Print, Orality and Communications in the Maid of Kent Affair

This article explores the printed and oral communications through which the sixteenth-century holy woman Elizabeth Barton publicised her political prophecies against the Henrician Reformation. Authorship of the primary printed account of Barton's early career has been misattributed, leading scholars to underestimate the number of accounts of Barton's miracles which circulated in her lifetime. This observation leads to an analysis of the media apparatus used by Barton and her adherents, which was an expansion into the political realm of the textual and oral networks through which saints' lives and miracles were publicised in late medieval England.

Scenes of Speaking and Technologies of Writing in More’s Tower Letters

The claim that More wrote several letters from the Tower with a coal may be taken literally, or as an image of powerlessness, or as a reference to Isaiah’s lips touched with a coal by an angel. The coal is an index of how technologies of writing and reports of speaking inform the Tower letters and those surrounding them. The letter to Frith plays upon the difference between heretical textuality and the simple truth of a Christian woman at prayer, as does the letter to Cromwell concerning More’s knowledge of Elizabeth Barton and the exploration of the difference between evidence and hearsay. The scandal of authorship in Margaret Roper’s letter to Alice Alington likewise concerns the play between male and female voices in the text. More’s explication of the fables recited to Lady Alington by Audley emplies out the notion of the author in favor of the voices, male and female, of conscience and love that play out across the written text of the letters the drama of More’s last days.

Reconstructing the Word: the Political Prophecies of Elizabeth Barton (1506-1534)

On 20 April 1534, a twenty-eight year-old Benedictine nun from the convent of St Sepulchre's in Canterbury was hanged at Tyburn alongside her confessor and a number of their associates. The nun was Elizabeth Barton, a former servant from the parish of Aldington in Kent. Barton and her companions were attainted of treason by a Parliamentary Act which asserts that they maliciously opposed Henry VIII's divorce from Katherine of Aragon and “‘traterously attempted many notable actes intendyng therbye the disturbaunce of the pease and tranquyllytie of this Realme.”