Prophesying Women and the Gifts of the Spirit

This chapter delineates in greater detail the radical potential of this Puritan spirituality and the profound appeal of radical sectaries to women. This includes the deep respect earned by female partisans, from the Henrician martyr Anne Askew to the centrality of women in the Quaker movement. Along this same trajectory, the mystical side of this spirituality is tracked from the followers of Henrik Niclaes through to the sectarians of the 1640s and 1650s. Data for this chapter comes from material produced by both proponents and detractors of the sectaries. The chapter includes the stories of many individual women and their theologies as well as sectarian communities, essentially fleshing out the promise of the final pages of chapter four.

Bewitching Power: The Virtuosity of Gender in Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr

This paper considers Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger’s play The Virgin Martyr (1622) in light of scientific notions of the female body circulating during the period to illustrate how the performance of martyrdom manifested a performance of gender virtuosity, elevating it to the status of the supernatural or divine. Like well-known female martyrs from the period, such as Anne Askew, the protagonist, Dorothea, takes on characteristically male attributes: she assumes the role of the soldier and defies scientific understanding of the female gender by sealing her phlegmatic “leaky” body and exuding divine heat that defies her cold, wet “nature”. The theatricality of gender reversals in the play, from Dorothea and other characters, illustrates how the act of martyrdom could be interpreted not only as a miraculous performance, a “witness” to the divine, but one built on sensational, seemingly impossible performances of gender.

Talking Books

This chapter explores the printed books of the sixteenth century as ‘talking books’; it also explores how the voice is implicated in the printing process. It focuses on the work of two print-aware authors, John Bale and William Baldwin, who worked with the most influential ‘talking book’ in England in the 1540s: Erasmus’s Paraphrases. It explores Bale’s attentiveness to the physical voice of Anne Askew in his editions of her Examinations (1546, 1547), arguing that he uses print to turn the written form of her oral testimony into a script for oral readers. It attends to Baldwin’s representation of the voices of illiterate working men, medieval magistrates, and an array of untrustworthy characters, including some noisy cats, to create careful ‘listeners’ who are aware of the manipulative authorial voice that lies behind literary voices on the page as well as the risks of affective ‘mishearing’.

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.

Katharina Schütz Zell, Idelette de Bure, and Reformed Women’s Views and Experience of Marriage

The Protestant movement had a significantly positive effect on early modern understandings of marriage, and women of the Reformed tradition participated actively in these changes. Protestants rejected celibacy as a good work to earn God’s favor and elevated marriage as an ideal for Christians, including for clergy. One way that Reformed women expressed their faith was by marrying priests, thus acting on their conviction of Biblical authority (e.g., 1 Tim. 3) over canon law which prohibited clerical marriage. Former nuns, citizens of good reputation, married reformers as expressions of faith. A second way that Reformed women contributed to the new ideal of marriage was by the ways that they managed their households, making these models of hospitality and partnership in following Christ. A number of Reformed women chose exile for their faith and their Protestant husbands. A few, like Katharina Schütz Zell, were articulate in defending their decision to marry priests and their calling to serve as “church mothers.” Some Reformed women, like Anne Askew, demonstrated their loyalty to their faith by rejecting marriage when it came to a choice between their faith and their marriages – or their lives.O movimento protestante teve um efeito significativamente positivo nos começos da compreensão moderna sobre o casamento, e as mulheres da tradição reformada participaram ativamente nestas mudanças. Os protestantes rejeitaram o celibato como boa obra para alcançar o favor de Deus e consideraram o casamento como um ideal para os cristãos, inclusive para o clero. Uma maneira que as mulheres reformadas expressaram a sua fé foi casando-se com sacerdotes, agindo desta forma a partir de suas convicções sobre autoridade bíblica (por exemplo, 1 Tm 3) em oposição à lei canônica que proibia o casamento clerical. Antigas freiras, cidadãs de boa reputação, casaram-se com os reformadores como expressões de fé. Uma segunda maneira que as mulheres reformadas contribuíram para o novo ideal de casamento foi pela maneira como administravam suas famílias, tornando-as modelos de hospitalidade e parceria no seguimento de Cristo. Algumas mulheres reformadas escolheram o exílio por causa de sua fé e seus maridos protestantes. Outras, como Katharina Schütz Zell, defenderam a decisão de se casarem com os sacerdotes e seu chamado para servir como “mães da igreja”. Outras ainda, como Anne Askew, demonstraram lealdade à sua fé ao rejeitar o casamento quando se tratava de uma escolha entre a fé e o casamento - ou suas vidas.