Abstract
From her provocative public reading of the Bible in Lincoln Cathedral in the early 1540s to her execution as a heretic in 1546, Anne Askew bears witness to the pivotal roles that reading, speech, and silence played in the religious debates of the English Reformation. Her reading of 1 Corinthians 7 provided scriptural authority for separating from her husband on the grounds of religious differences. She goaded the priests of Lincoln with her public perusal of the Bible, an action she had been expressly warned against and which she maintained silently, in the face of their disapproval, for six days. And she refused to acknowledge as legitimate any part of the Catholic Mass that Christ had not ‘confirmed with hys most precyouse bloude,’ claiming that she received more value from reading ‘five lynes in the Bible’ than from hearing ‘five masses in the temple.’1 In effect, Askew died in defense of her reading practice. Her Examinations negotiate rapid shifts in the cultural, religious, and legal discourses surrounding reading, speech, and silence in the last years of Henry VIII’s reign, illuminating one woman’s trenchant engagement with the Pauline prescriptions governing women’s religious expression in the English Reformation. Moreover, by emphatically insisting on her right to interpret the sacrament of the Eucharist symbolically, Askew also offers us a unique, early example of women’s rhetorical theory. In doing so, I will argue, she provides us with a crucial framework through which to reassess women’s gendered deployments of modesty discourse in the early modern period.
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Notes
Anne Askew, The Examinations of Anne Askew, ed. Elaine V. Beilin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 21, 142. Unless otherwise noted, all references to the Examinations will be to this edition and will be cited by page number in the body of the chapter.
In addition to the sources cited below, see in particular Elaine Beilin, ‘Anne Askew’s Self-Portrait in the Examinations,’ in Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Hannay (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985), 77–91
Elaine Beilin, ‘Anne Askew’s Dialogue with Authority,’ in Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and France, ed. Marie-Rose Logan and Peter Rudnytsky (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1991 ), 313–22
Megan Matchinske, Writing, Gender, and State in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and the Female Subject ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 )
Thomas S. Freeman and Sarah Elizabeth Wall, ‘Racking the Body, Shaping the Text: The Account of Anne Askew in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,’ Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 1165–96
Paula McQuade, ‘“Except that they had offended the Lawe”: Gender and Jurisprudence in The Examinations of Anne Askew,’ Literature and History 3 (1994): 1–14
and Joan Pong Linton, ‘The Plural Voices of Anne Askew,’ in Write or Be Written: Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints, eds Barbara Smith and Ursula Appelt (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001 ), 137–53.
Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Remnants of the Sacred in Early Modern England,’ in Subject and Object in Renaissance England, eds Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 337–45, 337. The phrase ‘iconic decorum’ comes from Julia Houston, ‘Transusbstantiation and the Sign: Cranmer’s Drama of the Lord’s Supper,’ Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994): 113–130, 113.
Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation, ed. Walter Howard Frere, 3 vols (London, 1910), 2:35–36, quoted in David Scott Kastan, ‘“The noyse of the new Bible”: Reform and Reaction in Henrician England,’ in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, eds Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 46–68, 53.
Heidi Brayman Hackel, ‘“Boasting of Silence”: Women Readers in a Patriarchal State,’ in Reading, Society, and Politics in Early Modern England, eds Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 ), 101–21, 102.
Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘Constructions of Women Readers,’ in Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, eds Susanne Woods and Margaret P. Hannay ( New York: Modern Language Association, 2000 ), 24.
Susan Wabuda, ‘The Woman with the Rock: The Controversy on Women and Bible Reading,’ in Belief and Practice in Reformation England: A Tribute to Patrick Collinson, eds Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998 ), 40–59, 41.
See Gerald Bray, ‘Scripture and Tradition in Reformation Thought,’ Evangelical Review of Theology 19.2 (1995): 157–66.
Peter Stallybrass, ‘Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,’ in Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, eds Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002 ), 42–79, 69.
Kimberly Anne Coles, ‘The Death of the Author (and the Appropriation of Her Text): The Case of Anne Askew’s Examinations,’ Modern Philology 99 (2002): 515–39, 531.
Theresa D. Kemp, ‘Translating (Anne) Askew: The Textual Remains of a Sixteenth-Century Heretic and Saint,’ Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 1021–45, 1028, 1033, 1031.
Stephen Orgel, ‘What is an Editor?’ in The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage ( New York: Routledge, 2002 ), 15–20, 15.
Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1350–1589 ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 ), 10.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Spivak Reader, eds Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean (New York: Routledge, 1996), 159, 204.
Danielle Clarke, ‘Nostalgia, Anachronism, and the Editing of Early Modern Women’s Texts,’ Text: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies 15 (2002): 187–209, 197.
Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 33. Cited in Clarke, 194–5.
Of the sixty or so Protestant martyrs in the reign of Henry VIII, only four or five were female. Of those questioned for heresy earlier in Henry’s reign, about one third were women. See Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (London: Routledge, 1993 ), 222 n. 62
and Retha Warnicke, Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 68, 71.
John King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982 ), 25.
Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen (1693). Reprinted in The Female Spectator: English Women Writers Before 1800, eds Mary R. Mahl and Helen Koon ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977 ), 134.
Judith Anderson, ‘Language and History in the Reformation: Translating Matter to Metaphor in the Sacrament,’ in Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamics of Cultural Change in Tudor—Stuart England ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2005 ), 36.
Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1560), ed. Peter E. Medine ( University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993 ), 205.
On silence as a rhetorical strategy see Cheryl Glynn, Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence ( Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004 ).
Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 38, 115.
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© 2012 Patricia Pender
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Pender, P. (2012). Sola Scriptura: Reading, Speech, and Silence in The Examinations of Anne Askew. In: Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008015_3
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