SOURCE: Betteridge, Thomas. “Anne Askewe, John Bale, and Protestant History.” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27, no. 2 (spring 1997): 265-84.

[In the following essay, Betteridge examines the cultural conflicts reflected in the relation between Askew's interpretation of herself and that of her editor, John Bale.]

Anne Askewe was burned as a heretic in 1546, having been found guilty of denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. Askewe's place in history has been largely constructed within a narrative that views her first-person accounts of her examinations, and her martyrdom, as being important for the light they shed on the doctrinal struggles and conflicts of the last years of the reign of Henry VIII.¹ This understanding of Askewe's place in history has the effect, however, of placing her within a magisterial Protestant, historical narrative which traditionally has had no place for a woman speaking in public on matters of faith.² It is ultimately based on an appropriation of Askewe's Examinations, which commenced with the copious prefaces, notes, and conclusions with which John Bale surrounded Askewe's words in his printed editions of her Examinations.³ Bale's additions to Askewe's testimony implicitly make her words nonauthoritative, almost meaningless, without the polemical framework that his glosses provide for them. Indeed Bale's editions of Askewe's Examinations embody a structure similar to that found in sixteenth-century versions of Lollard works, in which the fifteenth-century text is invariably constructed as of the past, as historical, in order to motivate the need for the polemical glosses and conclusions that its Tudor editors attached to it. These textual framings of Lollard works usually embody a historical narrative which implicitly demands a complete lack of continuity between the meaning of religious radicalism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a polemic needed to prove that the writings of fifteenth-century religious radicals were recoupable within acceptable categories of magisterial Protestant belief, Lutheran or Reformed, and a construction of the text's editor as its protector and explicator. Placing Askewe's texts within a similar narrative framework allowed Bale to claim for himself this editorial role. It enabled Bale to make the meaning of Askewe's testimony relate directly to his own endeavor, stripping her words of their potential radicalism and making the culturally valorized role of martyr the authorizing source for his own polemical struggle with his, and her, orthodox opponents.

The effectiveness of Bale's appropriation of Askewe's words is reflected in its continuing role in defining the grounds for modern accounts of the Henrician martyr. A. G. Dickens, in his influential study, The English Reformation, places Askewe within an account of the final persecutions of Henry VIII's reign. Dickens writes that, a year after Askewe had been executed, “John Bale published in her honour the remarkably vivid collection of original materials subsequently utilised by Foxe. If the documents present anything like an accurate picture, this daughter of a Lincolnshire knight proved herself an educated, pert and formidable disputant, quite unabashed by Gardiner and Bonner, who both attempted to re-convert and save her.”⁴ Dickens goes on to add that at the same time that Askewe was arrested so were a number of other Londoners, including John Lascells. Although Dickens comments that Lascells was “a somewhat obscure figure,” he adds that he was “in all likelihood the real intellectual leader of the group.”⁵ Aside from the obvious chauvinism of Dickens's assumption that Askewe could not have been the “real” intellectual leader of a group of religious radicals in London during the 1540s, one should note the extent to which Dickens's view of Askewe replicates the one produced by Bale in his edition of her testimony.⁶ The Askewe of Dickens, and Bale, is important because of her status as a mainstream Protestant martyr killed by Catholic opponents of the English Reformation. Dickens's narrative of religious change in England in the sixteenth century reproduces textual strategies similar to those employed by Protestant writers when they turned to such texts as Askewe's, and those of fifteenth-century Lollards, to validate their magisterial endeavor. It is based on a complete lack of continuity between religious radicalism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and on an insistence on the central importance of the magisterial Protestant endeavor as the motivation for religious change in the sixteenth century.⁷

This article examines the cultural conflicts reflected in the relation between Askewe's words and those of her editor Bale. The first section examines the status of Protestantism as a cultural identity in early Tudor England. It then relates this discussion to the textual strategies deployed by Protestant editors of fifteenth-century Lollard texts. The second section of the article discusses the relation between the narrative voices that make up the text of The Examinations of Anne Askewe. The final section, then, suggests the outlines of a historical narrative within which to understand Askewe's texts, reversing the absolute discontinuity between fifteenth- and sixteenth-century religious radicalism that magisterial Protestant writers like Bale insisted upon. In place of this discontinuity, I argue for a basic continuity, traceable in the status of authority, the moment of articulation, and the subjectivity of the writer within radical religious texts written in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

I

Early Tudor culture found itself locked in a paradoxical situation in which all its members agreed on the ultimate source of authority, the Bible, yet were unable to agree on key aspects of its material or textual substance. This doctrinal and cultural crisis was addressed by magisterial Protestant, and Catholic, writers through the constant production of truthful orderings of religious behavior and beliefs which, in their proliferation and repetition, themselves reflect the very uncertainties that they were designed to suppress.⁸ Magisterial Protestantism attempted to write over or displace these anxieties by defining itself as universal and coherent against an other, a disordered, corrupt and medieval “papist” past.⁹ This identity-defining structure, however, demanded that sixteenth-century Protestants find images of themselves within this “papist” past, a past that could only be “papist” in Protestant terms if it contained prototype Protestants against whom its “papistry” would be meaningful.¹⁰

One of the earliest English texts to articulate this construction of Protestantism and its other, a “papist” past that nonetheless contains signs of the Protestant future, is A Proper Dyalogue Betweene a Gentillman and a Husbandman: Eche complaynynge to other their miserable calamite through the ambicion of the clergye. At the end of this text is a Lollard tract entitled “A compendious olde treatyse shewynge howe that we ought to haue the scripture in Englyshe.” The preamble to this piece is provided by a poem entitled “The reusacyon of the treatyse,” in which the text itself speaks:

Though I am olde clothed in barbarous mede
Nothynge garncyhed with gaye eloquency
Yet I tell the truth yf ye lyst to take hede
Agaynst theyr forwarde furious frenezy
Which reken it for a great heresy
And unto laye people greuous outrage
To haue goddes worde in their natyfe langage[.]
Enemyes I shall haue many a shoven crowne
With forted cappes and gaye croosfys of golde
Which to maynteyne ther ambicious renowe
Are glad laye people in ignoraunce to holde
Yet to sheweth verite one may be bolde
Ass though it be a prouerbe dalye spoken
Who that tellyth trouth his head shalbe broken[.](11)

Immediately following this verse the treatise itself is printed. There is clearly, however, a problematic relation between the first-person speaker of the poem and the Lollard text. The speaker of the poem is constructed as being the Lollard through its claim to be clothed in a barbarous language, while simultaneously this claim is undermined by the verse itself. In effect the “I” refers both to the writer of the poem and to the treatise. It is also, however, a reference to the “I” who performed the text's resurrection. The speaker of the poem articulates a sixteenth-century Protestant identity by appropriating an antique Lollard fragment, performing the role of historian, and by mounting a polemical defense on the treatise's behalf against its murderous “papist” enemies.

An identical subjectivity is articulated in the texts that make up the sixteenth-century additions to another Lollard work, The Testimony of William Thorpe.¹² While the publishers did not fundamentally change Thorpe's text, they did add an address “Vnto The Christian Reader” and a piece that claimed to be “The Testamente of William Thorpe.”¹³ The “Testamente” serves the textual function of summing up the beliefs articulated during the course of the examinations and, as such, relates directly to the status of the narrative voice of the address “Vnto The Christian Reader,” which represents itself as the custodian of Thorpe's testimony (143-45). It is this narrative voice that presents Thorpe's text to the public with a gloss setting out how it should be read and what its meaning is.

Reade here with iudgemente goode reader the examinacion of the blessed man of god / and there thou shalt easelye perceyue wherfore oure holy chirch … make all their examinacions in darkness / all laye people cleane excluded from their councels.

(141)

The writer of this piece goes on to ask:

Who can tell wherfore that good preaste and holye martyr Syr Thomas hitton was brente / now thys yere / at maydstone yn Kent. I am sure no man. For this is their caste euer when they haue put to deathe or punyshed any man / after their secrete examynacyon / to slaunder hym of soche thynges as he neuer thought.

(142)

The printing of Thorpe's examination is motivated by a desire to expose the tyranny of the “papists” and by an alleged need to protect the truth of Thorpe's beliefs. The editor of Thorpe's testimony situates the Lollard text within a framework that shapes and attempts to determine its meaning. Implicit in this treatment of Thorpe's testimony is the claim that only with the advent of Protestantism can Thorpe's words achieve their true meaning. The Protestant contextualization of such texts and their writers as beacons of truth in an otherwise “papist” past implies that these fragments can only be made whole, and therefore truthful, once Protestantism had evolved. Within this schema truth becomes the preserve of the sixteenth century, and texts like The Testimony of William Thorpe function as that piece of the past in which Protestants could find themselves.¹⁴ This understanding of the past depended on an absolute discontinuity between religious radicals of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Within the magisterial Protestant endeavor, to be a religious radical in the fifteenth century was to be a harbinger of the advent of Protestantism; to be one after the Reformation was to invite persecution and death as an enemy of the new state church.¹⁵

II

John Bale's editions of Anne Askewe's Examinations embody an identical set of textual strategies as those adopted by the sixteenth-century editors of Thorpe's testimony.¹⁶ Bale adopts these strategies in order to obscure the potential radicalism of Askewe's unembroidered words and her rejection of all nonscriptural authority.¹⁷ Throughout the dialogues, Askewe presents herself as the possessor of truth and her questioners as hopelessly mired in tradition. It is this tradition which prevents them, in Askewe's view, from knowing the truth of the Scriptures. This failure and the resulting frustration are for Askewe the reasons why her examiners are so insistent that she answer them. For Askewe the truth comes from an individual's personal and immediate engagement with the Word of God, and no amount of human debate can alter this fact.

Askewe: Therfor it is mete, that in prayers we call unto God, to grafte in our foreheades, the true meanynge of the holye Ghost concernynge thys communyon.

(Lattre examinacyon, 13)

In a sense, Askewe represents silence and truth as synonymous and talk and debate as inherently untruthful. The more her tormentors wish her to speak, the more she defies them. Throughout her examinations Askewe refuses to engage in debate with her questioners adopting a number of strategies to facilitate her refusal. The end result is always to avoid speaking her tormentors' language, to avoid expressing her truth in a manner they would, or could, understand. So, for example, when Christopher Dare first questions her about the Mass, Askewe turns the tables on him:

Askewe: First Christofer dare examyned me at Sadlers hall, … and asked yf I ded not beleue that the sacrament hangynge ouer the aultre was the / verye bodye of Christ realye. Then I demanded thys questyon of hym, wherefore St Steuen was stoned to deathe? And he said he could not tell. Then I answered that no more wolde I assoyle his vayne questyon.

(First examinacyon, 1v-2)

When Bishop Bonner puts a similitude to her Askewe subverts it by reading it literally.

Askewe: Then brought he fourth this unsauerye symltude, that if a man had a wounde, no wyse surgeon wolde mynstre helpe unto it, before he had seane it uncouered. In lyke case, (sayth he) can I geue you no good counsel, unless I knowe wherwith your conscyence is burdened. I answered, that my conscience was clere in all thynges / And for to laye a plaistre unto the whole skynne, it might apere muche folye.

(First examinacyon, 23v-24)

Askewe is equally dismissive of attempts to make her debate in a “proper” fashion.

Askewe: And he sayd it was agaynst / the order of scholes, that he whych asked the questyon should answere it. I tolde him I was but a woman, and knew not the course of scholes.

(First examinacyon, 13v-14)

Above all Askewe rejects any attempt to reduce her truth, her faith, to human understanding.

Askewe: Then sayd I, that it was an abomynable shame unto hym to make no better of the eternal worde of God, than of hys slenderlye conceyued fantasy. A farre other meanyng requyreth God therein, than mannys ydell wytte can deuyse, whose doctryne is but lyes without hys heauenlye veryte.

(Lattre examinacyon, 22v)

Clearly there were good reasons for Askewe to attempt to avoid answering these questions directly. There is, however, more to her refusal to speak the language of her tormentors than a simple desire to avoid incriminating herself. As she tells Bishop Gardiner, she will not sing a new song in a strange land (Lattre examinacyon, 16); she will not make her beliefs fit the tune of the questioner's song, a song of categories, labels, and schools. Throughout both dialogues Askewe constructs her truth as transcending the mental or religious horizons of her opponents. It is not so much that she refuses to answer their questions, rather that she views her truth as beyond the competency of the questioners; Askewe does not need to speak her truth except to refer to the place in the Bible where it has already been said. This structure inherently undermines the need for anyone to mediate between the believer and Scripture. It embodies a radically simple understanding of the relationships between Scripture, believer, and authority.

Askewe's testimony represents the moment of its articulation as totally dependent on the need to enact and display the confrontation between the martyr and her persecutors, between the world and the Word. The narrative motivation for Askewe's words is provided by the discourse of interrogation.¹⁸ This discourse produces the questions, and it is one of its effects to force Askewe to produce her responses. However, while each question advances the text of the examination, it does so in circular fashion because there is no coherence between the various narrative voices of the text—those of the interrogator, of Askewe, and of Scripture—apart from the fact of keeping them separate.

Askewe: Then he asked me whye I had so fewe wordes. And I answered, / God hath geuen me the gyfte of knowledge, but not of utteraunce. And Salomon sayth that a woman of fewe wordes is a gyfte of God. Prov. xix.

(First examinacyon, 28v-29)

Askewe's narrative fills the gap between the question and Scripture; it is a text and at the same time announces itself as a nontext, as a negative piece of writing motivated on the one side by questions it does not construct as valid and on the other by a truth that has already, and definitively, been said. Askewe constructs herself as the unwilling writer of a narrative that is authored by the questioners. Her texts are dragged out of her. Without the questions, and the discourses from which they come, there would be no need for Askewe's narrative. Indeed there would be simply a silence, broken only by the turning of the pages of the Bible.

Askewe: And as I was in the mynster, readynge upon the Byble, they [the priests] resorted vnto to me, by.ii. and by.ii. by.v. and by.vi. myndynge to haue spoken to me; yet went they theyr wayes agayne, with out wordes speakynge.

(First examinacyon, 33)

In the silence of the Word the simple handmaiden of God enacts the performance of this role in the face of the hostile agents of the world.

Askewe's self-dramatization is grounded on the subject position of simple, humble, but nonetheless authoritative witness-bearer to Christ. This subjectivity is validated by her individual and personal engagement with Scripture and, as such, marks Askewe's rejection of her other roles as gentry woman, daughter of an important courtier, and wife of a rich Lincolnshire burgher. Indeed it is Askewe's performance of the role of the witness-bearer to Christ that creates the space for her negotiation and denial of sixteenth-century gender stereotypes. By constructing an absolute difference between the worldly narrative of her questioners and that of her personal engagement with Scripture, Askewe places all conventions into a delegitimated, unauthoritative space beyond and antinomic to the truth. Her texts embody a subjectivity that robs social and cultural conventions of their validity.

For Askewe, the discourse her questioners wish her to speak is foreign, literally a strange land, one in which her song, based on her personal faith, has no place. For her this strange land is everything that attempts to make her recant her faith, be it the church, tradition, the language of her tormentors, or her husband. In order to protect her truth, Askewe constructs a persona, that of the simple, faithful servant of God, which depends for its effectiveness on her verbal skill and intelligence. This persona, with the certainty of divine election and armed with God's Word, is prepared to defy all worldly authorities and powers.

          Lyke as the armed knyght
Appoynted to the fielde
With thys wyll I fyght
And fayth shall be my shielde.
          Faythe is that weapon stronge
Whych wyll not fayle at nede
My foes therfor amonge
Therwith wyll I procede.

(Lattre examinacyon, 63)

Askewe's dismissive attitude to all nonscriptural language makes it ironic that the first, and by far most influential, responses to her words were the prefaces and glosses that Bale attached to them. In Bale's hands Askewe's texts become the reason for more worldly language and debate. He uses the textual lacunae created by Askewe's silences, her simple references to the truth of Scripture, to place himself between the martyr's words and their meaning as their explainer and validator. To motivate this textual move, Bale makes Askewe's text resemble a piece of the past, one that needs to be explicated and located within a polemical historical narrative in order to protect and simultaneously to create the truth of its articulation of a magisterial Protestant identity.

Bale's comparison of Askewe to the early Christian martyr Blandina in the preface to the first pamphlet immediately locates the meaning of her words within a historical perspective.

Bale: Manye were converted by the sufferaunce of Blandina. A farre greatter nombre by the burnynge of Anne Askewe.

(First examinacyon, preface, 9)

By comparing Askewe with Blandina, a figure found in the historical writings of the church fathers, Bale is representing Askewe as another worthy object for a church historian. He is also, however, constructing the true meaning of Askewe's testimony as dependent on a historical narrative that is a product of his own labor as the protector and explicator of Askewe's texts. In his preface to the second pamphlet, Bale compares Askewe with other English martyrs. In the process he again constructs her within a clear historical context.

In England here, sens the first plantacyon of the popes Englysh church, by Augustyne and other Romysh monkes of Benettes supersticyon, ii kyndes of martyrs hath bene: One of / monasterye-buylders and chanetrye-founders, whom the temporal prynces and secular magistrates haue dyverslye done to deathe, sumtyme for dysobedyence, and sumtyme for manyfest treason. … The other sort were preachers of the Gospell, or poore teachers thereof in corners, whan the persecucyon was soche that it myght not be taught abroade. And these poor sowles … were put to deathe by the holye spirytuall fathers, Byshoppes, prestes, monkes, chanons, and fryars, for heresye and lollerye, theye say.

(Lattre examinacyon, preface, 3v-4)

This framing of Askewe's testimony has the effect of constructing her as sharing the same basic characteristics as all the other martyrs Bale locates within this tradition and making her testimony, like theirs, require explication. It also has the effect of historicizing Askewe's words in terms of their significance and making them important in terms of a polemical understanding of the past. In the process of explaining Askewe's words, however, Bale's text writes over the martyr's silent truth. At the point where Askewe's text falls silent, Bale's text begins; his glosses provide the words to give her silence meaning. In a sense Bale needs Askewe to speak almost as much as his orthodox opponents do.¹⁹ They need her to speak to condemn her, while Bale needs her to speak in order to justify his canonization of her as a Protestant saint. In her second examination Askewe comments, “Then had I dyuerse rebukes of the counsell bycause I wolde not express my mynde in all thynges they wolde have me” (Lattre examinacyon, 16v). Askewe's failure to answer all the council's questions, and to implicate powerful court ladies as heretics, drove some councillors to racking her illegally. Despite this torture, Askewe refused to satisfy their desires and give them the names of her noble supporters. Bale did not need to resort to such drastic measures to make Askewe speak; he merely had to write her story in a way that constructed her secrets as those in which he believed. Bale “finds” in Askewe's testimony the Protestant identity that his text of The Examinations embodies and performs at the moment of its articulation.

Bale, however, does not simply need Askewe to speak, he also needs her to do so in a language which he, his fellow magisterial reformers, and, ironically, her questioners accept as appropriate for matters of faith. By speaking when Askewe remained silent, Bale takes up the challenge of her questioners. While Askewe refused to reduce her faith to man's vain fantasies, Bale does so on her behalf. He uses her texts to sustain his rhetorical debate with her questioners. For example, Bale's gloss on an exchange between Askewe and her questioners, in which she simply cites chapters 7 and 17 of Acts to defend herself against the charge that it was heretical for her to argue that God lived not in temples made by man, relates directly and almost exclusively to the status of the woman who was the alleged source of this accusation.

An ignorant woman, yea, a beast without faythe, is herin allowed to iudge the holye scriptures heresye, and, agaynst all good lawes, admitted to accuse thys godlye woman, the seruant of Christ, for an heynous heretyc, for the onlye readinge of them. As peruerse and blasphemous was thys questmonger [Askewe's questioner] as she, and as beastlye ignoraunt in the doctryne of helthe, yet is neyther of them iudged yll of the worlde, but the one permitted to accuse thys true membre of Christ, and the other to condempne her. Wherfore her answere, out of the.vii. chapter of Mathew, was most fyt for them. For they are no better than swyne, that so condempne the precyouse treasure of the Gospel for the myre of mennys tradycyons.

(First examinacyon, 2v-3)

In the process of adding this gloss to Askewe's words, the center of the text is moved from her and to Bale's attacks on her questioners. Bale's eloquence, his invective, displaces Askewe's own concerns from the center of the dialogues toward the periphery. They become a source, a justification for him to argue with, and defeat, his “papist” enemies. Bale claims, in the conclusion to the first pamphlet, that these opponents argue not with words but with acts:

Bale: They [the “papists”] recken that with fyre, water, and swerde, they are able to answere all bokes made agaynst their abuses, and so to dyscharge their inuynciyle [invincible] argumentes.

(First examinacyon, 42v)

The irony of this statement is that while Bale was indeed a writer of books the woman he is writing in praise of was not. Askewe bore witness to her faith in the material fire that Bale appears here to be devaluing. Where Askewe's encounters with her persecutors move from their question to her response to the final authority of the Scriptures and her refusal to speak, Bale's glosses move in the opposite direction, from the Scriptures to a specific reading of them to a refutation of the question. While the conflict for Bale is who has the right to make Askewe speak, for Askewe the conflict is over the examiners' insistence that she speak with a voice that is already valorized and sanitized by men's traditions and unwritten verities. Askewe's text inevitably ends in silence, in an act of faith; Bale's gloss ends in the language of polemical, public debate.

III

As was suggested at the opening of this article, Askewe's place in the past is still largely determined by the parameters of Bale's magisterial Protestant endeavor embodied in his framing of Askewe's words. These parameters, that Askewe's texts have meaning within the terms of Bale's struggle with his political and doctrinal enemies and that in the process they validate a version of his Protestant identity, are, however, neither self-evident nor necessarily the most productive historical understanding of Askewe's testimony. Indeed to write history within these parameters is to inscribe over Askewe's words a set of historical paradigms that embody Bale's own agenda. In effect it is to write magisterial Protestant history. The final section of this article is an attempt to map out an alternative narrative within which to understand Askewe's words, which writes over the historigraphic boundaries of Bale's, and by implication Dickens's, historical discourse.

In 1548 John Champneys, in The harvest is at hand, wherin the tares shal be bound, and cast into the fyre and burnt, attacked all clergymen, Protestant and Catholic, as “marched men.”²⁰ Champneys criticizes the clergy

not onely because they [priests] are marched in their bodies and sometimes weare disguysed monstrus garmentes, but because their doctrine is marched also, for … [they] wolde haue the people to beleue [Scripture] and receive it; only as they do marche it and appoynt it out unto them.

(The harvest, sig. B2)

Champneys' description of clergymen as “marched men” brings together a number of disparate elements. It combines a reference to the mark of the beast referred to in chapter 19 of Revelation, the clergy's physical badges of office, and an understanding of the role of the clergy as standing between the people and Scripture. The clergy, according to Champneys, mark out the Scriptures and therefore prevent people from receiving the complete Word of God. Champneys' solution to this situation is to offer to stage before Edward VI a debate between all the marked men and one simple honest Christian so that the monarch can see, and indeed experience, how the clergy had corrupted God's Word. Given that Champneys is clearly putting himself forward in this text to occupy this role, it is important to note his text's suggestion that if this one true believer cannot defeat the ranks of the marked men he will deserve to be executed (The harvest, sig. D2v). If the marked men are defeated, however, then “all men ought to refuse and … despise their doctrine, how clerkeley or eloquently soeuer it be uttered (The harvest, sig. D2). Champneys' text appropriates precisely the forms for an examination of heresy in order to validate the truth of its writer's understanding of Scripture through a process of appropriation and subversion. The truth demanded of the accused in heresy trials, the absolute truth that their judges claimed to know, is rewritten by Champneys as that which can only be produced through the very process of being on trial. For Champneys the truth of Scripture can only be produced through the performance of the role of being the accused in a heresy trial.²¹ The model for this confrontation between the simple believer in God and his or her persecuting enemies was clearly articulated by Lollard victims of the first wave of persecutions caused by the passing of antiheresy legislation during the reign of Henry IV.

Peter McNiven has suggested that the persecutory system put in place in the years following the passing of De heretico comburendo and Arundel's Constitutions in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries resulted from a complex interaction between the church and, after 1399, the new Lancastrian monarchy.²² At the same time, as McNiven also points out, the attack on heresy in the 1400s was motivated as much by the church's lack of confidence in its own status as by the existence of the Lollards themselves.²³ The English Church's response to the spread of Lollardy reflects a desire to fix and assert an exclusive truth, an act in itself that illustrates this truth's unstable nature.²⁴ The persecutive enterprise of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries paradoxically was based on an assertion of the absolute and nondebatable nature of a truth that nonetheless was so precarious that the church had to require that every member of the English community publicly acknowledge and accept it.²⁵ In such Lollard texts as The Testimony of William Thorpe, however, this demand is subverted and rejected. Here it is the individual believer who is the possessor of truth; and the world, personified by its representatives, the clergy, is the repository of the untruth. At one of the defining moments in this text, Thorpe takes Archbishop Arundel through a list of questions all of which effectively require that the archbishop answers in the affirmative. For example Thorpe asks Arundel,

Sere, owen alle cristen men and wymmen, aftir her kunnynge and her power, for to conforme all her lyuynge to the lyuynge and techynge of Crist specialy, and also to the lyuynge and to the techinge of hise apostlis and of hise profetis, in all thingis that berr plesynge to God and edificacioun of his chirche?²⁶

Having asked Arundel a number of such questions, Thorpe finally agrees to submit to the archbishop's authority on the basis of the doctrine implicitly embodied in his questions, one that amounts to the assertion of the principle of sola scriptura.²⁷

And I seide, “Sere, acordingli as I haue rehersid to you I wole be / now redy to obeie ful gladli to Crist the heed of al holi chirche, and to the lore and to the heestis and to the counseilis of euery plesyng membre of him.”²⁸

Arundel's response to this highly qualified acceptance of the Established Church's authority is violent and dismissive.

And than the Archebischop, smytyng with his fist fersli vpon a copbord, spake to me with a grete spirit, seiynge, “Bi Iesu, but if thou leeue suche / addiciouns, obeiynge mee now here withouten ony accepcioun to myn ordinaunce, or that I go out of this place I schal make thee as sikir as ony theef that is in Kent! And avise mee now what thou wolt do.”²⁹

In this text Thorpe is presented as the sole possessor of the truth of the Church, as embodied in its founders and teachers, while his enemies are represented as hopelessly mired in their worldly concerns. Indeed as this quotation makes clear, Thorpe's persecutors are violent, hasty men whose spiritual horizon is entirely restricted by their concerns for worldly affairs. While Arundel threatens to treat Thorpe like a thief, the latter gives the archbishop a lesson in Christian teaching.

Clearly there is a relation between the subject position that Thorpe occupies in his examinations, that which Askewe assumes in her dialogues, and the one that Champneys claimed he wished to perform before Edward VI. All three construct themselves as lone, almost asocial or acultural, individuals holding out against the massed ranks of their worldly persecutors. Their authority is explicitly unworldly, drawing, as it does, directly on the example of Christ and deploying an understanding of authority as necessarily and irredeemably disempowered. Askewe, Thorpe, and, by implication, Champneys express a sense of subjectivity that is nurtured and confirmed in the struggle with their persecutors and which is based on an absolute, personal, and individual engagement with Scripture. Indeed one could argue that the persecutive machinery put in place in the early fifteenth century itself effectively produced this peculiarly “modern” subjectivity, so that the act of being an individual, being true to one's inner self or truth, requires a collision with the demands of the world and the community.³⁰

In these terms one could suggest that Bale's approach to Askewe is precisely designed to deny the extent to which her texts contain just such a sense of self. In glossing Askewe's words Bale implies that they need such treatment because they only have meaning within the terms of his own self-understanding and that of the struggles in which he was involved. To accept Bale's construction of Askewe is to reproduce an understanding of religious change in the sixteenth century that is located firmly within the magisterial Protestant endeavor.³¹ As an alternative one could argue that Askewe's place in the past should be understood as part of a confrontation between an English Church concerned throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with anxiously protecting its role as custodian and validator of the source of cultural truth and authority, Scripture, and those individual Christians who wished to articulate and perform a subjectivity based on their individual and personal engagement with Christ's teaching and example.³²

At the end of Askewe's texts is a prophetic poem, a paraphrase of a passage from the Bible, in which the martyr recounts a vision of a tyrant sitting on the throne of justice.

Yet wyll I shewe one syght
That I sawe in my tyme.
          I sawe a ryall trone
Where Justyce shuld haue sytt
But in her stede was one
Of modye cruell wytt.
          Absorpt [Aborded] was rygtwysnesse
As of the ragynge floude
Sathan in hys excesse
Sucte up the gyltelesse bloude.
          Then thought I, Jesus lorde
Whan thou shalt judge us all
Harde is it to recorde
On these men what wyll fall.

(Lattre examinacyon, 63v-64)³³

Askewe does not make clear who the tyrant is sitting on justice's throne, but then neither does Bale.³⁴ Askewe of course is writing in verse; she is describing a religious experience, a vision. Her words do not “need” explaining. It is noticeable, however, that Bale does not attempt to gloss Askewe's poem.³⁵ Perhaps the subject matter is too dangerous? Perhaps there was no place in Bale's narrative for Askewe's poem? Or perhaps it was impossible for Bale to make this poetic text, with its combination of Scriptural quotation, textual complexity, and political radicalism, fit into his Askewe. The subjectivity embodied in Askewe's poem is continuous to that articulated by Thorpe and analogous to what Champneys claimed he wished to occupy. It is based entirely on Askewe's individual, personal, and immediate engagement with God and speaks in a polished, textually complex, poetic form, asking, indeed demanding, to be heard and acted upon.

Notes

1. For a modern historical account of Askewe, see Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 370-77. A number of feminist scholars have also recently produced studies on Askewe. See, Elaine V. Beilin, “Anne Askew's Self-Portrait in the Examinations,” in Margaret Patterson, ed., Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985), 77-91; and “Anne Askew's Dialogue with Authority,” in Marie Rose Logan, ed., Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and France (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 313-22.

2. This article is largely concerned with traditional or Whig understandings of Askewe and her place in the religious struggles of the sixteenth century. This is not to suggest that revisionist historians have shown themselves to be more sensitive to the issues of appropriation and religious radicalism than their opponents. Eamon Duffy does not mention Askewe at all in The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); while for Christopher Haigh the idea of a woman speaking with authority in public on matters of religion is apparently so ridiculous that in conclusion to The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 215, he suggests that it was inherently disruptive and is now extremely amusing that an Elizabethan Puritan preacher had the name, Minge, which, in English schoolboy slang, refers to female genitalia.

3. The relationship between the Anne Askewe of these texts and the person burned at Smithfield is an inherently problematic one. However The Examinations of Anne Askewe do include at least two specific narrative voices, one explicitly that of John Bale and another that constructs itself as that of Anne Askewe. It is the relation between these two voices that this article is concerned with.

4. A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation, 2nd ed. (London: B. T. Batsford, 1989), 219. One wonders quite why Dickens needs to describe Askewe as “pert.” Was Cranmer pert at Oxford in 1555? Were Ridley and Latimer “brazen”?

5. Ibid.

6. Dickens, like his sixteenth-century forefathers, Bale and Foxe, is quick to assert as a fact that Askewe was not a religious radical. See ibid., 263.

7. Given the implicitly conservative nature of this magisterial narrative of religious change in sixteenth-century England, it is worrying to find its salient points often being reproduced in feminist accounts of such texts as those of Askewe. In this context this article is self-consciously part of the historiographical endeavor that Jean Howard has suggested should be the center of feminist studies of the early modern period. See Jean Howard, “Feminism and the Question of History: Resituating the Debate,” Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 19 (1991): 149-57.

8. John Bossy makes an essential point in terms of the sixteenth century when he suggests that both Protestantism and post-Tridentine Catholicism produced similar cultural results in terms of the ordering and organizing of religious practices through the textual fixing of the liturgy and other church rituals. See John Bossy, Christianity in the West: 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 103.

9. I use the term “papist” to refer not derogatorily to the actual opponents of Protestants in the sixteenth century but to represent their construction in the texts of such writers as Bale as an identity-defining “other” of a Protestant subjectivity.

10. This process of sustaining a Protestant identity by finding it in a past that was itself a product of a Protestant historian's own intellectual endeavor continued throughout the sixteenth century and reached its apotheosis in the massive texts of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments. In this context one should note Patrick Collinson's recent suggestion that, in an important sense, from its very beginnings, “‘The Reformation’ has been invented by historians, looking backwards.” Patrick Collinson, “England,” in Bob Scribner, Roy Porter, and Mikiláš Teich, eds., The Reformation in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 80.

11. A proper dyaloge betwene a gentillman and a husbandman, eche complaynenge [about] the ambicion of the clergye (Marborow in the Lande of Hessen [i.e., J. Hoochstraten, Antwerp, 1530]), sig. C2; STC 1462.5. STC numbers cited in the notes are to A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave et al., A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475-1640, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1976-91). Abbreviations in this and other sixteenth-century sources have been silently expanded in quotations.

12. “The Testimony of William Thorpe,” in Anne Hudson, ed., Two Wycliffite Texts, Early English Text Society orig. ser. 301 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 24-93 (hereafter cited in text).

13. Anne Hudson has suggested that the sixteenth-century editions of Lollard texts were remarkably accurate. See “‘No Newe Thyng’: The Printing of Medieval Texts in the Early Reformation Period,” Lollards and Their Books (London: Hambledon, 1985), 227-48.

14. This sixteenth-century construction of the meaning of Lollardy often still structures modern understandings of it, in which Lollards are only important when they can be related to the religious changes of the sixteenth century.

15. Although magisterial Protestants certainly did persecute fewer people than did their Catholic opponents, at least one religious radical was burned during the reign of Edward VI, Joan of Kent, who, however extreme her views were alleged to be by her accusers, told the man preaching the sermon at her execution to “Go read the scriptures.” See John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1822), vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 335.

16. John Bale, The first examinacyon of Anne Askewe (Marpurg in the Lande of Hessen [i.e., Wesel, 1546]); STC 848; and John Bale, The Lattre examinacyon of Anne Askewe (Marpurg in the Lande of Hessen [i.e., Wesel, 1547]); STC 850. These texts are hereafter cited parenthetically by folio numbers.

17. For a conventional account of the relationship between Bale's historiographical endeavor and Askewe's account of her examinations, see Leslie P. Fairfield, John Bale: Mythmaker of the English Reformation (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1976). Although Bale as a magisterial Protestant implicitly shared Askewe's commitment to the principle of sola scriptura, in practice, as Euan Cameron has suggested, magisterial Protestants were extremely wary of the radical implications of this doctrine. Cameron writes that magisterial Protestant translations of the Bible were not undertaken “for the sake of pure detached scholarship. … Once the Bible had been corrected, translated, and interpreted, then (and only then, one might say!) it was offered to the people.” Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 141.

18. One should note that to designate this discourse as interrogative is to reflect Askewe's own construction of it. It would be equally accurate to call it the discourse of pastoral care, as such examinations had a clear pastoral as well as an inquisitorial intention.

19. There is, of course, a level at which I and other historians share Bale's need to make Askewe speak in a language that is appropriate to our own agendas. Margaret Ferguson has recently criticized the way some feminist studies of early modern women writers have embodied a simplistic identification between the modern feminist scholar and the object of her or his study. This problem is particularly pressing when dealing with a writer like Askewe, whose radicalism and resistance to patriarchal oppression is based on an understanding of Christian authority that relies for its effectiveness on an explicit disavowal of autonomy and power. See Margaret W. Ferguson, “Moderation and Its Discontents: Recent Work on Renaissance Women,” Feminist Studies 20 (1994): 349-66.

20. John Champneys, The harvest is at hand, wherin the tares shal be bound, and cast into the fyre and burnt (London, 1548); STC 4956 (hereafter in text by signatures). For a brief discussion of Champneys, see J. W. Martin, Religious Radicals in Tudor England (London: Hambledon, 1989).

21. For a discussion of the nature of this dynamic within an early modern Christian context, see John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563-1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

22. See Peter McNiven, Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV: The Burning of John Badby (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1987).

23. McNiven comments that it was concern over the possible effects of unorthodox behavior and beliefs that provoked the demand for a “firmer commitment to an exclusive truth” (ibid., 226).

24. For an important discussion of the costs in terms of the restriction of religious and spiritual debate following Arundel's Constitutions, 1409, see Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel's Constitutions of 1409,” Speculum 70 (1995): 822-64.

25. As Elaine Scarry suggests, the need to subject people to excruciating pain in order to make them accept one's own construction of the world, authority, or truth speaks of the uncertainty of the torturer's and persecutor's own sense of truth in his or her beliefs. Scarry writes that “at particular moments when there is within a society a crisis of belief—that is, when some central idea or ideology or cultural construct has ceased to elicit a population's belief …—the sheer material factualness of the human body will be borrowed to lend that cultural construct the aura of ‘realness’ and ‘certainty.’” Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 14.

26. “The Testimony of William Thorpe,” 87.

27. Hudson suggests that Thorpe's understanding of Christian authority implied that “the only possible interpreter of the Gospel is the believer's own conscience.” She goes on to comment that “[a]s Arundel evidently perceived, the logical outcome of such a view in practical terms is anarchy.” Anne Hudson, “William Thorpe and the Question of Authority,” in G. R. Evans, ed., Christian Authority: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 137.

28. “The Testimony of William Thorpe,” 87-88.

29. Ibid., 88.

30. In this context one could argue that the history of the subject, and the emergence of a “modern” interior form of subjectivity, needs fundamentally to reject a narratization of the past that embodies a simplistic reproduction of the kind of structures that magisterial Protestants like Bale adopted precisely to obscure the relationship and continuity of subjectivity embodied in such texts as The Testimony of William Thorpe and The Examinations of Anne Askewe. Rather than obsessively going over the same old canonical texts, perhaps the writers of this history should look at those texts written by the persecuted, the hunted, and the murdered. What if a modern subjectivity was born, not among the courtiers, the professional writers, or the academics, but among the dispossessed, the inarticulate, the persecuted Christian? For a discussion of “the history of the subject,” see David Aers, “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject,’” in David Aers, ed., Culture and History, 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 177-202.

31. See Lee Patterson's critique of the way modern historical and literary critical accounts of the sixteenth century have effectively reproduced its own construction of its past. Patterson comments, “The fact is that the Middle Ages has from the begining served the postmedieval Western historical consciousness as one of the primary sites of otherness by which it has constituted itself.” “Critical Historicism and Medieval Studies,” in Patterson, ed., Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 2. See also Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum 65 (1990): 87-108.

32. This alternative narrative should, however, not be understood as another grand narrative but rather as a set of related moments, conflicts, and testimonies—the tradition of the dispossessed. See further on this notion, Terry Eagleton, “History, Narrative, and Marxism,” in James Phelan, ed., Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), 276.

33. These words are a paraphrase of a passage from Ecclesiastes. H. A. Mason has suggested that Askewe's use of them relates to a translation of this section of the Bible by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. See Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period (London: Routledge, 1959), 243-44.

34. To read the poem as a criticism of Henry VIII would be to ignore other places in the text in which Askewe expresses a strongly Erastian attitude toward monarchical power. For example Askewe offers to tell the king those things she refuses to discuss with her questioners (Lattre examinacyon, 14v). William Tyndale, however, managed to combine a bitterly critical polemic against clerical power in the state with a moral critique of Henry's government: “if when the light is come abroad, in which their wickedness cannot be hid, they find no such obedience in the people unto their old tyranny, whose fault is it? This is a sure conclusion: none obedience, that is not love, can long endure: and in your deeds can no man see any cause of love.” William Tyndale, “The Practice of Prelates” (1530), in Rev. Henry Walter, ed., Expositions and Notes (Cambridge, 1849), 344; STC 24465.

35. This appears relatively insignificant until one discovers that Bale was a writer who, in one of his pamphlets, even glossed the address of the printer of the work he was attacking. See John Bale, A Mysterye of inyquyte …, (Geneva: Mychael Woode [i.e., Antwerp: A. Gonius, 1545]), sig. M3; STC 1303.

I would like to thank the following people for their support and critical responses to this article: David Aers, Diane Purkiss, Justine King, and Michael Cornett.