[In the following essay, Mueller offers an account of Parr's Prayers or Meditations, which she says is more than a gesture to affirm her status in the royal household. It is, she states, a work which seeks to universalize religious experience and which involved considerable compositional challenges because of the author's gender.]

1

Nowadays we bring to our reading of those rarities—writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance and Reformation—two questions sharpened by the difference of gender. We inquire into the differential marked by the very fact of a woman's utterance, how she came to break the silence that bound the vast majority of her female contemporaries. We also ask what the voice is like, what difference it makes that a woman is writing. As we pursue such questions within a domain that lies at a remove of four and a half centuries from our own, however, we need to remind ourselves that these questions are cultural productions of our present era, as are the conceptions of “difference” that quicken our interest in their answers.¹ Among the many needs of feminist scholarship is a rhetorical history of women's writing. Such a rhetorical history would chart the intersections of cultural moments in specific localities and circumstances with antecedents and conventions of the genres in which women authors undertook to work. As it came to be filled in, such a history would help us readers to adjust our expectations about expressions of female difference not merely to the available range of possibilities but also to their effectual limits in a particular cultural context.

We are beginning to sense what the rough outlines of such a history for the sixteenth century would look like. The titanic figure of Teresa of Avila, a descendant of an ancient and wealthy family who wrote and worked tirelessly for the spiritual renewal of the Carmelite order, attests the still-vivifying force of a traditional religious vocation to empower female energies and self-expression, especially when conjoined with the newer influences of humanism and ecclesiastical reform.² Evincing the spread of these newer influences, humanistic cultivation in court and educational circles in Italy and Spain was making the figure of the learned woman at least a minor type, although fewer of these women took the further step of authorship.³ The woman writer would remain an extreme exception in this era. Yet in Continental cities where literary academies or salons and print culture flourished, there is a detectible pattern of educated women from the nobility and upper bourgeoisie writing and publishing love poetry that ranged from the ultra-idealized to the outspokenly erotic; such was the Rome of Vittoria Colonna, the Florence of Tullia d'Aragona, the Venice of Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco, and the Lyons of Pernette du Guillet and Louise Labé.⁴ Since women authors were such exceptions overall, however, we easily assume that a deliberately gendered self-presentation will mark their texts. This assumption has proved productive in recent analyses of Stampa, Franco, and Labé as love poets,⁵ but the rarefied neoplatonizing of Colonna, d'Aragona, and du Guillet apparently renders their poetry much more resistant to feminist interpretations and concerns.⁶ Teresa of Avila is the most complex and subtle case of all, for she assigns a great variety of values to her female identity across the range of articulation in her works—figuring it markedly, for example, in the Life, the Way of Perfection, and the Book of Foundations but dissolving it for the most part into a generic human spirituality in the Interior Castle.⁷ Since we are dealing here with only a handful of instances, these impediments to generalizing about women authors must occasion some embarrassment. The historical inference is inescapable nevertheless. We cannot simply presuppose that a woman writing at this era would think it desirable or feasible to make femininity figure conspicuously in her text. If we do insist on making this presupposition, we place ourselves in the shadow of a vast irony. We run the danger of importing into women's history, by an opposite door, the invidious reductivism that arose through conceiving of women apart from history. This ahistorical view of women has read personal destinies, life cycles, and human roles and achievements as just so many reiterations of a single universal—what in its most grandiose but also its most revealing formulation has been called the “eternal feminine.”⁸ Now that we accept the important place of gender among the social categories that construct a person, we must take care to historicize and otherwise locate its potentially diverse implications for any given woman author of the past.

While I have thus far sounded these cautions in general terms, they are especially pertinent to female authorship in sixteenth-century England and to the account I shall be offering of the Prayers or Meditations which Katherine Parr, Henry VIII's sixth and last queen, “collected” (as she says in her title) “out of holy woorkes” and saw forthwith through three editions in 1545. When we shift our sights to the English scene, we find our identification of circumstances that conduced to female authorship on the Continent in the sixteenth century to be instantly in need of adjustment. Not only is Teresa's precedent—that of a woman in religious orders—put effectually beyond reach after a series of acts by the crown, parliament, and convocation set the Reformation on course in the 1530s, but the pattern of a courtly or urban matrix of humanistic cultivation does not yield female authors in London at this period as it did in the other cities I have mentioned.⁹ With the striking exceptions of Katherine Parr and of her girlhood friend, Anne Askew, who was burned as a heretic in 1546 for the pertinacious scriptural critiques of Catholic orthodoxy that she records in her Examinations,¹⁰ literary Englishwomen of the earlier sixteenth century functioned uniformly as translators of religious works. This was the capacity in which Thomas More's most intellectual and most loved daughter, Margaret More Roper, made her contribution, with her translation of Erasmus's treatise on the Peter Noster into English.¹¹ This can also be termed a category of literary activity engaged in by females of the royal line, for there are two conspicuous instances from the period. Henry VIII's grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, countess of Richmond and Derby, made a vernacular translation of the highly affective sacramental meditations that comprise the fourth book of the Imitatio Christi. Paired with a translation of the first three books by William Atkynson, this version went through five editions between 1504 and 1519.¹² Much closer in date and circumstances to the work that concerns us here, the eleven-year-old Princess Elizabeth translated into English prose portions of one of Queen Marguerite de Navarre's Chansons spirituelles and bound the text in a sample of her best embroidery as a New Year's present in 1545 for her adored stepmother, Katherine Parr (who may well have slipped a seasonal gift suggestion to her precocious charge).¹³ Within its immediate context, Parr's own Prayers or Meditations may at first be read as a self-certifying gesture, in a literary mode for which she had impeccable precedents, to confirm her rather recently attained membership in the exalted circle of English royalty. However, a construing of Parr's motive as a simple affirmation of her status fails to engage and hence to explore the possible relevance of Elaine Beilin's key generalization regarding literary production in sixteenth- and earlier seventeenth-century England: “The Reformation, with its emphasis on individual salvation and the reading of scripture, was … the single most important influence on women writers.”¹⁴

In fact, dualities of origin and motive are widely if delicately inscribed in the text of Parr's Prayers or Meditations. On the one hand her efforts seem to eventuate and speak from a private and personal sphere where, if anywhere, women have conventionally found room for expression. On the other hand, for Queen Katherine's efforts in the Prayers or Meditations to circulate publicly in print, she would require—at the very least—the permission of her famously autocratic consort. Thus considerations of gender figured crucially twice over for Parr—not just in undertaking authorship but also in aspiring to official Tudor legitimation for religious expression in a personal voice. In particular, it seems Queen Katherine undertook to complement the vernacular service books for public church worship then being advocated to Henry VIII by archbishop Thomas Cranmer. She would assemble a vernacular manual for the private devotion of individuals in the new national Church of England.

For Parr's project to stand a chance of approval from the monitoring king and archbishop, its first-person voice would have to ring with the generic human accents of a pious Christian soul. Such a voice had a rich and well-established history tracing ultimately to the Psalms, the perennially favored model for Christian devotion. Its keynotes combine universalized affirmations of sin, frailty, and vital dependence upon God with an equally universal assurance of the preciousness of every soul to God. Some degendering can be observed in this generic voice of Christian devotion—this soul in need, yearning for the divine—as one ground on which its claim to universality is staked. Yet, where the grammar of so-called natural language forces a specification of gender, the generic voice predictably becomes a “he,” exposing the masculine norm implicit in linguistic as in other cultural universals. However Parr might otherwise gauge the cultural limits on her self-expression, overtly feminizing the voice of her Prayers or Meditations would have remained a tactical impossibility. Inevitably, her pursuit of this project required an authorial orientation that would now be classed as male-identified—that is, accommodated to the existing power relations of her society—since Parr would have stood no prospect of officially authorized publication without working with and through the all-male hierarchy of the English church and crown. Once we acknowledge this necessary quotient of male identification in her enterprise, we can more clearly reconstruct the compositional challenge that this sixteenth-century woman author took upon herself. For Parr in her Prayers or Meditations this challenge seems to have lain primarily in working toward a genuine inclusiveness for the affective range of a humanly generic voice by preventing its full-scale assimilation to the masculine norms for literary expression. While the immediate publication history of the Prayers or Meditations unfortunately permits no inference about Parr's success with her readership in undertaking to create a generic voice of the soul for Englishmen and Englishwomen alike, the nine editions in circulation by 1556 do attest to the acceptance her small volume gained among printers as disparate as the conservative Thomas Berthelet and the radical John Daye. There were five additional issues in Elizabeth's reign, when the Prayers or Meditations began to appear bound together with the vernacular King's Primer that Cranmer had prepared at Henry VIII's behest.¹⁵

Despite its obligatory strategic accommodations, a clearly individuated authorial design stamps Parr's collection as her own work. The interest of this authorial design should, it seems, have become evident before now, for in 1959 C. Fenno Hoffman, Jr., announced his discovery of her principal source. Apart from four closing prayers, the Prayers or Meditations comprise what he accurately termed “a 60-page abridgment” of the 177-page third book of the Imitatio Christi in the English translation of this work published by Richard Whitford, a Brigettine monk of Syon Monastery, under the title The Folowynge of Christ (1531?).¹⁶ Hoffman's discovery made it possible for anyone with the resources of the STC on microfilm and the requisite patience to collate Parr's text with Whitford's version of the Imitatio's third book and to take the measure of her compositional differences. What ensued instead was a drop in interest once Parr's Prayers or Meditations were tagged as a derivative compilation. Even Hoffman's discovery has all but sunk from view. The scholars who have done the most recent work on Parr—two critical essays and a full-length biography—betray no recognition that she worked from Whitford's Folowynge of Christ when they nod in the direction of the Prayers or Meditations. The most explicit and most recent critical notice, in fact, moves from lack of interest to open disparagement, couched typically in a passing remark, to the effect that “Catherine Parr's haphazard selection destroys the methodical character and evocation of inward dialogue which characterize the original”—identified by this scholar only as à Kempis's third book of the Imitatio.¹⁷

We cannot afford such cavalier treatment of any portion of the all too sparse remains that must ground our emerging histories of women's literary production in sixteenth-century England. In what follows I argue that Parr's Prayers or Meditations take shape and substance in a deliberate, bold, and sustained act of intertextual appropriation that constitutes a genuine claim to authorship. As her controlling aim, Parr undertakes to foster reformed devotion among the literate laity of the late Henrician church of England by performing a generic reorientation on the masterpiece of late medieval Catholic spirituality. Circumstantial information, moreover, permits us to follow Queen Katherine as she sheds her feminine silence and asserts her place in a program of vernacular religious publication spearheaded by Archbishop Cranmer.

Katherine had been married to Henry VIII in July 1543. She so quickly secured his respect and trust that she found herself officially designated queen regent of the realm from July to October 1544, while Henry in person conducted military actions in France. Just before leaving for France, Henry commanded Cranmer to revive the Catholic custom of holding processions through villages and towns to pray for “the miserable state of Christendom.” But the king made a major concession to his Protestant archbishop: the litanies and prayers chanted publicly in procession would be “in our native English tongue,” and some new occasional prayers would be composed. During the summer of 1544, while Katherine wielded the sovereignty of the realm, Cranmer was carrying out another of Henry's commands—that he, as principal minister of the regency council, attend daylong on the queen. The conversion to Protestantism that impels Parr's authorship of a later work, The Lamentation of a Sinner, is most plausibly dated to her extensive contact with Cranmer that summer.¹⁸ Strype's Ecclesiastical Memorials records a report that Parr wrote “A prayer for the kyng” and “A praier for men to saie entryng into battayle” for inclusion in Cranmer's issue of a vernacular Letanie with Suffrages to be Said or Song that duly saw two editions in 1544.¹⁹ Although both these editions and subsequent ones from Henry's reign introduce bidding prayers for the king, Queen Katherine, and Prince Edward, none in fact includes Parr's prayers, which found their own way into print at the end of her Prayers or Meditations, preceding the colophon dated 6 November 1545.

Closely conjoined in date, Cranmer's Litany and Parr's Prayers or Meditations also manifest a close complementary relation in their motive, direction, and norms for expression. The basic principles are spelled out in “An exhortation unto prayer, thoughte mete by the kinges majestie, and his clergy, to be read to the people in every church afore processyons” that Cranmer prefaced to his Protestant revision of the Litany. Because prayer offered to God must be heartfelt and intelligible, English is the language for English speakers to use. Any “true use of praier” must also be “grounded upon the sure foundation of goddis holie and blessed word, which can not deceive us.” While the litany and biddings instruct how “to make our comon prayer to our heavenly father,” Cranmer exhorts that prayer be made individually as well: “It is verye convenient, and moche acceptable to god, that you shuld use your private prayer in your mother tongue, that you understandyng what you aske of god, may more ernestly and fervently desyre the same, … ever having an ernest request and desyre of those godly benefyttes, which are appointed in goddes worde.”²⁰ Cranmer, however, gives no instruction in the personal mode of biblically grounded, vernacular prayer. This is where Parr's Prayers or Meditations enter, a culturally available project for a trustworthy educated noblewoman who, besides being the king's consort, had recently proved equal to the exercise of the powers of the king himself in council. Cranmer's is the work for souls in public, Parr's the work for the soul in private. Both attained the status of royally sanctioned productions of an English church that was making its first moves from Catholic to Protestant formulations in handbooks for worship offered at large to its literate membership.

Natalie Davis, in a study of European women who wrote histories between 1400 and 1820, emphasizes two “especially important” psychological factors in female authorship: a deep personal sense of connection and involvement with the areas of public life considered appropriate for the writing in question, and sufficient assurance that the work would find an audience to take its author seriously.²¹ The primary reason for Queen Katherine's first foray into publication must have been the crucial influence exerted by the archbishop on her religious life and beliefs, at the very point when her autocratic husband had bolstered her self-confidence by entrusting her with the rule of the realm. The text of Parr's Prayers or Meditations readily submits to analysis as a sensitive and discerning contribution to a Cranmerian literary program on popularizing Protestant lines. These conspicuous textual features will occupy much of the discussion that follows.

To anticipate in brief, Parr combines radical surgery with minute local remolding as she reworks her source materials. Entirely dismantling the monastic framework and its affiliated terms of reference in the original Imitatio, she does away with dialogue between a gender-marked pair of intimates who are identified as “Jesu,” “lorde,” “syr,” or “sire” on the one hand, and invariably as “my sone” on the other. Elimination of this dialogue also dispenses with a dynamic in which the monk of the source text is brought, by instruction and exhortation, through stages of moral and spiritual proficiency to the privilege of mystical rapture in a relation of ever closer male bonding. Parr replaces dialogue with monologue—the “I,” “me,” and “my” of a soul whose psychology is no more than generically specified as faculties of heart, mind, and will. From the densely scriptural weave of the original Imitatio she consistently selects lyric and affective verses couched in the first person (or restyles them in this form). The result is to center her abridgment of Whitford's version in a degendered, generically human speaker who yields self to God in a posture of total dependency and in utterances drawn from God's own Word. The salient features of Parr's speaker reflect emphases in early Tudor Protestantism, not least the yet unprobed and unproblematic presumption of the spiritual equality of all persons before God.²² Degendering from explicit masculinist norms in the direction of a fresh universalizing of the Christian gospel thus appears to be the chief design and effect of Parr's Prayers or Meditations as a public document produced for a historically specific context.

Nevertheless, the rhetorical mode throughout the work remains that of personal expression. The extra dimension afforded by access, in our century, to certain of Parr's private letters enables us to see that the motive of universalizing religious experience fails to account fully for her recasting of conventional linguistic norms as she gives voice to a speaking Christian soul in Prayers or Meditations. Although Parr's contemporary readers could have found only sectarian significance in whatever they registered of her very sparing recourse to explicit masculine locutions, our position as readers is, happily, different. What additionally and gradually can be pieced out in this text is an inscription of Parr's own religious sensibility as it underwent shaping by her gendered experience. Degendering from masculinist norms in Prayers or Meditations ultimately results not just in universalizing but in articulations that are identifiably feminine—those of the redactor as author. The touches of evidence for Parr's self-expression, with their demonstrable traces of historical context and autobiography, will claim final attention in my discussion.

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On the evidence of her title, a typically descriptive one of the period, Parr's declaration that her Prayers or Meditations aim at stirring “the mynde … paciently to suffre all afflictions here, to set at nought the vaine prosperitee of this worlde, and alwaie to longe for the everlastynge felicitee” seems to presage full concurrence with what is generally taken to be the project of the Imitatio Christi. Thomas à Kempis worked on elaborating a method to “enable the Christian to turn from the things of the flesh and the things of the mind so as to come within the life-giving influence of the Eternal Word.” This Word is “more than the Christ of history”; “the Christ is the Christ of Holy Scripture that fourteen centuries of mysticism had woven round the person of Jesus of Nazareth,” “the Eternal Word—the origin of all Things and Thoughts. The Word is Christ and God, the unifying principle in creation.” “Beginning with a mystic conception of Christ, the personality is led to justify the faith in this conception … not by losing the ego in Christ but by moulding the ego on the pattern of Christ.”²³

In à Kempis, spiritual method translates into a dynamic of spiritual progress that displays important affinities with Bonaventure's famous “threefold way” (triplici via). Book I of the Imitatio embodies the outlook of the active life of ethical self-regulation that weans the soul from the world (the purgative way). Book II fosters the turning to an inward life that refers all experience to the suffering and love manifest in the crucified Christ (the illuminative way). Book III posits a contemplative merging with Christ, so that Christ speaks to the soul from within the soul (the unitive way). While allowance is made throughout the three books for extreme oscillations of feeling, the sequencing of the Imitatio nonetheless clearly models the respective stages of progress in the spiritual life as methodized in medieval Catholicism: the levels of the beginner, the proficient, and the so-called “perfect.”²⁴

To launch her Prayers or Meditations, Katherine Parr plunges into the central section of Whitford's translation of the long third book of the Imitatio. Cued by its incipit, “Audiam quid loquatur in me Dominus Deus” (I listen to what the Lord God speaks within me), this section of the text is conventionally known as the Book of Internal Consolation, the acme of mystical rapture in the work. Parr's redaction, however, deals very sparingly in the ecstatic intimacies that make the third book distinctive. She omits altogether, for example, the famous pair of chapters, 5 and 6, “Of the marvelous effect of the love of God” and “Of the proof of a true lover of God,” and she sorts some passages of aspiration and longing from more highly charged expressions of transport as she excerpts from chapter 39, “How our Lord God savoureth to his lover sweetly above all things and in all things.”²⁵ As must be obvious in a recasting like the Prayers or Meditations that shortens its source text by two-thirds, Parr's most potent compositional strategy by far is excision—in effect, silencing.

What she silences even more than the rarefied accesses of spiritual union, however, are the lengthy, recurrent didactic passages where the Lord admonishes the soul to contempt of the world and where the soul expatiates on its goal of self-abasement and self-abnegation in all its dealings. In consequence, Parr lifts a lyrical and highly subjective cri de coeur out of the diversity and diffuseness of her original. Silencing some themes and tonalities intensifies the remainder, as an early reader saw fit to note in Parr's margin. The handwriting appears to be that of Anne Dyson, who signed the copies of Parr's Prayers or Meditations and Cranmer's Litany (the second edition of 1544) that were used as camera copy by University Microfilms.²⁶ Anne's marginal note appears next to this passage in Parr: “O Jesu, the joy and comfort of all christen people, that are wandrynge as pilgrimes in the wildernesse of this worlde: my hert crieth to the by still desires, and my silence speaketh unto the, and saieth: Howe longe tarieth my Lord god to come to me?”²⁷ The note, the only writing besides emphasis marks in the whole volume, is legible except for its final word. It runs simply: “ye faithful dooe servisse to god wth thyr soul.” It is poignant to find this appreciative jotting from a sixteenth-century woman reader, responding to emphasis laid by a woman writer, her contemporary, on the expressive capacities in the soul's silence—a condition widely identified today as a historically feminine one.²⁸ Parr, however, also supplies the soul with plenty to utter in her Prayers or Meditations.

In systematically reducing all dialogue to monologue, Parr dispenses altogether with the framework of the third book of the Imitatio—the colloquy of Christ with and within the soul. Her text instead consists entirely of the soul's personal addresses to Christ. From the standpoint of Catholic method, Parr's in medias res entry makes an utterly illegitimate trespass on a sacred preserve: the disclosures, experiences, and formulations attained only by contemplatives long practiced in arduous spiritual techniques. But her reworking shows her to be acting deliberately and to know what she is after. In violating her source text in this fashion, Parr repudiates the implied constraints on its scope. Her speaker originates not as one of “the perfect” or even as an adept, but rather as a generically human, undifferentiated “I” or “me.” With provision for some expressly Protestant highlightings, this “I” displays a quite standard psychology for the period. What singles out this speaking soul is no rarefied level of attainment through spiritual effort, but the potential advent of saving grace that it invocates and heralds. On this grace depends not only true devotion but any relation whatever of the soul to Christ. Parr's text opens just at this point of recognition, and it is immediately sharpened through deployment of her two other major authorial techniques besides excision—insistent, minute rewording on the one hand, and interposition of sentence-length new material on the other.

“Most benigne lord Jesu, grant me thy grace,” begins Parr in words taken from Whitford's version of the opening of chapter 17 of Book III. “That it maye,” he continues, “werke with me,” but she substitutes “worke in me” (Prayers, sig. Aii recto; Folowynge, fol. lxxxii recto). A sentence that has no counterpart in Whitford soon spells out her specific identification of such grace with the unmerited gift of salvation: “O what thankes ought I to geve unto the, which haste suffered the grevouse deathe of the Crosse, to delyver me from my synnes, and to obteyne everlastyng life for me?” (Prayers, sig. Aiii verso). This gift of saving grace registers on the speaking soul as desire for a oneness of will with its Lord, and this desire, itself enabled by grace, sustains the entire lyric movement of her work. Parr now backtracks from Whitford's chapter 17 to excerpt from his chapter 16. She reinforces the origin of the soul's desire in the gift of grace by inserting another new sentence. Its effect is to merge the two—the gift, the desire—in the onset of regeneration that for her functionally defines grace: “Lorde Jesu, I praie the grant me grace, that I never sette my herte on the thynges of this worlde, but that all worldly and carnall affections maie utterly die and be mortified in me” (Prayers, sig. Aii verso).

Next excerpting from chapter 18 and then from chapter 19, Parr pointedly deflates the self-confidence of the contemplative soul of the Imitatio, who offers, “lorde I wyll gladly suffre for the what soo ever thou wylte shall fall upon me … indyfferently wyl I take of thy hand good and bad” (Folowynge, fol. lxxxiv verso). Parr's soul instead declares anew its utter reliance on grace: “Lorde, geve me grace gladly to suffre, what so ever thou wylte shall fall upon me, and paciently to take at thy hande good and badde” (Prayers, sig. Aiii verso; my emphasis). Such dislocation of the order of chapters in the process of excerpting from her source is unusual compositional practice for Parr. She departs from sequence only twice in the Prayers or Meditations, but both times at its terminal junctures. At the beginning she skips backwards and forwards from chapter 17, as indicated above, before proceeding in order. Again, at the close of her work, she makes an enormous jump from midway in chapter 56 back to the opening of chapter 4. Such strenuous interventions in the text of her original collapse its arpeggios of mystical transport into a deep chord of basic dependence on divinity, so that Parr's soul leaves off speaking where the Imitatio's virtually begins in the third book—with a prayer, significantly, “to optayne the grace of devocyon” (Prayers, sig. Cviii verso; Folowynge, fol. lxiv recto-verso).

Through Parr's systematic selections and alterations, the connotations of spirituality are wrenched from the perceptibly Catholic to those of an emergent Protestantism. The Imitatio's third book recurrently limits the term grace to the preferential divine favor accorded the contemplative, as illustrated in Whitford's rendering in chapter 23: “Gyve me lord Jhesu this specyall grace for to rest me in the / above all creatures” (Folowynge, fol. lxxxix recto). Parr reworks the sentence toward greater inclusiveness of both subject and object: “Lorde Jesu, I pray the, geve me the grace to rest in the above all thynges” (Prayers, sig. Avi verso). Whitford renders and glosses the ecstatic longing in chapter 36 as follows: “Lorde I have grete nede of thy grace and that of thy grete synguler grace or that I may … flye freely to the / He coveytyd to flye without let that sayd thus” (Folowynge, fol. civ recto). Parr pares down as follows, cutting the gloss altogether and renewing emphasis on grace with phrases spliced in from Whitford's chapter 39: “Lorde, grant me thy singular grace that I maie … freely ascende to the. … O lorde, … it must be through helpe of thy grace” (Prayers, sig. Bv recto).

Grace in Parr shifts away from associations with divine favor understood as preferential dispensations and functions of the spirit. In her Prayers or Meditations grace figures, rather, as the vital empowerment by which God opens in the sin-marred human psyche the sole means for grace and the human soul to enter into a positive relation. Parr adopts the Reformation sense that the term first acquires in Luther.²⁹ Her reworking of a notable apposition in Whitford underscores the force of their divergent apprehensions. “Gather my wyttes and powers of my soule togyther in the,” implores the soul in Whitford's chapter 53; “graunte me to caste awaye and holly to dyspyse all fantasies of synne” (Folowynge, fol. cxxvi recto-verso). The soul in Parr's text expressly refers its hope for psychic wholeness and moral strength to the workings of grace: “Gather, O lorde, my wittes and the powers of my soule together in the, and make me … by thy grace strongely to resist and overcome all mocions and occasions of sinne” (Prayers, sig. Cii verso).

Because the theology and psychology of spiritual effort remain fundamental to the Imitatio Christi, Whitford's translation insistently inscribes a harsh late-medieval dualism with regard to life and the self. Heaven is to be embraced, this world renounced. The body and all earthly concerns are to be shunned as evils together with the world; only the spirit freed of the flesh can achieve and experience goodness. Parr's redaction just as insistently parts company with the schematic and simplistic enforcement of such dualisms, and especially with implications that privilege the cloistered recluse as the true “religious.” Thus, where Whitford's text proposes to “wytnes the appostels” as chief examples of Christ's elect, they figure as “prynces of all the world whiche neverthelesse were conversaunte amonge the people without complaynynge” (Folowynge, fol. xcii recto-verso). Parr reworks this representation along discernibly Cranmerian lines to model a clergy busy among the people in preaching and visitation: “Witnesse be the blessed apostles, whom thou madest chiefe pastours and spirituall governours of thy flocke” (Prayers, sig. Bi verso).

One quite uniform pattern of revision throughout the Prayers or Meditations tones down and complicates the repudiation of the world and the body to which its source is prone. Whitford reads, and Parr revises, in an indicative pair of passages that run as follows:

Lorde it is the warke of a perfyte man / never to sequestre his mynde from the beholdyng of hevenly thinges; and amonge many cures to goo as he were without cure / … alway busye in goddes servyce. … I beseche the therfore my lorde Jhesu … kepe me from the busynes and cures of the world and that I be not over moch iniquityd with the necessytyes of the bodely kynde

(Folowynge, fol. xcviii recto).

Lorde, it is the worke of a perfecte man, never to sequester his mynde fro the, and amonge many worldelye cares, to goe without care, … alwaie myndyng heavenly thinges. … I beseech the therfore, my lorde Jesu, keep me from the superfluous cares of this world: that I be not inquieted with bodily necessities

(Prayers, sig. Bii recto-verso).

There are several notable differences here. Parr specifies the interferences in the perfect life as “worldly cares” and “superfluous cares,” not as “busynes” or “cure” per se. Her soul also declines to claim credit in “goddes servyse” for “myndyng heavenly thinges.” Most importantly, where Whitford has the soul “iniquityd” or sullied by the body's needs, Parr reads “inquieted,” that is, disturbed or made restless. For Parr, because the world and the body are not to be rejected by reflex, spiritual danger impends not in these by themselves but in the delusive or excessive estimations to which the mind constantly succumbs unless it is sustained by grace. Where the soul in Whitford laments encumberment with “temporall thynges” and “passyons,” its counterpart in Parr laments “worldely fantasies” and “afflictions” (Folowynge, fol. cxxiv verso; Prayers, sig. Bviii verso).

Profound differences in theological and psychological outlook emerge as Parr excerpts and reworks her source. The Imitatio invokes a calculus of meritorious motives by which the soul can gauge its progress from worldliness to otherworldliness: “I wolde be above all temporall thynges / but whether I wyll or not I am compellyd … to be subjecte unto my flesshe” (Folowynge, fol. cxxv verso). Recasting this passage, Parr turns it outside in, implying her rejection of any possible calculus of the soul's progress. Neatly externalized dualities give way in her text to an evocation of constant inward struggle: “I would subdue all yvell affections, but they daily rebell and ryse against me, and wyll not be subject unto my spirite” (Prayers, sig. Cii verso). The persistence of a calculus of progress and of concern with what Luther decried as works-righteousness climaxes in the Catholic cast of the reflections on justification offered by Whitford:

I ought alway to meken my selfe and pacyently to suffre all thynges in charytye after thy pleasure / forgyve me lorde as ofte as I have not soo done / … Thy mercy is [a] more profytable and more sure waye for me to the getynge of pardon and forgyvenes of my synnes then a truste in myne owne workes. … And though I drede not my conscyence / yet I may not therfore justifye my selfe / for thy mercy removyd and taken away: no man may be justyfyed ne appere ryghtwyse in thy sight

(Folowynge, fols. cxxvii verso-cxxviii recto).

Parr correspondingly reduces the foregoing to a brief, direct appeal for justification in Protestant terms as the righteousness that inheres nowhere in the soul but is imputed to it by its “Lord God”: “To thy mercy I doe appeale, seyng no man maie bee justified, ne appeare rightous in thy sight, if thou examine him after thy justice” (Prayers, sig. Bviii recto).

3

If the presence interchangeably called the Lord or Christ does not converse with the soul in Parr's pages as it does, so familiarly and lengthily, in the Imitatio, it is not because the divine voice is absent from the Prayers or Meditations. This voice in fact sounds copiously, but it does so only through biblical echoes within human utterance. In this consistent and conspicuous feature of Parr's text we find clear, personal implementation of the program for grounding all prayer in God's word that Cranmer proclaimed in his Litany. Where, for example, the Lord in Whitford characteristically exhorts the soule to “lerne to have pacyence with me and not to dysdayne to bere the myseries and the wretchidnes of this lyfe as I have done for the … unto my dethe upon the crosse” (Folowynge, fols. lxxxiv verso-lxxxv recto), in Parr the soul just as characteristically replaces such discourse with reminiscences of relevant Scripture—here, Philippians 2:8—that it quotes back to its Lord: “Thou gavest us most perfect example of pacience: fulfillyng and obeiyng the wille of thy father even unto the death” (Prayers, sig. Aiv recto). Parr's excision of all mystical impartings that are not phrased as echoes of Scripture—in other words, her identification of all communication between God and the soul with the text of the Bible—makes for some of her most radical differences from Whitford and opens a rich further dimension of intertextuality in her work.³⁰

The deliberate design of Parr's scripturalism comes through especially clearly at one point where Whitford echoes Matthew 6:21 in this oblique fashion: “Wherfore thou that arte everlastynge trouthe sayste openly / there as thy treasure is there is thy herte” (Folowynge, fol. cxxvi recto). Parr rephrases thus: “Accordyngly as thou dooest saie in the gospell, Where as a mans treasure is, there is his herte” (Prayers, sig. Civ recto). Her scripturalist norms and design emerge, however, most insistently in a multitude of tiny departures that take Whitford's phrasings toward ever greater heightening of sense parallelisms and psalmic cadencing in the already densely woven, allusive texture of the original Imitatio. Typography plays a part too in this overall difference, for Whitford's text is set in block format throughout while Parr's is disposed in versicles like the Psalter (and Cranmer's Litany). Here, to illustrate, is a series of devout ejaculations from Whitford paired with their reworking by Parr:

O Lorde / what is man that thou vouchest saufe to have mynde on hym; or what hath he done for the / that thou wylte visyte hym with thy grace / … / For when a man pleasyth hym selfe he dyspleasyth the / and when he delytyth in mannes praysynges he is depryvyd fro the trewe vertues / for the trewe stedfast joye and gladnes is to joye in the and not in hym selfe / in thy name and not in his owne vertue ne in any creature. Therfore thy name be praysed and not myne / thy werkes be magnyfyed and not myne / and thy goodnes be alway blessyd / so that no thynge be gyven to me of the lawde and praysynge of man.

(Folowynge, fols. cxiv recto, cxv verso)

O Lorde, what is man, that thou vouchsafest to have mynde of him? and to visit hym?

Who so pleaseth hym selfe without the, displeaseth the: and he that deliteth in mennes praisynges, loseth the true praise before the.

The true praise is to be praised of the: and the true joye is, to rejoyce in the.

Wherefore thy name (O lorde) be praised, and not myne.

Thy woorkes bee magnified and not myne, and thy goodnes be alwaies lauded and blessed.

(Prayers, sig. Bvii recto)

The intertextuality that Parr practices with Scripture in her Prayers or Meditations contrasts markedly with the free hand she exercises in dealing with nonscriptural material from Whitford's version of the Imitatio. She is so highly respectful of the Bible as the source of authoritative formulations that she preserves their wording verbatim within hers. The effect is most striking when the soul in Parr assumes an explicitly masculine gender to conform with a scriptural allusion. To the “O Lord, what is man, that thou vouchsafest to have mynde of hym” in the foregoing passage—an echo of Psalm 8:4—may be added the allusion to the “perfecte man” of Psalm 37:37 who finds his peace in God, the echo of Psalms 24:4 and 19:14 in “Blessed is that man that for the love of the, … in a clene and pure conscience … maie offer his praiers to the, and be accepted,” and the following close adherence to the terminology of Romans 6:6, “But alas, myn olde man, that is my carnal affections, live still in me and are not crucified” (Prayers, sigs. Bii recto, Civ recto-verso, Bv verso).

There are even five instances to be found in Parr where the normative, humanly generic force of masculine gender in Scripture persists as a trace element, although she is not quoting or alluding to Scripture at these particular points in her redaction of Whitford. One such instance, a passage beginning “Where man is oftentymes defiled with sinne, encumbred with affliction, inquieted with troubles, wrapped in cares,” may be more clearly generic than clearly gendered (Prayers, sig. Ci recto, adapting from Folowynge, fol. cxxx recto). But the other four are normatively gendered masculine despite the absence of constraint from a biblical source. “O Lorde, all gyftes and vertues that any man hath in body or soule, … be thy gyftes, and come of the, and not of our selfe,” Parr reads in one such passage; and shortly thereafter, “Lorde, I knowe, that no man ought to be abasshed, or miscontent, that he is in a lowe estate in this worlde, and lacketh the pleasures of this lyfe” (Prayers, sig. Bi recto-verso, a free handling of Folowynge, fols. xci verso, xcii recto). A third such passage reads: “This is thy grace (O lorde) to thy friende, to suffre hym to bee troubled in this worlde for thy love” (Prayers, sig. Cvi recto-verso; cf. Folowynge, fol. cxxx verso). A fourth invocates “thou lorde God, the hevenly leache of mannes soule, whiche … bryngest a man nygh unto deathe, and after restorest hym to lyfe agayne, that he maie therby learne to knowe his owne weakenesse” (Prayers, sig. Cv recto; cf. Folowynge, fol. cxxxi recto).

Such masculinist assimilation might remain unremarkable in a sixteenth-century devotional text except for a considerably larger group of readings that show Parr at pains to demasculinize the soul of her text where opportunities arise for this.³¹ New light floods in on her authorial decision to revamp the dialogue of the Imitatio's third book as monologue when we consider that this entailed eliminating expressly masculine forms of address—“lorde,” “my sone”—throughout. Literally dozens of such references drop out in her extensive excisions of Whitford. Parr leaves herself with her lyrical “I,” “my,” and “me,” largely sufficient for personal reference except in contexts where her soul figures itself to itself in mindfulness of its relation to its ever-present Lord.

Here her authorial practice, unaffected by a scriptural prototype, proves extremely interesting. In what looks simply like a universalizing move in some of these contexts, Parr degenders the masculine locutions in her source. For example, she refers to “thy secrete and terrible judgementes, which scourgest the rightous with the synner” where Whitford reads “the ryghtwyse man with the synner” (Prayers, sig. Cvii recto; Folowynge, fol. cxxx verso). And she revises where Whitford expands first-person pronouns into third-person masculine references—“yf thou withdrawe thy selfe from me / … then maye not thy servaunt renne the waye of thy commaundementes as he dyd fyrst / … for it is not with hym as it was before”—so that her text sustains the ungendered first-person pronouns throughout the passage: “yf thou withdrawe thy selfe from me … then maie not thy servaunt renne the waie of thy commandementes, as I did before. For it is not with me, as it was” (Prayers, sig. Cv verso; Folowynge, fol. cxxx recto).

4

But can universalizing adequately characterize what Parr does when she recasts the figurations of the speaking soul in her Prayers or Meditations? There are two reasons why I think it cannot do so. One is a stylistic tendency that goes far beyond the explicit degenderings in Parr's text: she works throughout to heighten the connotations of deference and dependency in her vocabulary of self-reference. Where, for example, the soul in Whitford's version upbraids itself as a “wretchyd man” and laments, “I am but vanytye and nought before the / a[n] unconstant man,” the soul in Parr substitutes “wretched creature” and intensifies self-deprecation before the Lord: “I am nothyng else of my selfe but vanitee before the, an unconstant creature” (Folowynge, fols. cxxv verso, cxiv verso; Prayers, sigs. Cii verso, Bvi verso). Analogously, Whitford reads, “But what am I lorde that I dare thus speake to the / I am thy porest servaunte,” and Parr revises: “But what am I (Lorde) that I dare speake to the? I am thy poore creature” (Folowynge, fol. lxiv recto; Prayers, sig. Cviii recto). For her soul, daring to speak at all—not, as in Whitford, the manner of speaking—is in question before a Lord who is also explicitly the soul's creator. Protestantism does not seem a likely source of this inhibition on the soul's voicing of a relation that proves, when it is voiced, to be one of submissiveness and dependency. Reticence, however, must certainly have been ingrained as a feminine imperative by Parr's experience—and reinforced by her experience as Henry's wife.³²

One particular augmentation of the Lord's lordship and the soul's submissiveness proves most suggestive of all among Parr's reworkings of Whitford. It offers a self-contained vignette of the character of the relationship that becomes, ultimately, a structuring principle for the text of the Prayers or Meditations. Whitford's original runs: “Comforte and glad thy lover … to be so well contentyd and pleased that he wold as gladly be holden lest as other wolde be holden moste” (Folowynge, fol. xciii verso). As Parr rephrases in her genderless first person, she correspondingly recasts the soul from a lover to a servant: “O lorde, grant that I thy servaunt maie bee as well content, to be taken as the least, as other bee to be greatest” (Prayers, sigs. Bi verso-Bii recto). Very visible here, such local tendencies in self-reference to style the soul as the creation and the utter dependent of its Lord in fact emerge as the comprehensive means by which Parr makes the larger whole of the Prayers or Meditations to return full circle upon itself. Quoting the opening and closing sentences documents the exactness of the thematic and tonal reprise that gives shape to Parr's volume. Here are her opening lines:

Most benigne lord Jesu, grant me thy grace, that it maie alwaie worke in me, and persever with me unto the ende.

Graunte me, that I may ever desyre and will that, which is most p[l]easaunt, and moste acceptable to the.

Lorde, thou knowest what thyng is moste profitable, and most expedient for me.

Geve me therefore what thou wilte, as muche as thou wilte, and whan thou wilte.

Do with me what thou wilte, as it shal please the, and as shal be most to thy honour

(Prayers, sig. Aii recto-verso).

And here is the prayer that closes out Parr's use of the Imitatio materials:

Teache me lorde, to fulfyll thy wyll, to live meekely, and worthilye before the, for thou arte all my wysedom and cunnyng, thou art he, that knowest me as I am, that knewest me before the worlde was made, and before I was borne or brought into this lyfe: to the (O lorde) be honour, glory, and prayse for ever and ever

(Prayers, sig. Di recto-verso; cf. Folowynge, fol. lxiv verso).

The stylistic and structural dominance that Parr accords in her Prayers or Meditations to a lyrical posture of utter subjection, the forfeiting of personal will to an all-powerful and all-knowing Lord, proves traceable to an experiential source through similar turns of phraseology in her private letters. Henry chose Katherine for his queen, and there was no resisting this, although at the time she passionately hoped to marry Lord Thomas Seymour, the younger of the future Edward VI's two uncles. When Henry was safely dead in January 1547, Parr dared to breathe life into her former feelings in a letter she wrote later that year to Seymour:

As truly as God is God, my mind was fully bent, the other time I was at liberty, to marry you before any man I know. Howbeit, God withstood my will therein most vehemently for a time, and through his grace and goodness, made that possible which seemed to me most impossible; that was, made me renounce utterly mine own will, and to follow his will most willingly. It were long to write all the process of this matter; if I live, I shall declare it to you myself. I can say nothing but as my lady of Suffolk [Katherine Willoughby] saith, “God is a marvellous man.”

By her, that is yours to serve and obey during her life,

Kateryn the Quene, K.P. [her maiden initials]³³

Not only the opening and closing of the Prayers or Meditations reverberate in this letter, but also one of the lyric ejaculations from the body of the work: “O lorde Jesu, make that possible by grace, that is to me impossible by nature” (Prayers, Aiv verso; Folowynge, fol. lxxxvii recto). What had seemed an impossibility to Parr “by nature”—marriage with Henry—became not only a possibility but a lived actuality because, in her words, “God withstood my will therein most vehemently for a time, and … made me renounce utterly mine own will, and to follow his will most willingly.” In a context that astonishes the reader with its candor, she represents this treatment as God's “grace and goodness.” As she alludes to her marriage with Henry, the interchangeability of all-powerful agents—Parr's “lords” in upper and lower case—blurs so entirely that, at the level of consciousness where vocabulary choice occurs, the phraseology of her most intimate surviving letter on her own experience (“made that possible which seemed to me most impossible”) repeats that of the generalized voice of the soul in her Prayers or Meditations (“make that possible … that is to me impossible”).

There is also the arresting oddity of the observation made by Parr's close woman friend and an equally staunch Protestant: “God is a marvellous man.”³⁴ That this observation stuck in Parr's mind and was ready to hand for quotation puts us, in turn, on the alert for other experiential convergences of the divine and human in Parr's literary remains. We duly discover an even nearer analogue to the lyric posture adopted by the soul of Prayers or Meditations in a letter Katherine wrote as regent to Henry during his summer in France:

Zeal and affection forceth me to be best content with that which is your will and pleasure. Thus love maketh me in all things to set apart mine own convenience and pleasure, and to embrace most joyfully his will and pleasure whom I love. … I make like account with your majesty as I do with God for his benefits and gifts, … acknowledging myself … not able to recompense the least of his benefits, in which state I am certain and sure to die, yet I hope in his gracious acceptation. … Even such confidence have I in your majesty's gentleness, knowing myself never to have done my duty as were requisite and meet for such a noble prince, at whose hands I have found and received so much love and goodness, that with words I cannot express it.

Lest I should be too tedious to your majesty, I finish this my scribbled letter, committing you to the governance of the Lord with long and prosperous life here, and after this life to enjoy the kingdom of his elect.

From Greenwich, by your majesty's humble and obedient servant,

Kateryn the Queen, K. P.³⁵

“I make like account with your majesty as I do with God for his benefits and gifts. … Even such confidence have I in your majesty's gentleness,” writes Katherine. Her letter forthrightly supplies the identification of the two lords that had hitherto only been an implication of phrasal repetitions. Here at close range we glimpse the effectual meaning of “God is a marvellous man” in this queen's experience. God's demands on her and Henry's have been all of a piece. In her own words, “love maketh me in all things to set apart mine own convenience and pleasure, and to embrace most joyfully his will and pleasure whom I love.” But she who lost her life thus also found it, in a succession of new selves as Henry's queen, as an early Protestant convert, and ultimately even as Thomas Seymour's wife. Much outstripping the male identification entailed in her bid for authorship, male domination brought Katherine in her lifetime what she does not scruple to term “so much love and goodness, that with words I cannot express it …, acknowledging myself … not able to recompense the least of his benefits, in which state I am certain and sure to die.” Who is the ‘he’ of “his benefits”? How much can we suppose the ambiguity to matter in her experience of Henry and of God? Such intensifications in the intertextuality linking Prayers or Meditations with Parr's familiar letters allow us to conclude that the addresses of love and submission from a soul that deliberately acts to style itself “creature” and “servant” rather than “man” do not only universalize but also personalize the speaker in feminine terms.³⁶

Nor do the ramifications of intertextuality stop here. In the mayor's office of the town of Kendal, Cumbria, there is preserved, in a silver casing, a unique and tiny volume (page size, 1.75 by 2.25 inches) in Katherine Parr's handwriting. This is a further abridgment, by one-third, and a very intensive resequencing of the printed text of Prayers or Meditations. An inscription records that Parr presented this miniature book as a gift to an unspecified Mistress Tuke, one of three daughters of Sir Brian Tuke, himself a secretary to Henry VIII.³⁷ In this redaction prepared by hand in a single copy for a woman friend, we are given the private and personal version of Prayers or Meditations, potentially quite a different text from the longer official publication. What are the salient differences? We find generic masculine references dwindling to a residue of two—one being the psalmic echo, “perfeite man”—while the figuration of the lyrical soul, the “I,” as a loving dependent and subordinate is retained and even sharpened by the shortening and reordering of the text. The most notable feature of Mistress Tuke's version, however, is its ending. Parr works a major variant on the structural circularity of her published Prayers or Meditations. Beginning, like the longer version, “Most benigne Lorde Jesu, graunt me … yt I may ever desire and will that which is moste acceptable to the,” the short text concludes with the soul's longing to be united with Christ. In this new ending, significantly, Parr takes care to avoid the rapture of a solitary contemplative by excerpting from Whitford a tissue of biblical echoes—Romans 8:21, Psalm 9:2, 1 Corinthians 4:28, Matthew 25:34—that clearly situate this marriage in a heavenly afterlife and enlarge it to all chosen souls. “Whan shall I bee clerely delyvered from the bondage of synne,” her ending asks. “Whan shall I, Lorde, have only mynde on the and fully be glade and mery in the? Whan shalt thowe bee all in all and whan shall I be with the in thy kyngdom that thou hast ordeyned for thyne electe people from the begynynge?”³⁸

At first glance it is almost irresistibly tempting to infer that the spousal climax given to the overarching themes and tones of the soul's creaturely dependency was shaped by Parr for Mistress Tuke as a devotional reinforcement of her feminine social identity. Just at this point, however, a corrective issues from the phraseology of the familiar letters to belie the easiness of any such stereotypic inference about gendering. Parr's letter to Henry in France concludes by “committing” her royal consort “to the governance of the Lord …, and after this life to enjoy the kingdom of his elect”—a benediction tonally but not substantively modified in the concluding cadence of Mistress Tuke's version: “whan shall I be with thee in thy kyngdom that thou hast ordeyned for thyne electe.” As Parr configures the condition and attitude of the soul—the “I”—in her Prayers or Meditations, her language works delicately and ceaselessly to mediate between universalizing and feminizing tendencies. Significantly, too, this mediation operates as surely in the longer text published with royal authorization as it does in the condensed private version made for Parr's woman friend. Keith Thomas has aptly remarked on how mysterious still remain many aspects of the energizing force of Protestantism in the lives and personalities of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Englishwomen.³⁹ In our ability to read Queen Katherine Parr, however, we are perhaps in a somewhat more favorable situation. With help from her familiar letters, we can observe her at work in both versions of her Prayers or Meditations as she conjointly authors a paradigm for the private devotion of early English Protestants and a chapter of her spiritual and human autobiography.

Notes

1. Important statements include Christiane Makward's “To Be or not to Be … A Feminist Speaker,” Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Members of Workshop 9's “For the Etruscans: Sexual Difference and Artistic Production—The Debate over a Female Aesthetic,” and Carol Gilligan's “In a Different Voice: Women's Conceptions of Self and of Morality,” all collected in The Future of Difference, ed. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (Boston, 1980), 95-105; 128-156; 274-317.

2. Relevant recent work in English includes Keith J. Egan's “Teresa of Jesus: Daughter of the Church and Woman of the Reformation” and Ciriaco Morón-Arroyo's “‘I Will Give You a Living Book’: Spiritual Currents at Work at the Time of St. Teresa,” 69-91 and 95-112 respectively in Centenary of St. Teresa, ed. John Sullivan O.C.D. (Washington, D.C., 1984); Paul J. Smith's “Writing Women in Golden Age Spain: St. Teresa and María de Zayas,” Modern Language Notes, 102 (1987): 220-240; and Victoria Lincoln's Teresa, A Woman, ed. Elias Rivers and Antonio T. de Nicolás (Albany, N.Y., 1984).

3. On these erudite women, see Margaret L. King, “Book-Lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance,” and Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Learned Women of Early Modern Italy: Humanists and University Scholars,” 66-90 and 91-116, respectively, in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia LaBalme (New York, 1980); also Albert Rabil, Jr., Laura Cereta, Quattrocento Humanist (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts Series, 1981).

4. The works of several of these women poets saw contemporary publication: Colonna's Rime in multiple editions beginning in 1537; d'Aragona's Rime in 1547 and her narrative poem, Il meschino d'il guerino, in 1560; Stampa's Rime in 1554; Franco's Terze rime in 1575 and her letters in 1580; du Guillet's Rymes in 1545; and Labé's Euvres in 1555. For this bibliographical information I have used the valuable Continuum Dictionary of Women's Biography, comp. and ed. Jennifer S. Uglow, rev. ed. (New York, 1989).

5. On Stampa, see Frank J. Warnke, “Gaspara Stampa: Aphrodite's Priestess, Love's Martyr,” in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens, Ga., 1987), 3-21; on Franco, see Sara Maria Adler, “Veronica Franco's Petrarchan Terze Rime: Subverting the Master's Plan,” Italica, 65 (1988): 213-233; on Labé, see Anne R. Larsen, “Louise Labé's Débat de Folie et d'Amour: Feminism and the Defense of Learning,” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 2 (1983): 43-55, as well as François Rigolot, “Gender vs. Sex Difference in Louise Labé's Grammar of Love,” and Ann Rosalind Jones, “City Women and Their Audiences: Louise Labé and Veronica Franco,” 287-298 and 299-316, respectively, in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago, 1986).

6. See, for example, Dennis J. McAuliffe, “Neoplatonism in Vittoria Colonna's Poetry: From the Secular to the Divine,” in Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler and Olga Z. Pugliese (Ottawa, 1986), 101-112; Joseph Gibaldi, “Vittoria Colonna: Child, Woman, and Poet,” in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Wilson, 22-46.

7. For various positions on the degree of gendering in Teresa's works, see Sonia A. Quitsland, “Elements of a Feminist Spirituality in St. Teresa” and Ciriaco Morón-Arroyo, “Saint Teresa of Jesus: The Human Value of the Divine,” in Centenary of St. Teresa, ed. Sullivan, 19-50 and 401-431 respectively; Joseph F. Chorpenning, “The Image of Darkness: Spiritual Development in the Castillo interior,” Studia Mystica, 8 (1985): 45-58; and Vilma Seelaus, “The Feminine in Prayer in The Interior Castle,” Mystics Quarterly, 21 (1987): 203-214.

8. For a vigorous critique of this ahistorical reductivism, see Elise Boulding, The Underside of History: A View of Women through Time (Boulder, Colo., 1976), esp. chap. 1.

9. For a probing discussion of the English situation in the sixteenth century (which, however, restricts itself to poetry writing), see Gary Waller, “Struggling into Discourse: The Emergence of Renaissance Women's Writing,” in Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret P. Hannay (Kent, Ohio, 1985), 238-256. On incipient literary activity—other than translations—by Englishwomen in the later sixteenth century, see Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, N.J., 1987), 87-117. Earlier studies of limits on female expression include Ruth Kelso's Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana, 1956); Joan Kelly's “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” (1977), collected in her Women, History, and Theory (Chicago, 1984), 19-59; and Suzanne W. Hull's Chaste, Silent, and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475-1640 (San Marino, Calif., 1982).

10. See Beilin, “Anne Askew's Self-Portrait in the Examinations,” in Silent But for the Word, ed. Hannay, 77-91, expanded as chap. 2 of Redeeming Eve, 29-47.

11. There have been sensitive, even ingenious, attempts to uncover self-expression between the self-effacing lines of Margaret Roper's literary remains but, in the nature of things, the evidence can only be minimal. See Rita Verbrugge's “Margaret More Roper's Personal Expression in the Devout Treatise Upon the Pater Noster” in Silent But for the Word, ed. Hannay, 30-42, and Peter Iver Kaufman's “Absolute Margaret: Margaret More Roper and ‘Well Learned’ Men” in Sixteenth-Century Journal, 20 (1989): 443-456. More broadly relevant are Diane V. Bayne's “The Instruction of a Christian Woman: Richard Hyrde and the Thomas More Circle,” Moreana, 45 (1975): 5-15, and Francis G. Murray's “Feminine Spirituality in the More Household,” Moreana, 27-28 (1957-1958): 92-102.

12. STC 23954.7-23598. There is a modern edition of Lady Margaret's translation: The Earliest English Translation of … De imitatione Christi, ed. John K. Ingram, EETS e. s. 63 (London, 1893; rpt. 1973), 259-283.

13. The young Elizabeth's work, too, saw eventual publication under the title A Godly Medytacyon of the Christen Sowle, in four editions between 1548 and 1590 (STC 17320-17322.5) and a fifth printing in Thomas Bentley's The Monument of Matrones (1582), an anthology of religious works written or translated by women (STC 1892). There is a modern edition as well: The Mirror of the Sinful Soul: A Prose Translation from the French … made in 1544 by the Princess (Afterwards Queen) Elizabeth, ed. Percy W. Ames (London, 1897). For a discussion of the princess Elizabeth's translation, 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, ed. Hannay, 66-72.

14. Beilin, Redeeming Eve, xxi. This useful survey history finds, however, only minimal room (72-75) for my present subject, Katherine Parr.

15. Helen C. White, Tudor Books of Private Devotion (Madison, 1951), 28; William P. Haugaard, “Katherine Parr: The Religious Convictions of a Renaissance Queen,” Renaissance Quarterly, 22 (1969): 355.

16. C. Fenno Hoffman, Jr., “Catherine Parr as a Woman of Letters,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 23 (1959): 354.

17. John N. King, “Patronage and Piety: The Influence of Catherine Parr,” in Silent But for the Word, ed. Hannay, 47, which also mistakenly specifies the material in question as “Book III (chapters 15-50) of Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ.” Parr selects from chapters 16 to 54, and then from chapter 4 of Book III in Whitford's numbering. Belin reiterates King in brief (Redeeming Eve, 301, n. 29). Cf. the passing mention of the Prayers or Meditations as ostensibly original compositions in Haugaard, “Katherine Parr,” 354-355, and in Anthony Martienssen, Queen Katherine Parr (New York, 1973), 189, 202.

18. See The Lamentacion of a sinner, made by the most vertuous Ladie, Quene Caterin (London, 1547) [STC 4827], its sole modern reprint in The Harleian Miscellany, vol. 1 (London, 1808), 286-313, and my essay, “A Tudor Queen Finds Voice: Katherine Parr's Lamentation of a Sinner,” in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago, 1988), 15-47.

19. For these various biographical particulars, including the reference to Strype, see Martienssen, Queen Katherine Parr, 153-181. The earliest editions of Cranmer's Litany are STC 16019-23.

20. An Exhortation unto Prayer, … Also a Letanie with Suffrages (London, 1544), sigs. Aii verso, Bi verso, Bii recto.

21. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Gender and Genre: Women as Historical Writers, 1400-1820,” in Beyond Their Sex, ed. LaBalme, 153-182; quotation from 154.

22. Hugh Latimer was the most outspoken of ranking mid-century churchmen on the subject of spiritual equality; see Helen C. White, Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature of the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1944), 123; Allan G. Chester's edition, Selected Sermons of Hugh Latimer (Charlottesville, for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1968), which restores suppressed passages in earlier printings and contains a useful introduction; and John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, 1982), 175-176. On Latimer's acquaintance with and influence on Katherine Parr, see Mueller, “A Tudor Queen Finds Voice,” in The Historical Renaissance, ed. Dubrow and Strier, 31-41.

23. J. E. G. de Montmorency, Thomas à Kempis, His Age and Book, 2nd ed. (London, 1907), 231, 230, 233.

24. For fuller discussion, see Sr. M. Augustine Scheele, Educational Aspects of Spiritual Writings (Milwaukee, 1940), 76-95.

25. Although I will be quoting Whitford's version in the wording of the first edition that Parr herself used, notice should be called to Edward J. Klein's careful modernization of the complete text, The Imitation of Christ, From the First Edition of an English Translation Made c. 1530 by Richard Whitford (New York and London, 1943). Chapter numberings in Whitford's first edition undergo some alteration in Klein, where the abovementioned chapters are numbered 6, 7, and 34. University Microfilms has reproduced Whitford's first edition as no. 10104, case 25, carton 148, in its Pollard set.

26. Both volumes are holdings of Cambridge University Library. University Microfilms has reproduced Anne Dyson's copy of the Prayers or Meditations as no. 895, case 5, carton 29, and her copy of the Litany as no. 1110, case 9, carton 49, in its Pollard set.

27. Prayers or Medytacions [STC 4818] (London, 1545), sig. Aviii recto; the corresponding passage in Whitford, The Folowynge of Cryste [STC 23961] (London, 1531?), occurs on fol. xc recto. Subsequent citations of both works are abbreviated Prayers and Folowynge, respectively, and inserted parenthetically in my text.

28. The concern figures centrally in the problematics of contemporary feminism. See, for example, Tillie Olson, Silences (New York, 1978), and Susan Gubar, “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity,” in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel, a special issue of Critical Inquiry, 8 (1981): 243-265. For perspectives on feminine silence in the sixteenth century, see the studies by Hull and Waller cited in note 7 above.

29. See Heinrich Bornkamm's serial exposition of what he terms “the fundamental axioms of evangelical belief”—“by faith alone,” “by grace alone,” “Christ alone,” Scripture alone”—in The Heart of Reformation Faith, tr. John W. Doberstein (New York and Evanston, 1965), 16-44; and, for fuller discussion, Brian A. Gerrish, Grace and Reason: A Study in the Theology of Luther (Oxford, 1962).

30. The Imitatio Christi is itself redolent with biblical echoes and allusions, a feature inadequately annotated in the many English-language editions that have appeared. Parr thus further intensifies an already prominent strain in her source. For some pertinent remarks on the quotient of scripturalism in à Kempis's text, see de Montmorency, Thomas à Kempis, 174-180.

31. For suggestive discussion of a female poet's manipulations of grammatical gender in French, a language far richer than English in grammatical gender markings, and in a totally different genre, the love sonnet, see Rigolot, “Gender vs. Sex Difference in Louise Labé's Grammar of Love,” in Rewriting the Renaissance, ed. Ferguson, Quilligan, and Vickers, 287-298.

32. John Foxe preserves a narrative of a serious estrangement between Katherine and Henry that traced directly to her behavior in speaking. The episode can be dated to the summer of 1546, eight months after the Prayers or Meditations appeared in print. As the king showed mounting irritation at the queen's outspokenness in theological discussions with him, her enemies—powerful religious conservatives like Stephen Gardiner and Thomas Wriothesley—sought to bring her down with imputations of heresy. Parr, warned only at the last moment of her mortal danger, managed to save her life and reinstate herself in Henry's favor by declining to rise to bait he had set for her. He asked her to resolve doubts he had conceived about a point of theology. She demurred, referring her judgment “in this, and in all other cases, to Your Majesty's wisdom, as my only anchor, supreme head, and governor here on earth, next unto God, to lean unto.” “Not so,” retorted Henry. “You are become a doctor, Kate, to instruct us (as we take it), and not to be instructed or directed by us.” The queen, according to Foxe, responded as follows: “If your majesty take it so, then hath your majesty very much mistaken me, who have ever been of the opinion, to think it very unseemly, and preposterous, for the woman to take upon her the office of an instructor or teacher to her lord and husband; but rather to learn of her husband, and to be taught by him. And whereas I have, with your majesty's leave, heretofore been bold to hold talk with your majesty, wherein sometimes in opinions there hath seemed some difference, I have not done it so much to maintain opinion, but rather to minister talk, … that I hearing your majesty's learned discourse might myself receive profit thereby; wherein, I assure your majesty, I have not missed any desire in that behalf, always referring myself in all such matters to your majesty, as by ordinance of nature it is convenient for me to do.” Hereupon, according to Foxe, Henry exclaimed: “And is it even so, sweet heart? And tended your arguments to no worse end? Then perfect friends we are now again, as ever at any time heretofore.” This narrative climaxes the account of Parr in The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. Stephen Reed Cattley (London, 1843-1848), 5:559-660.

33. “The Queen's letter from Chelsea to my Lord-admiral … of her former loves,” transcribed in Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, rev. ed. (London, 1866), 2:445-446.

34. Katherine Willoughby, duchess of Suffolk, may be best known as the generous patroness of Hugh Latimer's last years. As one of the highest-ranking nobility to go into voluntary exile during the Marian persecutions, she, like Parr, receives a narrative of her own in Foxe's pages (Acts and Monuments, ed. Cattley, 8: 569-576.

35. Transcribed from Strype (Memorials, 2:331-332) in Strickland, Lives of the Queens, 2:419.

36. For discussion of a precedent in English, a century earlier, for using “creature” and “servant” to inscribe the first-person subject of feminine devotion, see my essay, “Autobiography of a New ‘Creatur’: Female Spirituality, Selfhood, and Authorship in The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Women in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse, 1986), 155-172.

37. DNB, “Tuke, Sir Brian (d. 1545).”

38. Queen Katherine Parr's Book of Prayers, transcribed by G. E. Pallant-Sidaway, intro. John Hodgkinson (Kendal, Cumbria, 1980), 28; cf. Prayers, sig. Ci verso, Folowynge, fol. cxxv recto. I gratefully acknowledge Joshua Scodel's gift of this little Kendal publication.

39. Keith Thomas, “Women and the Civil War Sects,” Past and Present, 13 (1958): 42-62. For further recent discussion, see Beilin, Redeeming Eve, chaps. 3-5, 9; and Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640-1660 (Oxford, 1989), chap. 2.