Anne Askew

Anne Askew was born of a notable Lincolnshire family and became a Protestant voice of radical reformation at the end of the reign of Henry VIII. According to Bale, Askew was compelled to marry Thomas Kyme as a substitute for her sister’s prior betrothal upon her untimely death. Askew sought a divorce after Kyme drove her from their home for her unorthodox beliefs. It is likely that her vocal criticisms of church policy regarding demonstrations of faith brought her to the attention of the bishops. She was first interrogated by Bishop Bonner and subsequently released before being re-captured. During her second imprisonment, Bishop Gardiner and Chancellor Wriothesley conducted the interrogation and torture, which historians generally attribute to the effort to prove the Protestant leanings of Henry VIII’s last queen. The unusual torture Askew endured as a gentlewoman has been understood to suggest her direct affiliation with the circle of Katherine Parr. In 1546, at age twenty-five, she was burned at the stake as a heretic. She became a significant martyr when John Bale and John Foxe published accounts of her interrogation, imprisonment, and torture. Askew is known almost exclusively from the two narratives she wrote of her interrogations: The first examinacyon (1546) discusses her beliefs and her efforts to frustrate her interrogators; The lattre examinacyon (1547) describes her re-arrest and the judicial torture she endured along with interrogation leading to her execution. John Bale first published her works along with commentary and framing, which supply much of the biographical information about Askew that remains available.

Wondering at Ruins

This chapter explores Spenser’s ambivalence towards the violence of reformation, and its ruination, not just of medieval monasteries, but the lives and legends of saints in monastic manuscripts. It offers a comparative analysis of two texts—William Vallans’s A Tale of Two Swannes (1590) and Spenser’s Ruines of Time (1591)—both written in the aftermath of the 1588 Spanish armada and with England’s war with Spain in the Low Countries ongoing. The chapter shows how both poets use a chorographical focus on the ruins of Roman Verulamium as a frame for their patriotic praise of Anglo-British heroism across history. Yet while both use historical examples of heroism to counter contemporary invasion anxieties in the early 1590s, both poems also reveal British history itself as a battleground between competing catholic and protestant versions of the past. These are tensions foregrounded by each poet’s respective approach to the life of St Alban, Verulamium’s most famous citizen. Vallans follows the medieval, monastic accounts of Alban’s life that are dismissed by John Foxe as ‘Abbeylike additions’ in his post-dissolution, protestant rewriting of Alban’s life in Actes and monuments, and this echoes Vallans’s interest in monastic history and monastic ruins elsewhere in his poem. If St Alban is the site of controversy in A Tale, he is a figure conspicuously absent from Spenser’s poem. The chapter argues for Alban’s shadowy presence in The Ruines of Time nonetheless, pointing to Spenser’s hitherto unacknowledged indebtedness to Gildas’s sixth-century De excidio Britonum and other ‘Abbeylike’ accounts of Alban.

John Foxe's "Rerum in ecclesia gestarum [...] commentarii in Sixteenth Century Polish Translation

This paper is devoted to the Polish translation of John Foxe’s famous Rerum in Ecclesia gestarum on Christian martyrs, authored by a Calvinist writer, printer and composer Cyprian Bazylik. His monumental Historyja o srogim prześladowaniu Kościoła Bożego (1567) was compiled from the works of John Foxe, Jean Crespin and Heinrich Pantaleon, supplemented with Jan van Utenhove’s account of the thrilling odyssey of the members of the London’s Foreign Church led by Jan Łaski. The author aimed at creation of a complete account of the persecuted Church throughout Europe, starting from John Wycliff to 1563. Historyja is the most significant witness of the impact of Foxe’s theological thought and ideas on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.