SOURCE: Mueller, Janel. “A Tudor Queen Finds Voice: Katherine Parr's Lamentations of a Sinner.” In The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, edited by Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier, pp. 15-47. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, Mueller discusses the achievement of Parr's Lamentations and examines its origins and composition, and in so doing raises questions about gender and authorship.]

Did women have a Renaissance? Arguing for gender as one crucial factor in the differential cultural advances shown by historical eras, Joan Kelly followed up her question a decade ago with negative evidence drawn mainly from literary texts.¹ In their depictions of Renaissance court life, women fall gracefully silent as they accede to the place and roles allotted them in men's discourse. But perhaps Kelly's secular outlook was inadequate to address the complex of social facts. For Renaissance England there is another—even an arguably prior—question. Did women have a Reformation? A collection of essays recently edited by Margaret Hannay attests that they did, and yet the issues of female self-affirmation and self-expression remain vexed.² A gender differential shows just as clearly in the religious area of literary production. When they promote the faith of Protestantism, learned sixteenth-century Englishwomen almost exclusively play the facilitating roles of patrons, translators, and compilers; they do not author works of their own. As far as I know, if private letters and transcripts of legal testimony are discounted, Reformation England can claim nothing over late medieval England on the score of original female authorship in prose. Against Julian of Norwich's Showings or Revelations of Divine Love (short text in 1373, long text after 1393) and the dictated Book of Margery Kempe (1436-38), English Protestantism might at best hope to set the First and Latter Examinations of Anne Askewe (1545-47) as redacted by John Bale, were it not for one notable exception.

The two concluding years of Henry VIII's reign (1545-46) saw Katherine Parr, his sixth and last queen, at work on her prose treatise entitled Lamentation of a Sinner, an unfolding of the momentous significance she discerned in her Protestant conversion and a publication circulating under her own name within months of Henry's death. In this essay on the text and context of Parr's Lamentation I have set myself a twofold aim. First, I characterize in some specificity the achievement registered by this all-but-forgotten work. Second, I inquire into the conditions of its origination and its discourse. Such an inquiry necessarily raises a linked pair of questions about gender and authorship, questions that focus the feature of sexual difference taken, in this case, to its limit in uniqueness. How was Parr as a woman—specifically, a Tudor queen and wife—able to find voice in her Lamentation at all? To what extent and in what connections does the voice of the Lamentation become an identifiably feminine one?

In John Foxe's pages Katherine Parr receives a spirited portrayal as the Protestant heroine who angled nearest and best with Henry VIII to ensure the future of the Reformation in England.³ But from anything Foxe records, one would never know that Parr had to her credit two publications as well as her canny exercise of power behind the throne: Prayers or Medytacions, … Collected … by … Katherine quene of Englande (1st ed. 1545, six more eds. by 1553) and The Lamentacion of a sinner, made by the moste vertuous Ladie, Quene Caterin, bewayling the ignoraunce of her blind life (1st ed. 5 November 1547; 2d ed. 1548; 3d ed. 1563).⁴ Since the appearance of a survey article on Parr as a “woman of letters” just over a quarter century ago,⁵ the handful of studies aimed at rescuing her from obscurity have, however, reinforced Foxe's view of Parr as ancilla rather than author.⁶ These studies attribute to her influence the family harmony and godly erudition in which Edward VI and Elizabeth were nurtured. They present Parr equally as a skilled patron at court, sustaining Cranmer's and Latimer's importance during Henry's conservative last years while advancing several younger Protestant humanists who later attained public prominence, notably Ascham, Cheke, Grindal, and Parkhurst. They credit her with concurrent success in spearheading the project of making Erasmus's scriptural Paraphrases accessible in English together with the vernacular Bible in every church in the land.

When these studies reckon at all explicitly with gender, they salute Parr as an outstanding exemplar of female piety and female learning in a Tudor royal tradition that spanned four generations, beginning with Margaret Beaufort, continuing with Catherine of Aragon, redoubling strength with two representatives from the same generation, Catherine's daughter, Mary, and Katherine Parr, and ending with Elizabeth I. Yet recognition of such salient contextual facts has failed to address an equally important factor of uniqueness.⁷ As an original composition, Parr's Lamentation is without parallel among the religious works in the literary remains of Tudor royal women. Their works are translations and compilations like her own earlier Prayers.⁸ When Parr's Lamentation is set alongside the pious translations produced by other Englishwomen in the sixteenth century, further aspects of uniqueness emerge. In the fullest study we have of this body of work, Mary Ellen Lamb observes that, by century's end, translations of ars moriendi works had become an approved outlet for “a female literary strategy through which women could be represented as heroic without challenging beliefs of the patriarchal culture of Elizabethan England.”⁹ Over against this body of translations, Parr's Lamentation stands out for its surprisingly early date and its female author's emphasis on how to live rather than how to die as a Christian. How did Katherine Parr uniquely find the authorial voice that brought her Lamentation into being?

I consider the question of authorial voice central to any understanding of this work, although the matter has gone unaddressed in the general neglect of Parr as an author. In the fullest discussion of the Lamentation to date, a mere three pages, William Haugaard pays respect to the work as “a variation of the classic religious ‘confession’” and “the witness of one lay Christian,” but he cannot conceal his regret at Katherine's meager use of individuating touches.¹⁰ She makes just two brief references to Henry VIII; in the first he is “such a godlie and learned king,” and only in the second is he “my most soveraigne favorable lorde and housband.”¹¹ She tells us nothing circumstantial about her conversion to the new Protestant faith. As a result of Parr's characteristic reticence in strictly autobiographical matters, her text has been shortchanged in critical discussion. Haugaard concludes, with James McConica, that the queen as author must be assimilated to the Erasmian strain that predominated in the Protestantism of the English court in the 1540s. Haugaard concludes this even though he is well aware that the Lamentation diverges sharply from Erasmus in one of its major emphases: Katherine's prolonged reflections on justification by faith as the authenticating mark of her conversion experience.¹²

In my view, an analysis of Parr's authorial voice in the Lamentation must begin by attending closely—not just approximately—to the content, organization, and style of what she is saying, in order to assess the adequacy of any putative models for her composition. But gender difference also keeps supervening on the question of models for religious prose, highlighting a complication grave enough to have almost muted female authorship in Parr's day. This is the fact that the available English models were entirely male authors.¹³ How was Parr nevertheless able to work her way beyond her earlier borrowed speech of translation (in the Prayers) and voice herself as an author (in the Lamentation)? To this difficult but vital question there is neither a single nor a uniform answer. There is not even a single or uniform way to go about seeking an answer. Natalie Davis, for example, has construed the question solely in contextual terms. Her essay on European women who wrote histories between 1400 and 1820 opens by listing four enabling conditions as requisites for female authorship: (1) access to historical materials and to public life, providing opportunities to observe and to ask questions; (2) access to genres of historiography, affording knowledge of rules for ordering and expressing materials; (3) a deep personal sense of connection and involvement with the areas of public life considered appropriate for writing history—termed “especially important” by Davis; and (4) sufficient assurance that the work would find an audience to take its author seriously.¹⁴ At relevant points in the ensuing discussion I too will acknowledge the presence of one or another of Davis's contextual requisites. But my emphasis is deliberately much less contextual than Davis's. I work from the premise—and thus, in effect, argue—that enablement is not merely a product of circumstances. It is also a process that the woman author makes readable in the very production of her text. She reveals both the force and the limits of this process in how she, as author, handles her compositional models. I consider it extremely significant that Parr utilized multiple models in writing her Lamentation, and I try to construe the significance of this multiplicity. On the one hand, this fact of textual production bespeaks her relative confidence and independence in working with her models, as well as the support these males lend to her efforts. On the other, it highlights junctures where Parr cannot assimilate her female difference even to these composite resources, and she is compelled to speak otherwise than the males do. At such junctures, as a subject both held by and holding in suspension a yet-incomplete discourse, what Parr intimates is just so much of the woman in the author as her times and her purposes will bear.

In what follows I argue first that the case for relegating the Lamentation to an Erasmian model crumbles when Parr's essential divergences from Erasmus in formal structure, major themes, and prose style are duly clarified. I then propose an alternative model, wholly English but eclectic, that builds on Tyndalian foundations with local resources derived from Thomas Cranmer and more comprehensive ones derived from Hugh Latimer. Besides textual evidence, what we know of Parr's biography increases the likelihood that Cranmer and Latimer influenced her at first hand during the period when she was working on the Lamentation. Yet, as I have just suggested, even my eclectic English Protestant model will not finally explain every identifying feature of Parr's authorial voice. In calculating the influence of Cranmer and Latimer there are registrations of gender and reverberations from the political context to be added in also. Once this woman's precarious position as a Henrician queen is taken into account, we can better understand why she appears both peculiarly powerful and peculiarly constrained in giving voice to her concerns for her own and England's godliness. In the course of discussion I try to suggest how both work and author can be located within the context of early English Protestantism and how Parr's characteristically oblique self-representation in the Lamentation relates to her sense of her gender and status.

I

We know from a surviving inventory that Katherine Parr owned copies of two works by Erasmus, his magisterial Enchiridion militis Christiani (written 1501, published 1503; 1st enlarged ed., 1518) and his more minor De praeparatione ad mortem (1534).¹⁵ From the fact of ownership we infer her direct acquaintance with Erasmus's central articulation of his “philosophy of Christ” in the Enchiridion.¹⁶ Parr's Lamentation does exhibit certain Erasmian connections: most notably, the stress on Christian community, social solidarity, and ethical commitment as well as on the necessity of taking the message of Scripture to one's heart. In the 1540s, however, certain key issues were widening the nascent split between Catholics and Protestants, and on these issues Parr explicitly sets herself against Erasmus.

She repudiates his Aristotelian notion of virtue as a habit of the will based on knowledge; for Parr, human nature is inherently reprobate, and any goodness it has is “imputed” through justifying faith in the merits of “Christ crucifyed.” Whereas Erasmus appropriates Plato's definition of knowledge to characterize faith as rationally grounded true belief, Parr distinguishes sharply between “dead, humayn, historicall fayth, & knowlege, gotten by humane industrie, … whiche may be had with all sinne” and the “true infused fayth and knowledge of Christe,” which comes by divine gift when the soul trusts what God “promiseth, and bindeth him selfe by hys worde, to geve … to all them that aske hym with true fayth: without whiche, nothing can be doen acceptable or pleasing to God” (Lamentacion, sigs. Cii^v-Ciii^r, Biii^v-Biiii^r; HM, pp 294-95). She conceives of charity analogously, as the soul's divinely prompted response to the gift of justifying faith. Parr cannot even envisage as a possibility the Erasmian pattern in which the soul acquires charity and other virtues by emulating the example of Christ's life. Consequently, there is nothing in the Lamentation to compare with the continuous stress on spiritual effort that grounds Erasmus's use of the Pauline image of the armor of the Spirit as the controlling metaphor of the Enchiridion. Parr interprets the armor of the Spirit quite differently. To her this armor is not an array of weapons that every Christian can employ at will (Enchiridion, chap. 3), but the peculiar possession of the crucified Christ, by which he conquered the devil on behalf of humankind.

The princes of the worlde, never did fight without the strengthe of the worlde. Christ contrary, … would fight, as David did with Golias, unarmed of all humaine wisdom, and policy, and withoute al worldlie power and strength. Nevertheles he was fullye replenished, & armed with the whole armour of the spirite. … Therefore when I loke upon the sonne of God … so unarmed, naked, geven up, and alone with humilitie, pacience, liberalitie, modestie, gentlenes, and with all other hys divine vertues, beating downe to the grounde al goddes enemies …, I am forced to saye, that his victorie and triumphe, was merveylouse. And therfore Christ deserved to have this noble title, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jewes.	David and Christ compared in fight. Sapi. xvii.
	Spirituall Armure. Eph. vi.
	Jesus title. Mat. xxvii.
(Lamentacion, sigs. Ciiv-Ciiiv; HM, p. 297)

Just as a soldier dons greaves, breastplate, sandals, helmet, and shield in a prescribed order, so Erasmus lays out his Enchiridion for his reader in a sequence of thirty-nine chapters, twenty-two of which are numbered “rules” for progress in the Christian life. This is as unlike Parr's handling of form as could be imagined. By and large, the Lamentation unfolds through discrete reflections on topics and Bible verses, keyed for the reader by marginal headings. In one typical run these go as follows: “Man of hys owne proude nature is easely made a Pharisey. Children lerne to be thankeful to your father. Rom. v. Harde hartes receyve no print. i. Cor. ii. Two yoke felowes, Blindnes & hardnes of harte. Profession in baptisme. Christ innocent. Esa. liii. Man sinful. Philip. ii. Christ obedient. Man stubburne. Math. ix. Christ humble. Man proud. John viii. Math. iiii. Christe hevenly. Man worldly. John xiii. John vi. Ma. xviii. Ma. viii. ii Cor. viii. Christ pore. Man riche. Lu. xiii. Lu. xxiii.” (Lamentacion, sigs. Avi^v-Aviii^r; HM, p. 291). Although some antithetical patterning can be discerned here, the larger progression from topic to topic—say, from Pharisees to children to blindness and hardness of heart to baptism—remains unpredictable. This loose stringing together, offset somewhat by devices that locally heighten a sense of form, exemplifies how Parr works with images as well as with topics. A few of her more spiritually charged topics are inseparable from certain images. These topic-image pairings may recur at irregular intervals in combination with other topics, to form new thought complexes. For example, envisaging one's relation to God as that of a loving child, not that of a bond servant working for wages, appears first as a sheer impossibility for an unregenerate soul, next as the focus of a prayer Parr makes for all Christians, and finally as a sustaining element in the faith with which the godly confront the world (Lamentacion, sigs. Avi^v, Diii^v, Fiii^v; HM, pp. 291, 301, 310). Likewise, stonyheartedness is the condition Parr first reprehends in herself, later pinpoints as the source of the world's disregard of Christ, and still later makes the focus of a prayer for the efficacy of true ministers of the Word (Lamentacion, sigs. Aii^r, Avii^r, Dv^r; HM, pp. 289, 291, 302).

Except for scattered local antitheses, a few topic-image pairings, and the gradual replacement of private and individual concerns by more general and social ones, the overall sense of structure conveyed by the Lamentation is that of serialism. One thing simply follows another. In comparison with the Enchiridion's scalar movement, the Lamentation may seem uncontrolled, rhetorically inept. Yet if we project Barbara Lewalski's account of the defining features of “Protestant emblematics” backwards a century, Katherine Parr will show as a formative Protestant writer both in the larger assemblage of her work and in her handling of such topic-image pairings as that of the stony heart. Regarding “larger structural features,” Lewalski notes that Protestant revisions of Catholic sequences work “in the direction of randomness” to provide a model of the Christian life “as an irregular, episodic sequence of graces and temptations, successes and failures, rather than an ordered progress by set stages to spiritual perfection.” In Protestant representations of the heart, “the special feature,” says Lewalski, “is that God acts powerfully upon the heart—not located within it …, and not in conjunction” with the efforts of the human subject. “The implication is (in accordance with Protestant doctrine) that the renovation of the heart is entirely the work of grace and not a cooperative venture.”¹⁷ This implication is exactly the one Parr reaches in the last of her three uses of the image of the stony heart in the Lamentation.

The theological divide between Parr and Erasmus also produces marked differences of expression at the level of the sentence. According to Erasmus, the supreme value of Scripture is attested in two mutually reinforcing domains. In the human realm, Scripture draws validation from the weight of the Church's witness over centuries. In the natural realm, Scripture evinces a truth and wisdom that are fully consonant with nature and finally superior to it. This cumulative sense—of the plenitude of divine revelation, of so great a cloud of witnesses—finds cumulative form in the balances and suspensions of a single Latin period, which Coverdale sensitively rendered as follows in his vernacular abridgment of the Enchiridion:

The first rule must be, that we so judge both of Christ and of his holy scripture, that we be sure, how that it greatly perteyneth to oure health, and that though al the world be against it, yet nothing that we perceave with oure natural senses is or can be so true, as it that is red in the scripture, enspyred of god himselfe, brought forth by so many prophetes, approved with the bloude of so many martirs, with the consent of all good men so many hundredth yeares, with the doctryne and life of Christ himself, with so many miracles, & c.: Which scripture is so agreable to the equite of nature, and every where so like it selfe, so raviseth, moveth, and altreth the myndes of them that take hede therunto, yea, and telleth of so many great, wonderful and true thinges, that yf we oft considre the same, it shall stere us up unto more ferventnesse both of faith, praier, and vertue, beyng sure, that as the rewarde of vice and of these momentany pleasures is both vexacion of mynde and eternall punishment, so unto good men shalbe geven an hundred folde joye of a pure conscience, and finally everlasting life.¹⁸

By contrast, Parr's scripturalism manifests itself as an immediate and subjective response, the first impulsion of her soul under justifying faith. Accordingly, she couches her testimony to the supreme value of Scripture in the ejaculatory, antithetical, and parallel constructions whose chief precedents lie in the Pauline epistles. As in Paul, so too in Parr, ejaculation and antithesis register the oscillations of gospel and law, of divine grace and human effort, that confound the sinner. Then, stabilizing the movement of the prose with their formal responsions, the parallelisms herald the assurance that accompanies true faith.

I knowe O my lorde, thy eyes looke upon my fayth: Saynt Paule sayeth, we be justified by the fayth in Christe, and not by the deades of the lawe. For, if rightwisenes cum by the lawe, then Christ died in vayne. S. Paule meaneth not here, a dead, humain, historicall fayth, gotten by humain industrie, but a supernall livelye fayth, which worketh by charitie, as he himselfe plainlye expresseth.	Justification by a Christian faythe. Roma. iii. Galat. ii.
	Galat. v.
By this fayth I am assured: and by thys assurance, I fele the remission of my sinnes: this it is that maketh me bold, this it is that conforteth me, this it is that quencheth all dispayre.	Lerne what true fayth doth in man. Ose. ii. Ephe. ii. Rom. v. Galat. iii
(Lamentacion, Biiir-v, Bvr; HM, pp. 293-95)

II

Since close examination shows Parr's Lamentation diverging markedly from basic Erasmian features of thought and composition, a search for possible models must turn elsewhere. Given the very close thematic and tonal consonances between the reflections on justifying faith in the opening section of the Lamentation and Tyndale's repeated treatments of the same subject, it is not surprising to find other stylistic and formal correspondences between the two. It may, however, seem surprising that Henry's last queen would show any authorial affinities to a man who had been arrested and burned as a heretic with Henry's complicity. Events in the intervening decade—1536-46—indicate how this could come about. Within months of Tyndale's burning in 1536, Cromwell and Cranmer persuaded the king to confirm his independence of Rome and to bolster his popularity in the realm by reversing his previous stand and authorizing a vernacular English Bible (mostly Tyndale's work, although this fact was downplayed with Henry for obvious tactical reasons).¹⁹ Henry's authorization opened the way for cautious maneuvering to credit Tyndale as the chief exponent of the earliest phase of English Protestantism, and by 1545 these maneuvers were on their way to success. Thus it is that Parr's distinction between “a dead, humain, historicall fayth” and “a supernall livelye fayth” leads clearly back toward Galatians by way of Tyndale's excursus on “historical” versus “feeling” faith in his Answer to More.²⁰ Parr's preferences, moreover, in her profuse citations from Scripture reveal a systematic likeness to Tyndale's: the Pauline epistles and the Gospels generally; more particularly, Matthew and the first epistle of John, two texts for which Tyndale had provided detailed expositions. Together with the fundamental Pauline content of Protestantism, Parr assimilated the dynamics of Tyndalian style. I have discussed in detail elsewhere the nervous, antithetical rhythms and the recursions that produce the clausal parallelisms and heaping catalogs so characteristic of Tyndale's prose.²¹ I shall not repeat myself, but instead offer a typical instance of how similarly Tyndale and Parr could style their writing on a shared theme. More than any other, the theme in question for them here—the relation of faith and works in the true reception of the Gospel—would continue to engross the constructive efforts of English theologians throughout the era of the Reformation. Here, first, is Tyndale in his Prologue to Romans:

Where the worde of God is preached purely, and received in the hart, there is faith, the spirit of God, & there also good workes of necessitie, whensoever occasion is geven. Where Gods word is not purely preached, but mens dreames, traditions, imaginations, inventions, ceremonies, & superstition, there is no faith, and consequently no spirite that commeth of God. And where Gods spirite is not, there can bee no good workes, even as where an apple tree is not, there can grow no apples, but there is unbeliefe, the divels sprite, and evill workes. Of this, Gods sprite and hys fruites, have our holy hipocrites not once knowen, neither yet tasted how swete they are, though they fayne many good workes of their own imagination to be justified withal, in which is not one cromme of true fayth, of spiritual love, or of inward joy, peace, and quietnes of conscience: for as much as they have not the worde of God for them, that such workes please God, but they are even the rotten fruites of a rotten tree.22

Where true fayth is, there are good workes.

Where fayth lacketh, there is all evill workes.

And here is Parr, in one of the socially oriented passages late in the Lamentation:

It may be seene how the worde of God is evill spoken of through licencious and evil living: and yet the worde of God is all holye, pure, sincere, and godlye, beyng the doctryne and occasion of al holie and pure living: It is the wicked that perverteth all good thinges, into evill, for an evil tree can not bring furth good fruite. And when good seed is sowen in a barreyne and evil grounde, it yeldeth no good corne, and so it fareth by the word of god: For when it is heard, and knowen of wicked men, it bringeth furth no good fruit: but when it is sowen in good ground, I meane the hartes of good people, it bringeth furthe good fruite aboundantlye: so that the want & faute is in men, and not in the worde of god. I praye god al men & women may have grace to becum meete tillage for the fruites of the gospell, and to leave onelye the jangling of it. … For onlye speaking of the gospel maketh not men good christians, but good talkers, except theyr factes and workes agree with the same: so then theyr speche is good, because theyre hertes be good.	Evil lyving slaundereth the best profession. Psal. xii.
	Math. vii. A similitude. Math. xiii. Applicacion.
	Prayer.
	Math. xii.
(Lamentacion, sigs. Fiv-Fiiv; HM, p. 308)

At the level of overall form, it is historically as well as literarily suggestive that Parr's Lamentation bears more resemblance to Tyndale's Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) than to any other prose tract I know from the period. The Obedience was the one work of Tyndale's that reportedly “delighted” Henry VIII when he read the first edition at Anne Boleyn's prompting.²³ The Obedience opens with a long, personal, urgently affective preface in which Tyndale exhorts his readers to be steadfast and ready to suffer for free access to the Word of life, the promises of the Gospel, in their own tongue. A much briefer prologue then modulates between personal and social concerns by reflecting that God turns the abuse of temporal power to his own ends, trying the constancy of true believers and exposing hypocrites. The extended body of the work follows. Deploying the categories of the Pauline epistles—rulers and people, clergy and laity, husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants—across the spectrum of Tudor society, Tyndale purports to develop a full account of Christian social obligation. The account becomes all the fuller as polemical and theological digressions swell the the main discussion.

A fluid tripartite movement also characterizes Parr's Lamentation. The work opens with an account of her conversion experience which is at once highly analytical and yet devoid of autobiographical specificity. Moralized commonplaces of faculty psychology—blind reason, wayward will, vain imaginations—lend a generic cast to Parr's evocation of her own subjectivity. At this precarious point, the inception of discourse, the genderlessness of the self-presentation bespeaks neither cowardice nor cooptation by male norms. Instead, the combination of universalism and personalism that energized early Protestants—the conviction that all souls are equal before God and that every soul is individually accountable to God—empowers Katherine to conceive herself as a subject for discourse on these common grounds. Such (as mine is), she implies, is the human soul. First she reprehends and confesses her sinfulness; then she evokes her struggles with justifying faith, which came home to her at last through her personal apprehension of the theology of the Passion. The middle section of the Lamentation expatiates on this theology, which is central to her religious outlook. Parr daringly appropriates devotional terminology for doctrinal purposes as she focuses on what she calls “the booke of the crucifixe.” As she works her way toward the introduction of this term, she makes clear that her “crucifix” is not a physical object. Rather, it is a lively image which the inward eye of the Christian is enabled to see through knowledge of the Gospel as characterized by Paul in I Corinthians 2:2: “I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” Echoing the early Reformers' optimism about Bible reading by the laity, Parr outgoes Paul in her reiterated “booke” metaphor, her means for impressing upon her reader the accessibility of this knowledge of Christ. But like Tyndale, she ultimately returns her emphasis to Paul and to the feeling faith without which even the book of Scripture will remain a dead letter.

Inwardlie to beholde Christ crucified upon the crosse, is the best and goodliest meditacion that can be. … Then we shall see our owne crueltie, when we feele hys mercy: our owne unrightwisenes and iniquitie, when we see his rightwisenes and holynes. Therefore to learne to knowe truly our owne sinnes, is to study in the booke of the crucifixe by continuall conversacion in fayth.	A christian mans booke.
This crucifix is the booke, wherein God hathe included all thinges, & hath most compendiously written therein all truth profitable and necessarye for our salvacion.	Lessons of the Crucifixe. i. Cor. ii.
And that this is true, is evident and cleare, bicause the verie true Christian is a Christian by Christe. And the true Christian feeleth inwardlye, by Christ. … The true Christian, by Christe, is disburdened from the servitude of the lawe, having the lawe of grace (graven by the Spirite) inhabiting his hart.	ii. Cor. iiii.
	Rom. vii.
(Lamentacion, sigs. Bviiv-Bviiir, Cir, Ciir-v, Diiir; HM, pp. 295-96, 297, 300)

The Lamentation's final section extends the lessons and truths of the “booke” of the crucifix into the domain of communal Christian behavior and daily social life. Parr's treatment here reflects the social optimism that characterizes early English Reformers until the accession of Mary Tudor: the polity itself is sound in its order, but occupants of specific positions within it stand in need of moral renewal, a livelier sense of responsibility for the welfare of fellow subjects and souls. Two categories of persons come in for Parr's reprehension, but she interestingly specifies no social positions for them: they are denominated only in Tyndalian terms as “wekelinges” and “carnall gospellers,” timid or time-serving souls who deter the establishment of true Protestantism in the realm. By contrast, those whom she commends are “children,” “servauntes,” “housbandes,” and “wyves” who attend to their respective callings. This final section ends with a summons to general amendment of life, reinforced with a sobering, heavily scriptural evocation of the Second Coming.

The affinities displayed in the tripartite structure of Tyndale's Obedience and Parr's Lamentation are reinforced by others at the local level of composition. The largely unpredictable serialism of both works marks them with the distinctively Protestant irregularity of design that Lewalski has identified for a later period. To organize smaller units of discourse within this open design, Parr employs strategies that Tyndale had adapted to English Protestant use from scholastic methods for disputation and scriptural exposition. Amid the welter of scriptural citations and the runs of miscellaneous headings in the margins of both works, a class of rubrics serves to point up discursive tactics and sectarian implications from time to time.²⁴ Examples in Tyndale include “An apte similitude,” “Contrary preachyng, contrary Doctours,” “A compendious rehearsall of that which goeth before” (Whole Workes, fols. 102, 109, 178; PS 43:149, 174, 331). Comparable headings in Parr read: “A similitude. Applicacion of the similitude,” “Good latinistes and evil divines,” “A conclusion with an answere to objections” (Lamentacion, sigs. Biiii^r-v, Ciiii^v-Cv^r, Fiiii^r, Giii^r; HM, pp. 298, 309, 312).

III

While considerably more pertinent than Erasmus's Enchiridion, Tyndale's Obedience proves far from an exhaustive model of composition for Parr. Time and again her Lamentation takes leave of Tyndalian disputation and scriptural exposition to range into doctrinal articulation, prayer, self-reprehension, moral fervor, and formal complaint. Parr's polyphony makes her voice much more varied than Tyndale's. If certain twentieth-century feminist theorists are correct, the best achievements of women writers will assume the form of “antiphonal, many-voiced works,” a form that resists the demure silence or the male-dominant norms of expression to which female gender and authorship have historically been assimilated.²⁵ Yet Parr's case itself resists easy accommodation either to this contemporary feminist outlook or to Harold Bloom's widely espoused theory of literary history since the Renaissance as a (male) succession in which predecessors and models repeatedly trigger among later writers “the anxiety of influence” and a conflictual stance.²⁶ In the late Henrician court where the Lamentation emerges as a unique production by a female author, such polyphony as Parr achieved appears to have been fostered rather than hindered by close association with two authoritative and authoring males—the leading Protestant clerics Cranmer and Latimer. At this point, before considering textual ramifications of Parr's personal acquaintance with these two men, it is useful to follow Natalie Davis in noting contextual factors that bear upon Parr's authorship.

Although the Lamentation was first published nine months after Henry VIII's death, in November of 1547, it seems that the queen circulated her manuscript earlier among some members of the innermost court circle. Anthony Martienssen, Parr's recent biographer, notes an ostensible reference to a copy of the Lamentation that Sir William Paget, one of Henry's two principal secretaries, sent to Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, the ranking exponent of the old faith in England.²⁷ Always alert to outspoken Protestantism—especially when it issued in “lamentation” critical of the established order—Paget made up a scandalous parcel for Gardiner, who was in Belgium conducting an embassy for the king. In the parcel, it seems, were a manuscript copy of Parr's Lamentation of a Sinner and a copy of Henry Brinkelow's newly printed Lamentation of a Christian against the City of London, made by Roderigo Mors. Gardiner's response to Paget, his coreligionist, in a letter dated 5 November 1545, vents his indignation against Brinkelow's book at some length. He promises to write an invective of his own to answer this invective against the London aldermen for failing to demand that the king do away with bishops. In his remarks on the queen's manuscript, Gardiner's heavy-handed repetitions betray his shock: “Mary, to the booke of Lamentacion which youe sent me, I wyl oonly answer lamentably to youe, and, lamentyng with youe, counforte myself; digesting in thiese letters so moch displeasour as I receyved in reding of this most abhominable booke.”²⁸ Parr's book must indeed have been “abhominable” to Gardiner not only for its credo of justifying faith but also for the scorn it poured on “learned men” who “perswade to the credite and beliefe of certeyne unwritten verities, (as they call theym) whiche be not in scripture expressed, and yet taught as doctryne apostolike, and necessary too be beleved” (Lamentacion, sig. Fiiii^r; HM, p. 309)—the gist of her passage labeled “Good latinistes and evill divines.” Unwritten verities figured centrally in the defense of transsubstantiation that preoccupied Gardiner in the late 1540s and set him in ever more bitter opposition to Cranmer.²⁹ The queen's disparagement declares her no traditionalist but a scripturalist, one of the archbishop's party.

Although we do not know when Katherine Parr underwent the conversion experience on which she reflects to open her Lamentation, situational considerations combine with textual ones to indicate that Cranmer's agency was probably crucial. We know that the queen and the archbishop were brought into close contact after the king decided to conduct the French war in person. Henry appointed Katherine regent during his absence—12 July to 1 October 1544—and Cranmer was assigned to attend constantly upon her (Martienssen, pp. 174, 180, 184). The third contextual factor identified by Davis—“a sense of connection, through some activity or deep concern of her own, with the areas of public life” in question, “namely, the political and the religious”—appears as germane to Parr as to Davis's four early modern women historians. So does Davis's fourth factor, an extension of the third. “This ‘connectedness’ with the issues of public life” gives the prospective woman author confidence to write, confidence that she can find “an audience who will take seriously her publications on these topics.”³⁰ Wielding royal authority in Henry's place must have greatly increased Katherine's self-confidence while also engaging her to the hilt in public life. Her ten-week regency thus appears an important precondition for her finding of authorial voice.

Yet the queen by no means exercised her authorship as compliantly as she did the regency. Henry correctly chose Katherine as the safe vessel of his political concerns. She showed herself able thereafter to steer her own course in religious concerns, to embrace and express convictions opposed to his own (though not to publish them until after Henry's death). Chief among these is the tenet of justifying faith, so dear to the earliest English Protestants. One notable textual link with the queen's personal contacts during the period when she was at work on the Lamentation can be traced in her excursus on justifying faith, a passage that bears the stamp of Cranmer's thought and style alike. Here is Cranmer in the Homily of Salvation, which first appeared in print in July 1547:

Thys sentence: that we be justifyed by faythe onely, is not so meant … that we shoulde or myghte … be justified wythoute our good workes, that we should do noo good woorks at all. … Trueth it is, that our owne workes do not justifye us, to speake properlye of our justifycation. … Nevertheles, because fayth doth directly send us to Chryst for remission of our synnes, and that by fayth geven us of God we embrase the promyse of gods mercy, and of the remission of our synnes (whyche thing none other of oure vertues or workes properly doeth): therefore Scripture useth to say, that faith … doeth justyfye. … But that we be justifyed by faith onelye, freely and without workes: is spoken for to take away clearely all meryte of our workes, … and therby wholly to ascribe the merite and deserving of our justification, unto Christ onely, and his most precious bloud shedynge.31

Fayth alone, howe it is to be understand.

As Cranmer's thought threads its way through antitheses laden with predicate complements (“not so meant … that we shoulde or myghte … be justified wythoute our good workes,” “do not justifye us, to speake properlye of our justifycation,” “But that … is spoken for to take away clearely all meryte of our workes”), he locates the domain of justifying faith between two extremes: antinomianism, with its disdain for good works, and the works-religion that Protestants decried in Catholic doctrine and practice. In addition Cranmer's procedure is punctiliously analytic—that is, definitional—with respect to basic terms: faith, justification, remission, merit. When Parr in her Lamentation likewise undertakes to articulate justifying faith, her predicates evince the antithetical weighting of Cranmer's as they thread their way between the same extremes of antinomianism and works-religion (“is no dirogacion … for oute of this fayth springeth … yet we may not impute … : but ascribe and geve”). Her technical vocabulary and her penchant for doublings (“ascribe and geve,” “referre and attrybute,” “knowlege and perceyvyng,” “very true onlye propertie”) also reflect Cranmer's characteristic means for exact and exhaustive expression. His sonorous redundancies find an echo here in Parr's prose:

This dignitie of fayth is no dirogacion to good workes, for oute of this fayth springeth all good workes, yet we may not impute to the worthines of fayth or workes, our Justificacion before god: but ascribe and geve the worthynes of it, wholy to the merites of Christes passion, and referre and attrybute the knowlege and perceyvyng therof, onely to fayth: whose very true onlye propertie, is to take, apprehende and holde fast the promyses of goddes mercie, the whiche maketh us rightwise.	Dignitie of fayth hurteth no workes.
	Marke diligently without offence.
	Roma. iii. Roma. v.
(Lamentacion, sig. Biiiir-v; HM, p. 294)

Apart from this crucial excursus, however, Parr's voice in the Lamentation owes more to the liturgical than the doctrinal Cranmer. Each of the collectlike prayers inserted at intervals in her text recalls Cranmer's mastery in this form.³² Parr works with sureness in assembling the various elements—a vocative or “naming” noun phrase, followed by verb phrases of petition or thanksgiving with their associated complements and then by a final ascription or “renaming”—that fill the “subject” and “predicate” positions of a collect sentence. She also proves an attentive student of the chief syntactic devices used by Cranmer to spread and endow with nuance the capacious single sentence that compromises a collect. Thus in the example below, she emulates Cranmer's characteristic circularity of form and reference (“I shall pray to the lorde … that we may serve the lorde”). At the same time Parr's “that” clauses sustain the rich ambiguities between purpose and result on which Cranmer often plays to evoke the conformity of human will and action with the divine:

I shall praye to the lorde, to take all contencion, & strife away, that the sowers of sedition, may have mynde to cease their labour, or to sowe it amongst the stones: & to have grace, to sowe gratious vertues, where they may both roote and bring furth fruite: with sending also of a godlie unitie, and concord amongest al Chrystens, that we may serve the lorde, in trewe holynes of life.	Prayer.
	Luke i.
(Lamentacion, sig. Dvr; HM, p. 302)

IV

If Katherine Parr took Cranmer as a model for certain formulary dimensions—both doctrinal and liturgical—in her work, she found something quite different and even more essential to her authorial purposes in the homiletics of Latimer. As a vocal and highly respected public figure, he provided an illustrious contemporary precedent for the strains of introspection and social morality that mingle in the Lamentation. We know that Latimer served as one of the Lenten instructors retained by Katherine in 1546 to expound the Gospels to her and her ladies-in-waiting every afternoon (Martienssen, p. 208). Perhaps she had become personally acquainted with him at an earlier point, for one of her closest friends since girlhood—Catherine Brandon, the intrepidly Protestant duchess of Suffolk—was Latimer's chief patron. Although it makes no mention of Latimer, the title page of the first edition of the Lamentation carries an aura of Latimerian association in its reference to “the instaunt desire of the righte gracious ladie Caterin Duchesse of Suffolke” to see this text “set furth and put in print.”

Parr's text bears out Latimer's precedent more than anyone else's at crucial junctures of its production. She appears to draw much of her initial warrant as well as her ongoing stimulus for authorship from the self-referential mode so conspicuous in his preaching. Consciously universalizing in its terms and appeal, this Latimerian strategy aims to project the speaker's Protestant identity through avowals of personal failings and personal commitments which are figured, in turn, as responses to the impact of Scripture on experience. Here, for example, are the reflections that open Latimer's best known work, the Sermon of the Plough: “This is one of the places that hath bene racked, as I told you of rackyng scriptures. And I have bene one of them my self, that hath racked, I cry God mercy for it.”³³ Elsewhere, in the third of the famous series of sermons delivered at court in 1549 before the boy king Edward, Latimer jestingly repels charges, old and new, that he has been guilty of seditious preaching. Then, suddenly striking a serious note, he confesses that he has been guilty in the past with regard to his calling in a very different way: “I remember how scrupulous I was in my time of blindnes and ignorauncie, when I should say Masse, I have put in water twise or thrise …, fearyng that I had not put in water inough.” The marginal heading reinforces the self-accusation: “M. Latimer was somthyng scrupulous, when hee was a Masse sayer” (Frutefull Sermons, fol. 43^r-v; PS 27:138).

Latimer's penchant for reproaching himself before reprehending others finds a continuing analogue in Parr's Lamentation. This self-effacing path to authorship, while ultimately Pauline, also allowed for contemporary access by a woman as well as a man, when both, in “feeling faith” as Protestants, knew themselves sinners personally accountable to God. In the opening section Parr's efforts to establish her subject and herself as the speaker of her text move toward expression through self-reprehension. Before that point is reached, however, a suggestive grammatical detail intervenes. Parr's access to self-reference and self-representation, the “I” of her text, is specified as opening by way of another human, some generic “he,” who sets an example for her. “Who is he,” she asks, “that is not forced to confesse … if he consyder what he hath receyved of god, and dothe dayly receyve?” She then continues,

Trulye I am constrayned & forced to speake & write thereof to mine own confusion and shame: but to the greate glorye, and prayse of god.
I woulde not cum unto him, but hyd my selfe out of his sight, seking many crooked & bye wayes, wherin I walked so longe, that I had cleane loste his sight. And noo marvayle or woundre, for I had a blynde guide called Ignoraunce, who dimmed so mine eyes, that … I coulde not thinke, but that I walked in the perfect and right way.	A blind guide for a blind way.
I woulde not learne to knowe the lord and hys wayes. But loved darkenes better then light: yea, darknes semed to me, light. I embraced ignorance, as perfecte knowlege, & knowlege seemed to me superfluous & vayne. I regarded little goddes worde, … & followed the vayne folishe imaginacions of my hert. I would have covered my sinnes with the pretence of holynes: I called supersticion godlye meaning, and true holynes, erroure.	Jhon iii.
	The jugement of man is corrupt in all thinges.
(Lamentacion, sigs. Aiir-Aiiiv; HM, pp. 289-90)

This vocabulary of superstition, crooked byways, blindness, and ignorance as well as the capsule allegory of a blind guide called Ignorance strongly point toward Latimer as the author who sets the course for Parr in voicing her Lamentation. Yet it is not long before limitations on the usability of a Latimerian model also begin to show in Parr's text. These lead us back to manifest social and gender differences. Certain of Latimer's most characteristic strains—his indulgence in autobiographical digressions, his frank delight in his reputation for earthy utterance, his topical innuendos regarding the mighty of the realm, his sharp assertions of his pastoral authority³⁴—have no analogue whatever in Parr's voice. Largely because of his outspokenness, in the plainest English, about Gospel imperatives for England in the here and now, Latimer became the most famous preacher of his age. For him, it proved feasible if intermittently risky to be a succès de scandale. Even when he opposed the Six Articles in the turbulent 1540s, he met no worse fate than revocation of his preaching license and confinement to private life in Warwickshire on a comfortable pension from the crown. Nor was Latimer the only male author to give voice in outspoken Protestantism during Henry's last years. Brinkelow—the author paired with Parr in Paget's parcel—was concurrently employing Tyndalian rhetoric to denounce Gardiner and other public figures by name as corrupt wordlings, in The Complaint of Roderick Mors (after 1542) and The Lamentacion of a Christian against the City of London, made by Roderigo Mors (1545).³⁵ By contrast, when she undertook to write her Lamentation of a Sinner, Queen Katherine Parr held a position so much more contingent and precarious than these men that the question of how she was able to sustain her voice as a Protestant author at all returns with new force.

V

At no point in her life or authorship, least of all between 1545 and 1547, were the prerogatives of a ranking male cleric open to Katherine, either for denouncing prominent sins and sinners or for braving down a charge of sedition with a jest. A fuller glance at her situation in the spring of 1546, when Latimer was instructing her in the Gospel, will confirm the point. This same spring saw the beginning of a plot to dethrone Katherine, which Gardiner masterminded, playing on certain signs of the king's exasperation with his intelligent and now zealously Protestant wife. The queen was to be discredited with Henry. She would be exposed as a presumptuous meddler with his authority and, worse yet, an adherent of a religion that “did not onely disallow and dissolve the policie and politicke governement of Princes, but also taught the people that all thynges ought to be in common.”³⁶ To this end, the Gardiner faction engineered the second arrest and interrogation of another longtime friend of Parr's, the brilliantly self-possessed Anne Askew. Renegade enough in having left her two children and her uncongenial husband, Askew had also studied on her own and become learned in the Bible. Her studies led her to repudiate transubstantiation as unscriptural and to express openly memorialist beliefs about Holy Communion. Since she had been in trouble with the authorities about her religious convictions only a year before, Anne fell under suspicion as the likely purveyor of incriminating books found in the queen's chamber. Perhaps she could be made to confess things that would bring down Queen Katherine. Anne was accordingly taken back into custody, where highly placed officials racked her with their own hands. All was to no avail so far as evidence for Gardiner's plot against Katherine went. What Anne did say, however, ensured that she would shortly die at the stake as a heretic.³⁷ For her part, the quick-witted Katherine reingratiated herself with Henry by volunteering her utter submission to his will before she was ever formally accused.³⁸

Here context throws light on a differentiation that cuts across gender to distinguish Anne from Katherine, the defiant from the compliant female, the silenced woman from the one who somehow sustained voice. Parr's text renders that “somehow” historically specific and readable. As the Lamentation gains momentum after its launching in Latimerian self-reproach, Parr undertakes by degrees, at selected junctures, to feminize her voice in keeping with her position as Henry's queen. In so doing, she marks her distance from the species of inflammatory Protestant rhetoric practiced by Brinkelow and Askew, and she also sets limits on Latimer's usefulness to her as a model. Unlike “Roderick Mors,” Parr will not name names in seeking to advance the Gospel by her mode of lamentation. Nor will she arrogate final authority to herself under her new faith, as Anne had done. A probable allusion to Anne begins in sympathy for those who are “moste cruellie persecuted” when they set themselves “contrarie” to “pastoures … so blynded wyth the love of theymselves, and the worlde, that they extol mens invencions and doctrines, before the doctrine of the gospell” although “they be not able to maintayne theyr owne invencions and doctrines, with any jot of the scrypture.” “Is not this miserable state,” asks Parr, “muche to be lamented of all good christians?” But she proceeds to distance herself from the derisive exposing of error that Askew takes satisfaction in practicing in her Examinations. “Yet I can not allow, neyther prayse al kynd of lamentacion,” says Parr, “but suche as maye stande with Christian charitie” (Lamentacion, sigs. Ei^v-Eii^r; HM, p. 304). The conception Katherine voices of her own primary “vocacyon” even as queen—that of “women maryed”—is as conformably Pauline in its content as in its style: “Not beyng accusers, or detractours, … they teache honest thinges, to make the yong women sobre minded, to love theyr housbandes, to love theyr children, to be discrete, chast, huswiflye, good, & obedient unto theyr housbandes, that the worde of god be not evil spoken of” (Lamentacion, sig. Gii^r; HM, p. 311).

As a result of Parr's distinct if subtle feminization of her voice, ongoing connections between Latimer's homiletics and the Lamentation focus the question of how the factor of gender will be accommodated. Her text, in fact, shows gender to be a variable: a difference that may or may not figure within the universalism and personalism of early English Protestantism. Thus, the prayers with which Parr recurrently climaxes and offsets the plaintive movements of the Lamentation can draw validation, if they need to, from Latimer's pronouncement on the “sacrifice of prayer”: “this sacrifice a woman can offer as well as a man” (Frutefull Sermons, fol. 57^v; PS 27:167). But what Latimer says in the passage that follows this pronouncement is even more comprehensively suggestive regarding Parr's disposition of tones and themes in the Lamentation. He declares of prayer, “So, to make an end: This must be done with a constant fayth, and a sure confidence in Christ,” and then appends this characteristic capsule allegory:

This fayth is a great state, a lady, a Dutches, a great woman, and she hath ever a great company and traine about her (as a noble estate ought to have). First, she hath a gentleman Usher that goeth before her, and where he is not, there is not Lady fayth. This gentleman Usher is called Agnitio peccatorum, knowledge of sinne, when we enter into our hart, and acknowledge our faultes, and stand not about to defend them. … Now, as the Gentleman Usher goeth before her, so she hath a traine that commeth behinde her, and yet though they come behinde, they be all of Faythes company, … and those be the workes … when every man considereth what vocation he is in, … and doth the workes of the same, as to be good to his neighbour, to obey God, & c. This is the trayne that foloweth Lady Fayth: as for an example: A faythfull Judge hath first an heavy reckoning of hys fault, repenting him self of his wickednes, & then forsaketh his iniquitie, his impiety, feareth no man, walkes upright, and he that doth not thus, hath not Lady Fayth, but rather a boldnes of sinne, and abusing of Christes passion.	Faith is a great state and a Dutches.
	Knowledge of sinne is gentleman Usher to Lady Fayth.
(Frutefull Sermons, fol. 58r; PS 27:168-69)

Admittedly, the historical personage evoked and complimented in Latimer's allegory of Lady Faith is not Katherine Parr but, rather, her close friend Catherine Brandon, Latimer's patron. Yet, thanks to the modulations of Latimer's imagery to include both genders, the authorial Katherine Parr can be identified with the “faythfull Judge,” one who follows or has Lady Faith. Such a one “hath first an heavy reckoning of hys fault, repenting him self of his wickednes, & then forsaketh his iniquitie, his impiety, feareth no man, walkes upright.” It is remarkable how exactly this sequence—from faith through repentance to upright works—patterns the overall movement and scope of Parr's Lamentation.

As her title and subtitle declare and reinforce, the genre of her work is a “lamentacion or complaynte” (Lamentacion, sig. Ai^r).³⁹ The text confirms this generic assignment at the repeated junctures where Parr at once renews her voice and takes a new subject. Thus her transition from confession of sin to repentance in faith is signaled by the marginal rubric, “Lamentacion,” and begins thus: “What cause nowe have I to lament, mourne, sigh, & wepe for my life, & tyme so evil spent?” (Lamentacion, sig. Aviii^v; HM, p. 292). Later, striving to give force to the theology of the Passion which occupies her “booke of the crucifixe” section, Parr renews her mode of lamentation through another recourse to Latimerian self-reproach. All the while, however, she sustains a measure of distance from Latimer in her characteristically unspecific first-person utterances and in the recognizably feminine connotations that she draws from biblical imagery to attach to herself (here, the pliable clay being molded into a vessel by the potter's hand).

I certeynlye never knewe myne owne miseries, and wretchednes so wel, by booke, admonicion, or learnynge, as I have doen by lokyng into the spirituall booke of the crucifix. I lamente muche I have passed so manye yeares, not regardyng that divine booke. … I never knew myne owne wyckednes, neyther lamented for my synnes truly, untill the tyme God inspired me with his grace, that I looked in this booke. Then I beganne to see perfectly, that … I was in the Lordes hande, even as the cleye, is in the potters hande: then I began to crye, and saye: Alas lorde.	The booke of the crucifixe.
	The first lesson in the booke.
	Hie. xviii. A christien complaynt.
(Lamentacion, sigs. Diiv-Diiiv; HM, p. 301)

As noted earlier, this central section, which elaborates the metaphor of the “booke of the crucifixe,” is one of the most striking in the Lamentation. Here we are brought to the heart of Katherine Parr's theology. Especially notable is the avoidance of any reference to liturgical images, the roods and crucifixes to which Henry had so deep an attachment, or to the Sacrament of the Body and Blood, a prescribed understanding of which in those years was literally a burning issue. While Katherine was working on her Lamentation, the martyrdom of Anne Askew came as a horrific reminder of the consequences of declaring publicly against the corporeal real presence in the Sacrament. The queen rejected for herself the voice and authorship of sorts that Anne found through defiance and revolt. Yet Katherine did not pass in silence over the currently dangerous subject of how the faithful receive Christ to themselves. For her, the Passion becomes the vital meeting point of private religious feeling and public enactment, or, more simply, of the faith and works that English Protestants remained so intent on uniting. Drawing on Pauline sources, Parr urges that the mystery of receiving and being received into Christ's body be taken to signify affective incorporation in the community of true Christians. The transitivity of her syntax in a key passage enacts what she seeks to elicit, a sense of divine love made so apprehensible in human form as to inspire humans to embody that love in their lives and institutions.

The sincere, and pure lovers of god, doo embrace Christe, with such fervencie of spirit, that … they knowe by their fayth they are members al of one bodie, and that they have possessed al one God, one fayth, one baptisme, one joie, and one salvacion.	True christians. Ro. xii. i. Cor. xii. Eph. iiii.
Lamentacion, sig. Dvr; HM, p. 302)

To crown her presentation of a nonliturgical, nonsacramental, yet fully scriptural theology of the Passion as the core of her understanding of true Christianity, Parr proposes to identify communion with Christ as the communion of those who have become “members al of one bodie” by embracing Christ through justifying faith. In 1545-46, when eucharistic controversy abounded, this was a constructive achievement without analogue among English writers. Its singularity may be the result of universalism and personalism conceived specifically by a woman—that is, from a necessarily lay perspective on the institutionalizing of participatory religion. In Parr's conception of Christian communion, the private domain of affectivity and the one public domain—worship—open equally to men and women merge in a spiritual vision of the harmonious English body politic and ecclesiastic that finds more earthbound expression in the social programs and preaching of Latimer and other so-called commonwealth men.⁴⁰

VI

At the transition from the “booke of the crucifixe” section to the socially oriented final section of the Lamentation, Parr's vocabulary of lament again takes an expressly Latimerian turn: “It is muche to be lamented, the … contencions, and disputacions, that have ben, and are in the worlde aboute Christen religion, & no agremente, nor concord of the same, amongest the learned men. Treuly the devell hath ben the sower of the seede of sedicion, and shalbe the maynteyner of it, even tyl Gods wyll be fulfylled” (Lamentacion, sig. Dvii^r-v; HM, p. 303). At this point also, reverberations arise from the historical context to reinforce the continuity, within Parr's text, both of her concerns as queen and author and of her relations with Latimer. Early in the Lenten season in which Latimer instructed her, the queen received a letter from Sir Thomas Smith, Regius Professor of Civil Law, on behalf of Cambridge University. Smith appealed to the queen for help in preventing the king and his agents from exercising newly legislated powers of confiscation against the university's buildings and lands. Katherine's letter of reply (26 February 1546) urges her view that Cambridge must use its “sundry gifts, arts, and studies … as means and apt degrees to the attaining and setting forth the better Christ's reverend and most sacred doctrine, that it may not be laid in evidence against you at the tribunal seat of God how ye were ashamed of Christ's doctrine. For this Latin lesson I am taught to say by Saint Paul, Non me pudet evangelii.” Only after stressing that human learning exists to serve and advance knowledge of the Gospel does Katherine announce the results of her intercession with Henry. The king has, she reports, reaffirmed his intention of being “a patron of good learning” who “will rather advance and erect new occasion therefor, than confound those your colleges.”⁴¹ The absolute priority set by Parr, in this letter and in the final section of the Lamentation, on the use of human learning to disseminate the Gospel is likely to owe its force if not its exact formulation to the teaching of Latimer.

One of the most persistent concerns in Latimer's extant sermons is the need for doctrinally sound, personally committed ministers of the Gospel to combat superstition, ignorance, and a host of social abuses in England. This need not only figures centrally in the Sermon of the Plough, but was a major theme as early as his two-part Convocation sermon of 1538 on a portion of Luke 16:8: “The children of darkness are wiser in their generation than the children of light.” In this sermon to the clergy themselves, Latimer spoke with characteristic plainness.

Nay, this greeved Christ, that the children of this world should be of more pollicye then the children of light; which thing was true in Christes time, and now in our time is most true. … Among the Lay people the world ceaseth not to bring to passe, that as they be called wordly, so they are worldly indeede, driven hedlong by worldly desires. … In the Clergy, the world also hath learned a way, to make of men spirituall, worldlinges, … where with great pretence of holiness, and crafty colour of religion, they utterly desire to hyde and cloke the name of the world.

The children of this world ar of more pollicy, then the children of light.

(Frutefull Sermons, fols. 4v, 5v; PS 27:41, 43)

This Latimerian topicality, which construes Luke 16:8 as an indictment of England's worldly and otherwise unreformed clergy, is picked up and reechoed by Parr in the last section of the Lamentation. But she stops short of proposals for institutional reform, contenting herself with decrying abuses and promoting godly uses of learning. Since Latimer's position as a cleric admonishing fellow clerics is barred to her, her own reprehensions remain more general and oblique than his while nonetheless developing out of the very text of his Convocation sermon:

I suppose there was never more nede of good doctryne to be set furth in the worlde, then nowe in thys age: for the carnall children of Adam be so wise in theyr generacion that, yf it were possible, they would deceyve the chyldren of lyght.	This age requyreth lernyng. Worldly children.
It wer al our partes and duties, to procure and seeke all the wayes and meanes possyble, to have more knowlege of goddes wordes, set furthe abrode in the worlde, and not allowe Ignoraunce, and discommende knowledge of gods woorde, stopping the mouthes of the unlearned, with suttle and crafty perswasions of Philosophie, and Sophistrie, wherof commeth no fruite, but a greate perturbacion of the mynde, to the simple & ignoraunt, not knowing whiche waye to turne theym.	Knowlege wished against ignoraunce.
The fleshly children of Adam bee so politicke, subtil, craftie, and wise in theyr kynde, that the electe shoulde be illuded if it were possible: for they are clothed with Christes garment, in utter apperaunce, with a fayer shewe of al godlines, and holines in theyre wordes.
(Lamentacion, sigs. Fiiir-Fvv; HM, pp. 308, 309-10)

This critique of abuses of human learning by enemies of true religion modulates into the passage, already noted, where Parr appears to distinguish Askew's self-expression from her own, in terms of an unwarranted and a warranted “kynd of lamentacion, … suche as maye stande with Christian charite” (Lamentacion, sig. Eii^r, HM, p. 304). But it is her conclusion that supplies the lengthiest demonstration of how inseparable for Parr were the rightness of her lamentation and the writing of her Lamentation. While she as a woman can neither legislate nor preach reform, she can make an example of herself as a regenerate sinner through her authorship. By this means, in turn, her voice can and does entreat a serious hearing from others:

God knoweth of what intent and minde I have lamented mine owne sinnes, & fautes to the worlde. I trust no bodye will judge I have doon it for prayse, or thanke of any creature, since rather I might be ashamed then rejoyce, in rehersall therof. For, yf they knewe how little I esteme, and wey the prayse of the worlde, that opinion were soone removed & taken awaie: … for I seeke not the prayses of the same, neither to satisfie it, none other wise, then I am taught by Christ to dooe, according to Christen charitie. I woulde to god we would al (when occasion doth serve) confesse oure faultes to the world, al respectes to oure owne commoditie laied aparte.	Godly wish.
Yf any man shalbe offended, at thys my lamenting the fautes of men, whiche be in the worlde, fantasying with theym selves, that I do it eyther of hatred, or of malice, to any sort of kynde of people: verely, in so doing, they shall dooe me greate wrong: for, I thanke God by hys grace I hate no creature: yea, I woulde saye more to geve witnes of my conscience, that nether life, honour, riches, neyther what soever I possesse here, whiche apperteyneth unto myne owne private commoditie, be it never so deerlie beloved of me, but moste willinglie and gladly I woulde leave it, to winne any manne to Christ, of what degre or sorte, soever he were. And yet is this no thing in comparison to the charitie that God hath shewed me, in sendinge Christe to dye for me: no, yf I had all the charitie of Aungels, and apostles, it shoulde be but like a sparke of fyer compared to a greate heape of burning coles.	A conclusion with an answere to objections.
(Lamentacion, sigs. Giiir-Giiiiv; HM, p. 312)

Manifold implications regarding social, religious, and literary aspects of early English Protestantism arise from the play of contraries in Parr's self-representation and self-realization as an author. On the one hand, her brief early references to her relation to Henry VIII and her later Pauline excursus on wifehood mark her gender and position as conformably feminine. On the other hand, the process of composition also bespeaks a gradually intensifying sense of spiritual authority in the work, however much Parr hedges this in with disclaimers. Thus, in the third and final section, a sentence may begin modestly enough: “Truly in my simple, and unlearned judgement …” But it continues in ringing tones that cast self-effacement behind: “no mannes doctryne is to be estemed or preferred lyke unto Christes and the Apostles, nor to be taughte as a perfect and true doctrine, but even as it doth accorde and agree with the doctrine of the gospell” (Lamentacion, sig. Ei^r-v; HM, p. 304). As the Lamentation draws to a close, Parr's increased self-assurance bespeaks her sense of the measure of power to be wielded in the larger religious and social domains of her time, specifically through authorship.

Yet Parr herself insists that any spiritual authority attaching to her words has no further design or objectification than the book she is writing. “I have, certeynly,” she says, “no curious learning to defende …, but a simple zele, and earnest love to the truth, inspired of god, who promiseth to powre his spirite upon al flesshe: whiche I have by the grace of god (whome I moste humblye honour) felt in my selfe to be true” Lamentacion, sig. Bviii^r-v; HM, p. 295). Here the egalitarian tendencies in early English Protestantism, a strain deeply involved with its scripturalism (“the truth, inspired of god, who promiseth to powre his spirite upon al flesshe”), clearly register their contribution to Katherine Parr's authorship as an effect of God's spirit: “felt in my selfe to be true.”⁴² No less clearly, however, she herself is careful to refer her authorship to a realm where the single, ultimate relation of the soul to God transcends and sets at naught both gender and every other mark of human difference. Overlaying its subtly feminine tones with a prevailing generality and near anonymity of expression, Parr's Lamentation does nothing to impede the program of defusing Protestantism of its radical social potentialities, which was in full career in the England of her day.

However muted the femininity of Parr's voice through long stretches of the Lamentation, her gender does operate authorially nonetheless. At midcentury no less than at the end of it, a low voice was ever an excellent thing in women. It was surely obligatory for keeping one's head as a Henrician queen. As I have shown, femininity circumscribes the public domain within Parr's discourse and screens topicality, polemic, and personality from her text. Only the factor of gender, as conditioned by her experience and activated in her text, is adequate to account for the consistent measure of literary distance between Parr's voice and some of the most characteristic strains in Latimer's preaching, as well as the greater distance of her work from the invective of reformers like Tyndale, Brinkelow, Bale, and others. Paget was seriously mistaken, after all, in thinking to make one parcel for Gardiner of this Lamentation and the Lamentation of a Christian against the City of London. If we are willing to attend with greater sensitivity both to its shared and to its individuating features, we may eventually come to recognize in Parr's Lamentation one of the rarer literary achievements of early English Protestantism.

Notes

1. Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 19-49, reprinted from Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koontz (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), pp. 137-64.

2. Margaret Patterson Hannay, ed., Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985).

3. See The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. Stephen Reed Cattley (London: Seeley & Burnside, 1846), 5:553-61.

4. Both works are in Pollard and Redgrave's Short Title Catalogue (STC), nos. 4818 and 4827 (first editions).

5. C. Fenno Hoffman, Jr., “Catherine Parr as a Woman of Letters,” HLQ 23 (1959): 349-67.

6. See James Kelsey McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 200-234; William P. Haugaard, “Katherine Parr: The Religious Convictions of a Renaissance Queen,” RQ 22 (1979): 346-59; E. J. Devereux, “The Publication of the English Paraphrases of Erasmus,” BJRL 51 (1968-69): 348-67, esp. pp. 354-60; Anthony Martienssen, Queen Katherine Parr (London: Secker & Warburg; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), pp. 1-28, 144-225; and John N. King, “Patronage and Piety: The Influence of Catherine Parr,” in Silent but for the Word, Hanny, pp. 43-60. Elizabeth H. Hageman provides a helpful annotated bibliography as “Part 1: Women Writers, 1485-1603” of “Recent Studies in Women Writers of Tudor England,” ELR 14 (1984): 409-25, esp. p. 414.

7. Laudatory generalities have characterized the small critical notice taken of Parr's Lamentation to date. Conyers Read, in Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955), p. 40, apparently issued the first call for recognition of the work's interest and merit. Roland H. Bainton, “Catherine Parr,” in Women of the Reformation in France and England (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1973), pp. 161-81, took the further step of hailing the Lamentation as “one of the gems of Tudor devotional literature,” comparable in quality to Marguerite de Navarre's Chansons spirituelles or Vittoria Colonna's Rime religiose.

8. Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII's mother, englished the fourth book of The Imitation of Christ (see The Earliest English Translation … of De Imitatione Christi, ed. John K. Ingram, Early English Text Society, extra ser. 63 [London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1893], as well as the Speculum aureum peccatorum, which Wynkyn de Worde printed under the title The miroure of Golde to the synful Soule in 1522. Mary Tudor, Catherine of Aragon's erudite daughter, contributed to the project of englishing Erasmus's Paraphrases at Katherine Parr's behest (see Devereux, “The Publication of the English Paraphrases of Erasmus”). The eleven-year-old Elizabeth Tudor presented her stepmother, Katherine Parr, with an English prose version of Marguerite de Navarre's poem Le Miroir de l'âme péchéresse as a New Year's gift in 1544: for the text, see Percy W. Ames, ed., The Mirror of the Sinful Soule: A Prose Translation … by the Princess (Afterwards Queen) Elizabeth (London: Asher and Co., 1897); for discussion, see Anne Lake Prescott, “The Pearl of the Valois and Elizabeth I: Marguerite de Navarre's Miroir and Tudor England,” in Silent but for the Word, Hannay, pp. 61-76. Elizabeth's other religious translations—from Boethius, Calvin, and others—are listed, along with pertinent studies, in Hageman's bibliography, ELR 14:416-18. As Hoffman discovered (“Catherine Parr as a Woman of Letters,” p. 354), Katherine Parr's own Prayers or Medytacions (1545) is almost wholly comprised of an abridgment of the third book of De imitatione Christi in Richard Whytford's translation (published ca. 1530).

9. Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Countess of Pembroke and the Art of Dying,” in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985), p. 209.

10. Haugaard, “Katherine Parr,” pp. 356, 358.

11. Katherine Parr, The Lamentacion of a sinner, made by the most vertuous Ladie, Quene Caterin, bewayling the Ignoraunce of her blind life: set furth and put in print at the instaunt desire of the righte gracious ladie Caterin Duchesse of Suffolke & the earnest requeste of the right honourable Lord, William Parre, Marquesse of North Hampton (London, 1547), sig. Dv^r. In the reprint of the Lamentation in The Harleian Miscellany (London: Robert Dutton, 1808), 1:286-313, these quotations occur on p. 302. Subsequent references to these two editions of 1547 and 1808 are abbreviated Lamentacion and HM respectively, and are incorporated in my text. Throughout this essay, when I cite Parr and other sixteenth-century authors, I normalize i and j, u and v. I also silently expand all printers' contractions except the ampersand.

12. Haugaard, “Katherine Parr,” pp. 349, 357-58.

13. For a sensitive assessment of the conditions that silenced Tudor women writers—one, however, limited to the situation for poetry writing—see Gary F. Waller, “Struggling into Discourse: The Emergence of Renaissance Women's Writing,” in Silent but for the Word, ed. Hannay, pp. 238-56, esp. pp. 245-49.

14. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Gender and Genre: Women as Historical Writers, 1400-1820,” in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia H. LaBalme (New York and London: New York University Press, 1980), pp. 153-82; quotation from p. 154.

15. F. Rose-Troup, “Two Book Bills of Katherine Parr,” The Library, 3d ser., 2 (1911): 40-48. Parr's copies were both English translations: the Enchiridion a John Byddell imprint in one of several years (1533, 1534, 1538, or 1544, when it was “newly corrected and amended”), the Preparation to Death a Thomas Berthelet imprint in 1543 (pp. 42-43).

16. On the importance of the Enchiridion as the best single source for Erasmus's conception of the Christian life, see Preserved Smith, Erasmus: A Study of His Life, Ideals, and Place in History (New York: Harper & Bros., 1923), pp. 55, 58; John Joseph Mangan, Life, Character, and Influence of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 1:174; and Johan Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation, tr. F. Hopman (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1924; New York: Harper & Bros., Torchbooks, 1957), p. 54.

17. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 195-96. The motif of the stony heart is also a staple of Tyndale's, Latimer's, and Becon's prose.

18. A shorte Recapitulacion or abrigement of Erasmus Enchiridion, brefely comprehendinge the summe and contentes thereof. Very Profitable and necessary to be rede of all trew Christen men. Drawne out by M. Coverdale Anno. 1545, STC 10488, sigs. Ci^v-Cii^r; modern-spelling version in Writings and Translations of Bishop Coverdale, ed. George Pearson, Parker Society 13 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), pp. 506-7. For the Latin original, see Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, Ausgewählte Werke, ed. Annemarie and Hajo Holborn (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1933), p. 57.

19. Accounts of the maneuverings between 1536 and 1538 that eventuated in the Great (first royally authorized English) Bible can be found in Charles C. Butterworth, The Lineage of the King James Bible, 1340-1611 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940), pp. 91-101; and F. F. Bruce, The English Bible: A History of Translations, rev. ed. (London: Lutterworth Press, 1970), pp. 50-59.

20. William Tyndale, An Aunswere unto Syr Thomas Mores Dialogue, in The Whole Workes of William Tyndall, John Frith, and Doctor Barnes (London: John Daye, 1573), fols. 266-68; modern-spelling version in Tyndale, An Answer to Sir Thomas More's Dialogue, ed. Henry Walter, Parker Society 45 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1850), pp. 50-52, 55-56.

21. For references and discussion, see Janel M. Mueller, The Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style, 1380-1580 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 188-201.

22. “A Prologue upon the Epistle of S. Paule to the Romaines, by M. William Tyndall,” in Whole Workes, fols. 45-46; modern-spelling version in Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scripture, ed. Henry Walter, Parker Society 43 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1848), pp. 499-500. Subsequent references to these two editions of Tyndale will be abbreviated Whole Workes and PS, respectively, and will be incorporated in my text.

23. The narrative is transcribed from John Foxe's manuscripts by John Strype in Ecclesiastical Memorials … under King Henry VIII, vol. 1, pt. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), pp. 172-73.

24. In the wake of Elizabeth L. Eisenstein's massive argument for the press as the most radical force for change in the early modern era (The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979]), studies of the ideological associations and impact of various typographical conventions are beginning to appear. Arthur J. Slavin discusses the form for payments received that the last Catholic bishop of London devised on the model of papal letters of indulgence and the shunning of this device by early Protestant administrators, in “The Tudor Revolution and the Devil's Art: Bishop Bonner's Printed Forms,” in Tudor Rule and Revolution: Essays for G. R. Elton from His American Friends, ed. Delloyd J. Guth and John W. McKenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 3-23. The early English Protestant marginalia that reached one climax in the famous tendentious glosses of the Geneva Bible (1560) are another undoubtedly important topic of this kind. Suggestive leads for discussion in studies of the later modern period include Lawrence Lipking's “The Marginal Gloss,” Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 609-55; and John Dixon Hunt's “Oeuvre and Footnote” in The Ruskin Polygon: Essays on the Imagination of John Ruskin, ed. Hunt and Frith M. Holland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), pp. 1-20.

25. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Members of Workshop 9, “For the Etruscans: Sexual Difference and Artistic Production—The Debate over a Female Aesthetic,” in The Future of Difference, ed. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), pp. 128-56; quotation from p. 131. See, further, Hélène Cixous's 1975 essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), pp. 245-64.

26. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

27. Martienssen, Queen Katherine Parr, p. 201. Subsequent references to this biography will be incorporated in my text following the author's name.

28. The Letters of Stephen Gardiner, ed. James Arthur Muller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), p. 163.

29. See, further, Cranmer's A Confutation of Unwritten Verities, first published ca. 1547. There is a modern-spelling edition in John Edmund Cox, ed., Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, Parker Society 16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1836), pp. 1-82.

30. Davis, “Gender and Genre,” pp. 155-56.

31. [Thomas Cranmer,] “A Sermon of the salvation of mankynd, by onely Chryst our Saviour,” in Certaine Sermons appoynted … to be declared and read, by al Parsons, Vicars, and Curates, everi Sunday and holi day, in their Churches (London, 1563), STC 13651, sigs. Ei^v-Eii^r, Eiiii^r; modern-spelling version in PS 16:131-32.

32. Mueller, Native Tongue and the Word, pp. 226-43, analyzes the stylistic achievement of Cranmer's Prayer Book collects.

33. Frutefull Sermons preached by … M. Hugh Latymer (London: John Daye, 1571), fol. 12^v; modern-spelling version in George Elwes Corrie, ed., Sermons by Hugh Latimer, Parker Society 27 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), p. 59. Subsequent reference to these two editions of Latimer will be abbreviated Frutefull Sermons and PS, respectively, and will be incorporated in my text.

34. For an excellent discussion of these traits as consciously cultivated aspects of Latimer's public persona, see Robert L. Kelly, “Hugh Latimer as Piers Plowman,” SEL 17 (1977): 13-26.

35. See the old-spelling edition of both works, J. Meadows Cowper, ed., Henry Brinklow's Complaynt of Roderyck Mors … and The Lamentacyon of a Christen Agaynst the Cytye of London, made by Roderigo Mors, Early English Text Society, extra ser., 22 (London: N. Trübner & Co., 1874).

36. John Foxe, The … Ecclesiasticall History … contaynyng the Actes and Monuments (London: John Daye, 1570), fol. 1213; modern-spelling version in Foxe, Acts and Monuments 5:556. It is noteworthy that even a queen was not safe from a potential tarring with the brush of Anabaptist primitive communism.

37. For a sensitive discussion, see Elaine V. Belin, “Anne Askew's Self-Portrait in The Examinations,” in Silent but for the Word, Hannay, pp. 61-80.

38. See Martienssen, pp. 190-94, building on Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 5:553-60; Robert Parsons, A Treatise of Three Conversions of England (St. Omer, 1603), fol. 593, cited in McConica, English Humanists, pp. 226-27; and John Strype's excerpts from Foxe's manuscripts in Ecclesiastical Memorials, vol. 1, pt. 1, pp. 598-600. In all this danger and turmoil, one specific in Anne Askew's written account of her Latter Examination assumes special significance with regard to the company Katherine Parr was keeping. Anne says that she asked to speak with Latimer at the end of one of her interrogation sessions in the spring of 1546, but the request was denied (The Latter Examination of Anne Askewe, in Select Works of John Bale, ed. Henry Christmas, Parker Society 1 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849], p. 206). Latimer clearly had some special standing, not only with Katherine Parr and Catherine Brandon but also with other women in their extended circle who were serious adherents of the new faith.

39. In “The Female Complaint” (forthcoming in Social Text) Lauren Berlant notes the gravitation of female expression toward the genre of complaint. Among conventionalized modes of first-person utterance, this one looks uniquely amenable to the complainer's insistence on selfhood and her wariness about appropriation. Berlant's contemporary black songwriter is potentially Anywoman who finds voice by defining herself against some aspect of her cultural experience.

40. For relevant discussion, see Helen C. White, Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature of the Sixteenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1944); Charles M. Gray, Hugh Latimer and the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950); Allan G. Chester, Hugh Latimer: Apostle to the English (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954); A. G. Dickens, Thomas Cromwell and the English Reformation (London: English Universities Press, 1959); Mary T. Austin, “The Political, Economic, and Social Aspects of Edward VI's Reign as Viewed through the Sermons and Letters of Hugh Latimer” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, East Lansing, 1961); Mary Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith: A Tudor Intellectual in Office (London: Athlone Press, 1964); and Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1965).

41. Martienssen, pp. 206-7, citing Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials (no reference given).

42. On the next English Protestant instance (1641-58) of female empowerment afforded by the egalitarian strain that periodically surfaces in Christian spirituality, see Keith Thomas, “Women and the Civil War Sects,” Past and Present 13 (1958): 42-62, esp. pp. 44-47, 50.