Women during the English Reformations

Renegotiating Gender and Religious Identity

K. Kramer, Julie Chappell, K. Kramer, Julie Chappell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137465672
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Catholic or Protestant, recusant or godly rebel, early modern women reinvented their spiritual and gendered spaces during the reformations in religion in England during the sixteenth century and beyond. These essays explore the ways in which some Englishwomen struggled to erase, rewrite, or reimagine their religious and gender identities.

Chapter 1

“To the Illustrious Queen”: Katherine of Aragon and Early Modern Book Dedications

Valerie Schutte

In 1979, Elizabeth Eisenstein challenged early modern historians to reassess the period immediately after the invention of the printing press as a time of communication revolution—one that stimulated renaissance and reformation and instituted a break with the past.¹ It was no longer enough to simply understand the importance of early texts in terms of content or the processes of production; it was now time to consider the roles of those texts in cultural and ideological formations. Since then, the printing press and the revolutions of which it was a part have been scrutinized from many angles, including the process of printing, book readers and literacy rates, and the ways in which books were used. The history of the book has become a recognized field of study. Yet this field has overlooked a crucial part of early modern texts: book dedications. Following the title, book dedications were the first words in an early modern printed book, but only a few modern studies exist that are devoted entirely to dedications. When modern scholarship does address dedications, authors still favor the body of the text as having more literary importance. These underutilized sources illuminate patronage relationships and, particularly, the importance of women to the first generations of printed texts in England.

The study of book dedications has been primarily left to amateur historians as compilers of anthologies, but these resources present little or no explanation of the dedications. Clara Gebert, Mary Elizabeth Brown, and Henry Benjamin Wheatley have all offered anthologies; although these have enabled greater access, they lack the critical analysis necessary to fully recognize the importance and place of dedications in early modern texts.² Franklin B. Williams, Jr.’s anthology is the most important work that has been done on English book dedications.³ Meant to be a research aid to the English Short Title Catalogue, Williams’s book created a key by which to search the intended recipient or recipients of nearly every book printed in England prior to 1641. He organized his study as a personal index, alphabetically listing every book dedicatee followed by the English Short Title Catalogue numbers of each book dedicated to that person.

Modern scholarship has seen some interest from doctoral candidates in their dissertations, as well as a few articles and mentions in book chapters. John Buchtel’s 2004 dissertation at the University of Virginia examines dedications associated with Henry Stuart, Prince of Wales, and two articles have been published out of his research.⁴ Tara Wood’s unpublished dissertation at Arizona State University in 2008 examines the 183 books dedicated to Elizabeth I, situating them within the Tudor patronage system.⁵ As both dissertations are necessarily limited in scope, they leave much to be done with the study of book dedications. William Wizeman’s revisionist study on Marian Catholicism offers a chapter on Marian texts, authors, and dedicatees, concluding that dedicators to Queen Mary I saw themselves as contributing to the Catholic restoration of England.⁶ Jaime Goodrich has offered a case study of Mary Roper Clarke Basset’s manuscript dedication to Queen Mary I to show that Basset’s dedication and translation was an example of a Catholic woman writer challenging Edward VI’s religious settlement.⁷ Helen Smith has recently used book dedications as “new” evidence of women’s participation in the processes of book composition.⁸

Nieves Baranda Leturio’s work on book dedications focuses on dedications directed to women in early modern Spain from 1500 to 1700.⁹ She posits that dedications are useful sources that provide information on women’s reading habits, rather than simply recording patronage and social relationships. They also illuminate correlations between subject matter and readership, with the majority of books covering topics of religion, while the rest consisted mainly of literature, etiquette, and education. Admittedly, she does not include books dedicated to women of the royal family, as they had different duties and demands than did the rest of Spanish women; nonetheless, her argument is also relevant to royal dedications. Dedications to Tudor queens provide similar evidence in the English royal court of the complexity of relationships between the queen, her household, and the broader social and political world.

Book dedications, particularly those printed during the early phase of the English reformations, have many uses for historians. Firstly, they provide insight into the patronage system of the early Tudor period: dedicating a book to an important person could result in monetary or political favor. Secondly, book dedications reflect some of the most important religious and political matters of the period. As prefaces to important works on marriage, education, and Christianity, book dedications allow the authors a chance to explain why they chose to write the works that they wrote and why they wrote them in the way that they did. Thirdly, book dedications to the wives of Henry VIII, particularly those only dedicated to the queens, not the king and queen together, demonstrate the extent of the queen’s patronage power at the Tudor court. In appealing to queens, the authors demonstrate a canny understanding of the queens’ influence over the king’s policies, particularly relevant during a time of religious change and upheaval. Book dedications offer a glimpse of an author’s choice of patron and show interconnectedness of nobles and humanists across Europe. The tradition, as well as the standards and protocols, of dedicating printed books to English queens began with Lady Margaret Beaufort.

Lady Margaret, mother of Henry VII, had approximately ten books dedicated to her. She was a patroness of William Caxton, and the two enjoyed a close relationship; Caxton dedicated Blanchardyn and Eglantine, a thirteenth-century romance, to Lady Margaret.¹⁰ Lady Margaret ran her own household, established colleges, and was even declared a feme sole by Parliament in 1485. Because of this odd position, she functioned as an important model that later writers followed in their dedications to actual queens. Dedications to Lady Margaret tended to be brief remarks made for commercial purposes, connecting Lady Margaret to a book so that it would sell better and help establish the new market of printed books. Dedications to the six wives of Henry VIII took the format of more traditional dedications, lavishly praising the queens and pleading for patronage. The authors were much more concerned with the queens appealing to Henry on their behalf than increasing the sale potential of a book. Of course, a handful of manuscripts had been dedicated to previous English queens,¹¹ but Katherine of Aragon was the first queen to have a printed book dedicated to her.¹²

As Henry VIII’s first wife and queen of England for the first twenty-four years of Henry’s reign, Katherine of Aragon was known for her passion for learning, her religious devotion, and her desire to pass as much knowledge to her daughter, Mary, as possible. Katherine was the recipient of at least seven book dedications, all of which show that she was a respected and educated queen on whom authors and printers relied. Moreover, she was a source of patronage and wielded considerable power at court. The books dedicated to her came from well-known humanists, such as Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives; religious men, such as Alphonsus de Villa Sancta; and courtiers, such as Thomas Wyatt. Henry’s remaining five wives collectively received approximately ten book dedications, coming from similarly stationed men. For these later queens, the patronage system of book dedications did not really change. As before, men dedicated books to these queens in hopes of a reward. Yet one aspect of these book dedications that did change was the nature of their received devotional literature. As expected, when Katherine of Aragon was queen, the devotional works were orthodox and spoke directly against Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon. But the devotional works dedicated to the five wives after Katherine of Aragon took on a much more evangelical flair. Both Anne Boleyn and Katherine Parr received dedications to English translations of scripture. As with subject matter, dedications could also change to reflect different religious tones. Erasmus’s dedication to Katherine was rarely reprinted and the extant copies are exactly the same. This is not necessarily typical: Juan Luis Vives’s dedication to Katherine of Aragon of The Instruction of a Christen Woman (1526) underwent many changes in its nine editions.¹³ Its translation into English by Richard Hyrde in 1529 included both Vives’s original dedication and a new dedication by Hyrde. Vives’s and Hyrde’s names appear on all editions, but Hyrde’s preface, which was extremely laudatory of Katherine, is omitted from all editions after 1531, and all mentions of Katherine as queen were changed to princess, to reflect her demoted status after the annulment of her marriage to Henry. Only the 1585 and 1592 editions returned to calling Katherine queen, when the annulment no longer faced as much open hostility. Yet Erasmus’s dedication of Institution of Christian Matrimony to Katherine of Aragon has received very little scholarly attention and provides a key example of the historical and literary richness of book dedications.

Erasmus’s Institution of Christian Matrimony was initially printed in Latin in Basel in 1526 by Johannes Froben in both folio and octavo editions, as Christiani matrimonii institutio.¹⁴ Another Latin edition was published in Antwerp in 1526, followed by two undated sixteenth-century editions, one published in Cologne and the other with no place of publication given. Translations were offered in German in 1542, Italian in 1550, French in 1714, and, allegedly, English in 1568, with one undated edition. The first reprinting in its entirety since the eighteenth century appeared as an English translation by Michael Heath as part of the Collected Works of Erasmus project.¹⁵ But Heath’s identification of these last two (at least) seems problematic. Firstly, he takes his information from two other sources, Émile Telle’s Erasme de Rotterdam et le septième sacrament and Ferdinand van der ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 “To the Illustrious Queen”: Katherine of Aragon and Early Modern Book Dedications
• 2 “Rather a Strong and Constant Man”: Margaret Pole and the Problem of Women’s Independence
• 3 Religious Intent and the Art of Courteous Pleasantry: A Few Letters from Englishwomen to Heinrich Bullinger (1543–1562)
• 4 Elizabeth Cary and Intersections of Catholicism and Gender in Early Modern England
• 5 Eleanor Davies and the New Jerusalem
• 6 The Failure of Godly Womanhood: Religious and Gender Identity in the Life of Lady Elizabeth Delaval
• 7 Haunting History: Women, Catholicism, and the Writing of National History in Sophia Lee’s The Recess
• 8 Stripped of Their Altars: Film, Faith, and Tudor Royal Women from the Silent Era to the Twenty-First Century, 1895–2014
• List of Contributors
• Index