Abstract
As a prominent patron of humanist scholarship and Reformed religion, and the author of several devotional works in her own right, Katherine Parr exerted a significant influence on the English Reformation — as several scholars have begun to explore.1 Yet to date, it is the texts that most legibly bear her authorial signature that have attracted critical attention.2 Parr’s patronage, by contrast, has long been widely celebrated as historical fact and at the same time surprisingly ignored as a social, literary and mechanical process. In the Acts and Monuments (1563), for instance, John Foxe paints a triumphal Protestant portrait of the queen as the period’s ‘only patroness of the professors of the truth’.3 And Parr’s recent biographer Susan James goes so far as to say that Katherine was ‘by conviction, by influence and by actions the first true queen of the English Reformation’.4 According to James Kelsey McConica’s 1965 portrayal of the period, Parr’s generation
found appropriate patronage, not in a Machiavellian Secretary of State, but in a noble lady of irenic temperament and sincere attachment to humanist learning. … It is in her circle, which revives the traditions of her royal predecessors Margaret Beaufort and Catherine of Aragon, that the Erasmian spirit finds new shelter and influential support.5
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Notes
See especially the pioneering work by Janel Mueller, ‘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, eds Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 15–47; ‘Complications of Intertextuality: John Fisher, Katherine Parr and “The Book of the Crucifix”’, in Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, eds Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti (Basingstoke: St Martin’s, 1997), pp. 15–36; ‘Devotion as Difference: Intertextuality in Queen Katherine Parr’s Prayers or Meditations (1545)’, Huntington Library Quarterly: A Journal for the History and Interpretation of English and American Civilization, 3, no. 53 (Summer 1990): 171–97.
Janel Mueller, ed., Katherine Parr: Complete Works and Correspondence (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011).
John Foxe, ‘The Story of Queen Katharine Parr, late Queen, and Wife to King Henry the Eighth: Wherein appeareth in what danger she was in for the Gospel, by means of Stephen Gardiner and others of his conspiracy; and how graciously she was preserved by her kind and loving husband the king’, in Actes and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes, touching matters of the church (London: J. Daye, 1570 [1563]), p. 554.
Susan E. James, Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 280.
James Kelsey McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), p. 201.
Maria Dowling has cautioned against exaggerating Parr’s influence, arguing that her role was more minimal that many scholars presuppose. In ‘The Gospel and the Court: Reformation Under Henry VIII’ she writes: ‘Modern historians have focused on Katherine Parr as the head of reform during Henry’s final years; this is inaccurate, and distorts the true picture of power and influence at court. … Whatever her private virtues, Katherine Parr was not the head of the reform party’ (Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth Century England, eds Peter Lake and Maria Dowling [London: Croom Helm, 1987], pp. 59–60). Dowling targets James Kelsey McConica for ‘grossly exaggerate[ing] the importance of Katherine Parr’ (p. 71, n. 1). She also refers to Anthony Martienssen, Queen Katherine Parr (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973).
John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982) in this context.
Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2009), p. 15.
Julie Crawford, ‘Sidney’s Sapphics and the Role of Interpretive Communities’, English Literary History, 69, no. 4 (2002): 979–1007, at 982.
Franklin B. Williams, ‘The Literary Patronesses of Renaissance England’, Notes and Queries, 207 (1962): 364–6. Williams presented his evidence ‘in order to alert students to new research opportunities’, and in fostering this project he poses several questions of the data he has compiled: ‘Do women writers favor women as patrons? Was the reign of a queen reflected in any general increase in feminine patronage? What kinds of books … were addressed to women?’ (pp. 365–6).
See in particular Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel, eds, Patronage in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).
Andrew Gurr, ed., Patronage and Literature in England 1558–1658: The Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991).
See in particular Ann Baines Coiro, ‘Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer’, Criticism, 35 (1993): 357–76.
Kari Boyd McBride, ‘Sacred Celebration: The Patronage Poems’, in Marshall Grossman, ed., Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), pp. 60–82.
Su Fang Ng, ‘Aemilia Lanyer and the Politics of Praise’, English Literary History, 67 (2000): 433–51.
Lisa Schnell, ‘Breaking “the rule of Cortezia”: Aemilia Lanyer’s Dedications to Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 27 (1997): 77–102.
On Russell, see Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), chapter 4.
Arthur F. Marotti, ‘John Donne and the Rewards of Patronage’, in Patronage, eds Guy Fitch Lytle and Steven Orgel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 207–34. On Herbert, see Michael Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family (London: Routledge, 1988).
Margaret Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Patronage’, ELR [English Literary Renaissance], 12 (1982): 162–79.
Micheline White, ‘The Perils and Possibilities of the Book Dedication: Anne Lock, John Knox, John Calvin, Queen Elizabeth, and the Duchess of Suffolk’, Parergon, 29, no. 2 (2012): 9–27; ‘Women Writers and Literary Religious Circles in the Elizabethan West Country: Anne Dowriche, Anne Lock Prowse, Anne Lock Moyle, Ursula Fulford, and Elizabeth Rous’, Modern Philology, 103, no. 2 (2005): 187–214; ‘Power Couples and Women Writers in Elizabethan England: The Public Voices of Dorcas and Richard Martin and Anne and Hugh Dowriche’, in Framing the Family: Narrative and Representation in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, eds Rosalyn Voaden and Diane Wolfthal (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), p. 305.
Julie Crawford, Mediatrix: Women, Politics and Literary Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2014).
Helen Smith, ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 53–86.
Nicholas Udall, ‘To the Ientel christian reader’, The first tome or volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the newe testament (London: Edward Whitchurch, 31 January 1548) (STC 2854) (separately paginated), B vi v.
William L. Edgerton, Nicholas Udall (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1965), p. 77.
John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, Relating Chiefly to Religion, and the Reformation of it, and the Emergencies of the Church of England, Under King Henry VII. King Edward VI. and Queen Mary I. with Large Appendixes, Containing Original Papers, Records, &c. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), I v 48. James, Kateryn Parr, pp. 228–9. But see Maria Dowling, who argues that although Parr ‘commissioned the translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrases and even employed Princess Mary on the project, she undertook no part of the work herself’ (Dowling, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII, p. 236).
Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 39–40.
Stephen Orgel, ‘What is a Text?’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 24 (1981): 3–6, at 3–4.
Cohen (p. 21) refers here to Philip H. Round’s By Nature and by Custom Cursed: Transatlantic Civil Discourse and New England Cultural Production, 1620–1660 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), p. 155.
There is not the space here to go into this in detail but interesting evidence exists about the use and longevity of this book. See Henry J. Cowell, The Four Chained Books Being the Story of the Four Books ordered to be ‘set up’ in the parish Churches of England (London: The Protestant Truth Society, 1938). John Craig, ‘Forming a Protestant Consciousness? Erasmus’ Paraphrases in English Parishes, 1547–1666’, in Holy Scripture Speaks, eds Pabel and Vessey, pp. 313–59.
Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 135.
Mary Caruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 165–6.
Michael Schoenfeldt, Embodiment and Interiority in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 13.
Melitta Weiss Adamson, Food in Medieval Times (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), p. 67.
See Joan Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500–1700 (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 50–2.
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Pender, P. (2014). Dispensing Quails, Mincemeat, Leaven: Katherine Parr’s Patronage of the Paraphrases of Erasmus . In: Pender, P., Smith, R. (eds) Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342430_3
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