[In the following excerpt, King maintains that, contrary to John Bale's depiction in his commentaries on the Examinations, Askew was a strong person who violated the patriarchal expectations of silent and obedient women.]

Anne Askew (1521-1546) was accused of heresy because of her denial of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and ritual of the mass. According to her own account, her husband, Thomas Kyme, drove her from their household after she violated prohibitions against lay participation in theological debate and scriptural interpretation. Governmental authorities in London then interrogated her in two rounds that ended with the unprecedented application of the full rigour of torture and the rack to a gentlewoman in an unsuccessful attempt to force her to recant. On 16 July 1546, during the closing months of Henry VIII's reign, she was burned at the stake as a heretic outside of London Wall.

The first examinacyon of Anne Askewe, latelye martyred in Smythfelde and The lattre examinacyon of Anne Askewe provide an extremely rare autobiographical account of heresy interrogations, torture, trial, and conviction. The initial set of examinations resulted in Askew's release from imprisonment in 1545, but the second arraignment, recorded in The lattre examinacyon, resulted in death in the following year. These personal narratives accord with the redefinition of the saint's life or martyrology by her editor, John Bale, who added commentaries to his editions of the two Examinacyons. Bale rejected the medieval formula that presented miracle-working saints as intermediaries between believers and Christ and styled the genre of a Protestant saint's life as an account of a humble believer who is faithful to Christ to the point of death.

By presenting Askew in the stereotypical role of a weak woman who can resist injustice only through divine grace, Bale distorts the victim's own fashioning of her self as a strong woman motivated by intense religious conviction and personal interpretation of the Bible. Askew avoids the kind of hyperbolic rhetoric that Bale and his contemporaries conventionally employed in religious polemics. The shrillness of his commentaries contrasts sharply with the bluntly colloquial diction of an autobiographical account laced with scriptural references. These narratives demonstrate an unruly loquaciousness that led Askew to violate the patriarchal expectation that virtuous women would remain silent and obedient to masculine authority wielded by fathers, husbands, clerics and magistrates. Askew even claims that when she met with the Lord Chancellor, they sat on the floor for two hours ‘reasoning’ about theology and law. On other occasions she employed rhetorical questions, smiles, and gestures to argue in favour of Protestant doctrine and worship. Nevertheless, she remained capable of exploiting the feminine obligation of silent obedience when she refused to confess and implicate the aristocratic women who sent money to her in prison. …

After John Bale received Askew's manuscript from the German merchants who smuggled it out of England, his editions were printed respectively in November 1545 and 16 January 1546 by Derik van der Straten in Wesel in the County of Cleves, a German principality on the Rhine River. It appears that Bale supplied the false colophon borne by each text, ‘Imprented at Marpurg in the lande of Hessen’, in order to prevent authorities from identifying the source of copies smuggled into England and to refer to the practice of the Reformation hero, William Tyndale, who published a series of Antwerp imprints under ‘Marpurg’ colophons. Like Tyndale, Bale went into exile on the Continent in order to circumvent British prohibitions against militant Protestant publication.

The relaxation of censorship that followed the accession of Edward VI, at the death of his father, Henry VIII, on 28 January 1547 enabled the Examinacyons to circulate in England without restraint. In many extant copies of STC 850, four lines at the top of leaf C7 have been cut out so that C6v and C7r could be glued together without any apparent break in the text. That alteration eliminated Bale's attack against Sir William Paget, who served as Secretary under Henry VIII and Edward VI, thus converting the text into progovernment propaganda. … The woodcut on the title pages represents Askew as a saint who carries the Bible in one hand and a martyr's palm in the other, in opposition to the dragon that is identified with the papacy by the tiara on its head.

John Foxe omitted Bale's commentaries when he incorporated the Examinacyons into his Actes and Monumentes of These Latter and Perillous Dayes (1563), a collection of martyrologies and history of the church known as the ‘Book of Martyrs’, one of the most renowned Elizabethan prose texts.

References

STC 848, 850

Beilin, Elaine V. (ed.), (1996), Anne Askew, The Examinations, Oxford: Oxford University Press

———. (1987), Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

Christmas, H. (ed.), (1849), Select Works by Bishop Bale, Cambridge: Parker Society, vol. 36

King, John N. (1982), English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition, Princeton: NJ: Princeton University Press

McQuade, Paula, ‘“Except that they had offended the lawe”: Gender and Jurisprudence in The Examinations of Anne Askew’, Literature and History, 3rd. ser., 3, ii (1994): 1-14