ABSTRACT
In 1560, Anne Lok published a transla tion of four of Calvin's serm ons on Isaiah 38, prefaced by a ded icato ry epistle to C atherine B randon and follow ed by a so n n e t sequence in tw o parts - five sonnets 'expressing the passioned m inde of th e p en iten t sinner', followed by a longer sequence paraphrasing th e 51st p sa lm .1 It is an u n se ttlin g text in a num ber of ways. G enerically anom alous, it contains the first so n n e t sequence n o t on ly to be w ritten in English, b u t to com bine the Petrarchan genre of th e sonnet sequence w ith th a t of psalm p ara phrase. C om piled by a m iddle-class w om an from the co m m u n ity of P ro testan t exiles in Geneva, it em erges from beyond th e English court, in con trast to th e tex ts of aristocratic w om en su rround ing C atherine Parr w hich form the m ajor precedent for w om en's pub lica tion in England before 1560. The tex t's strangeness disturbs th e p rac tice w hich underp ins criticism on early m odern w om en's w riting of th is period: characterizing w om en 's tex tu a l activ ity in term s of a restric ted class of aristocratic au thors, in a secondary or derivative re la tionship to m ale-au thored texts, and confined to religious genres and topoi. Lok's tex t draws u p o n largely m ale-au thored French C alvinist and Anglo-G enevan trad itio n s of psalm paraphrase to co n struct a tex t in w hich tex tua l v irtu o sity works to ou t-trope th e sonnets and psalm paraphrases of T hom as W yatt, Lok's m ain poetic predecessor in England.
