Middleton to Sarah Edmondes (Bod. MS Don. e.17). Edith Snook here makes an original contribution to the ongoing scholarly project of historicizing reading by foregrounding female writers of the early modern period. She explores how women's representations of reading negotiate the dynamic relationship between the public and private spheres and investigates how women might have been affected by changing ideas about literacy, as well as how they sought to effect change in devotional and literary reading practices. Finally, because the activity of reading is a site of cultural conflict - over gender, social and educational status, and the religious or national affiliation of readers - Snook brings to light how these women, when they write about reading, are engaged in structuring the cultural politics of early modern England.

Chapter 1
Gendering the English Reformation: The Vernacular Reader in Anne Askew’s Examinations and Katherine Parr’s Lamentacion of a Synner

No realm under the sky hath had more noblewomen, nor of more excellent graces, than hath this realm of England, both in the days of the Britons and since the EnglishSaxons obtained it by vakant conquest.

John Balel¹

The images on the title page of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments polemically distinguish between Catholics and Protestants. From top to bottom, panels picture the separation of blessed from the cursed, angels from devils, holy martyrs from Catholic clergy, and finally, the Christian from heretic. In the crucial foundational frame, the devout pray, listen to preaching, and peruse their Bibles, while their adversaries pray with rosaries. The male reader, on the side of good, engages in conversation with another man, who leans over his shoulder. But it is two women who occupy the very centre of the image. One holds a book in her lap while another, with a child, looks on. This image typifies not only the association between Protestantism and reading, but illustrates the unmistakable involvement of the female reader in signalling the practices of the ‘true faith.’ Here, the familial context for female reading seems to epitomize the distance down the social hierarchy to which reading extends: if women and children are concerned with Bible reading, everyone must be. This chapter is an exploration of two works invested in this symbolic representation of the female reader. Anne Askew’s Examinations and Katherine Parr’s Lamentacion of a Sinner were both published first in the context of religious conflict and reform in mid-sixteenth-century England. The two women appeared repeatedly thereafter in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, from its first edition in 1563. Their works, each connected to the English court, were published in close proximity to each other, and each author characterizes herself as an unlearned feminine reader of the vernacular scripture. This construction of identity, I will argue, forges connections between discourses of gender and those of faith, an interweaving which facilitates both the female writer’s construction of her own authority and her incorporation into England’s Protestant history, as it was written by John Foxe, John Bale—a former Carmelite-friar, Protestant hagiographer, and playwright—and Thomas Bentley—compiler of The Monumentof Matrones, a devotional work for women readers.

John Foxe. Actes and Monuments. Title Page. (STC 11223 vol.1). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Of lower social status than Parr but a gentlewoman, Anne Askew was the daughter of Sir William Askew of Lincolnshire and the wife of Thomas Kyme, a wealthy landowner. Her efforts to divorce her husband, however, took her to the Court of Chancery in London and were reflected in her reversion to her own family name, even if they were not formally legalized. Askew was associated with the court of Henry VIII and Katherine Parr through Askew’s brother Christopher, a gentleman of the king’s Privy Chamber before his death in 1543, and her brother Edward, who was a member of Archbishop Cranmer’s household and cupbearer to Henry VIII.² Her sister Jane was also married to the steward at the Lincolnshire estates of the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, about whom Askew would be questioned during her second examination.³ This line of inquiry, which included the Duchess of Suffolk, the Countesses of Sussex and Hertford, Lady Joan Denny and Lady Fitzwilliams, suggests that her interrogators believed her to be allied with high-ranking women at court; Askew’s refusal to implicate them would eventually lead to her illegal torture (121–123).⁴ Megan Matchinske argues that it is the very possibility of these court connections that made her the focus of concern for council traditionalists: ‘Askew’s potential access to and interaction with political and religious dissenters within Henry VIII’s inner circle—within household chambers—likely proved far more damaging to her case than the mere fact of her religious radicalism.’⁵ Askew was burned for heresy in July 1546.

Her Examinations are accounts of her interrogation for matters concerning the Six Articles of 1539.⁶ The First Examination narrates events after her arrest in 1545, while the Lattre Examinagon is a collection of documents related to the proceedings after she was re-arrested in June 1546 and includes her examination before the Privy Council and a letter to John Lassels, who would be martyred with her.⁷ Shortly before Henry VIII’s death on January 28, 1547, John Bale printed Anne Askew’s FirstExaminagon in Wesel, where he was in exile; he printed The Lattre Examinagon in January 1547, also in Wesel. To both volumes, he added what he called relucydacyons; extended commentary on Askew’s words.⁸

Despite the fact that Katherine Parr was not actually martyred for her faith as Askew was, John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments draws a direct line from Askew to Parr, allowing only the tale of the three who were burned with Askew (John Lassels, John Adams, and Nicholas Belenian) to intervene: ‘the course and order as well of the time,’ Foxe comments, ‘as the matter of the story doth require now somewhat to treat, likewise, touching the troubles and afflictions of the virtuous and excellent lady queen Katharine Parr.’⁹ The matter that connects Parr to Askew is the queen’s activities at court. Parr was a published writer, as Askew was, but this does not feature in Foxe’s tale. Her most explicitly reformist work, The Lamentacion of a Sinner, was printed in November 1547 in London, a date which Janel Mueller attributes both to the work’s espousal of justification by faith and its ‘self-accusatory candor.’¹⁰ Parr died soon after its publication, in August 1548, after the birth of a daughter, whom Parr had with her fourth husband, Thomas Seymour, married just months after Henry’s death.

Parr’s The Lamentacion of a Sinner and Askew’s Examinations were published first at the cusp of a dramatic change in governing attitudes towards religious reading. Despite Henry VIII’s break with Rome, his version of Protestantism was not firmly dedicated to the vernacular scripture reading with which it would later be associated. Although William Tyndale printed his English translation of the Bible in 1525, it had to be secretly imported into England; after Henry’s break with Rome, Miles Coverdale published his translation in 1535, with the Matthew Bible following in 1537. Its revision, the Great Bible, appeared in 1539, with several more editions coming thereafter because it was popular with Protestants.¹¹ The reform-minded Cranmer’s preface to the second edition of the Great Bible affirms the value of the Bible for every reader:

[…]men, yonge, olde, learned, unlemed, ryche, poore, prestes, layemen, Lordes, Ladyes, offycers, tenauntes, and meane men, virgyns, wyfes[,] wedowes, lawers, marchauntes, artifycers, husbande men, and almaner of persons of what estate or condicyon soever they be, maye in thiys booke learne all thynges what they ought to beleve, what they ought to do, and what they shulde not do.

He concludes, ‘it is convenient and good, the scripture to be red of all sortes and kyndes of people, in the vulgare tonge.’¹² But individual access to the Bible was just as often proscribed because of anxieties about the socially disruptive consequences that might attend vernacular reading. The 1538 Injunctions, for example, urged that churches purchase a Bible for their parishioners to read. Many parishes, however, were reluctant or unable to place an English Bible in the church, so in 1541, another proclamation imposed a monthly fine of forty shillings on parishes that did not have a Bible available—with the stipulation that laymen should not dispute its contents.¹³ Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, feared that Scripture reading might cause a ‘refusal of obedience,’ while other clergy thought that ‘vice, uncharitableness, [and a] lack of mercy’ were a consequence of access to the Bible.¹⁴ With the 1543 Act for the Advancement of True Religion, the 1538 directives were actually reversed, and England returned to a more cautious official position on vernacular reading. While the 1543 act allowed that the ‘highest and most honest sort of men’ profited from reading the Bible, it also dictated that no women or men below the degree of yeomen could read the Bible privately or publicly; while higher ranking men could read privately, noblewomen and gentlewomen could read by themselves, but not to others.¹⁵

For David Scott Kastan, the title-page woodcut of the Great Bible best exemplifies this conflicted position of vernacular scripture in late Henrician England: God, at the top of the woodcut, presents the Word to the enthroned Henry, who will enact the divine will; Henry passes the Verbum Dei to Cranmer and Cromwell, on his left and right, who in turn distribute the word to the clergy; commoners occupy the bottom of the page, where it is not ‘Verbum Dei’ that issues from their mouths, but ‘Vivat Rex’ and ‘God Save the Kynge.’ The people do not receive God’s word directly from a book, and the image, according to Kastan, displays an ‘abiding fear of common access to Scriptures,’ even as it articulates the authority of the state, a message reinforced by a prison in the lower right corner of the page.¹⁶ It is worth adding that, as on the title page of Acts and Monuments, several women are visible amongst these ‘common people.’ One is prominently seated near that prison, where she is set apart, with children at her feet; she looks to the right, towards a man who seems to engage her in conversation. She, too, announces, ‘Vivat Rex,’ while the children proclaim ‘God save the Kinge.’ Seemingly a family portrait, the image prominently displays women as part of the nation of citizens who proclaim loyalty to the king as a consequence of the distribution of the Word. This woman may offer guidance to the children who look up at her, but she seems to be under the further direction of her male companion, with the result that the image establishes for reading not only a class-based hierarchy but also a gendered one.¹⁷

The reign of Edward VI, on the other hand, saw the most vigorous Protestant reform of any period before or after in sixteenth-century England and included change on questions of reading. Edward Seymour (brother to Thomas, Katherine Parr’s husband) had been made Lord Protector, and the Six Articles, under which Askew had been charged with heresy, were repealed. New evangelical Homilies were printed, endowed prayers were suppressed, the laity were allowed communion with both bread and wine, the clergy were allowed to marry, church images were pulled down, and Latin rites were replaced first by one book of common prayer, and then, another, more decisively Protestant. Yet, even as Bible reading came to be a defining feature of the Protestant faith, that commitment had shallow roots in English soil. Between 1547 and 1553, the repeal of the 1543 Act for the Advancement of True religion allowed unrestricted Bible reading and sixty editions of the Bible were printed, including versions for the poor. Still, Protestant preachers remained, according to Christopher Haigh, a minority; the triumph of Queen Mary and the defeat of the Duke of Northumberland and other of Jane Grey’s powerful supporters was, in part, the result of popular support for a Catholic queen.¹⁸ To say the least, the works of Anne Askew and Katherine Parr were published at a cultural moment in which the value of vernacular Bible reading was debated, and the ability to read far from universal.

Despite the close ties between the two writers, Anne Askew has received much more extensive contemporary scholarly analysis, with critics drawing attention to issues of female subjectivity, as well as to the tension between Askew’s words and Bale’s interpolations.¹⁹ The reasons for this disparity in critical notice are understandable. Study of Askew’s work has been facilitated by Elaine Beilin’s 1996 edition of the Examinations, while Katherine Parr’s works have not yet received this level of editorial attention, although they are reprinted in Ashgate’s The Ear# Modern English Woman facsimile series. Askew’s work is also more defiant, in that her responses to her examiners are intriguingly ironic, transgressive, and gendered; because Bain’s edition includes Bale’s interpolations, the volume also highlights Askew’s place within a patriarchal culture. Indeed, contemporary critics’ relative lack of interest in Parr’s work may be because the text does not lend itself to an analysis of resistance to limiting early modern constructions of femininity. Janel Mueller, the scholar to offer Parr’s work the most sustained and considered analysis, contends that the text ‘renders [Parr’s] gender all but undetectable,’ while Diane Willen says of Katherine Parr and her contemporaries that ‘their concern for feminism [is] nonexistent.’²⁰

Here I am less concerned with the question of whether or not these women were feminists or protoferninists—individual writers attuned to the particular cause of women’s economic, social, or religious advancement—than with investigating how gender inflects their assertions regarding theology and faith practices, especially vernacular Bible reading. If Mueller is right that Parr’s work lacks autobiographical referents, it is n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Gendering the English Reformation: The Vernacular Reader in Anne Askew’s Examinations and Katherine Parr’s Lamentacion of a Synner
• 2 Dorothy Leigh, the ‘Labourous Bee,’ and the Work of Literacy in Seventeenth-Century England
• 3 A ‘Wit’s Camelion’: Elizabeth Grymeston and The Catholic Reader
• 4 Reading the Passion Among Women: Aemelia Lanyer and Elizabeth Middleton
• 5 ‘Onely a Cipher’: Reading and Writing Secrets in Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania
• Selected Bibliography
• Index