ABSTRACT
This section contains four prayers by women that date to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. The first is a form of confession, a genre common in Middle English, composed for and/or by a nun. It comes from a manuscript that probably belonged to a nun or to a women’s religious house: the final reference to St Augustine suggests a house of Augustinian canonesses. The second is a prayer attributed to Queen Elizabeth of York, wife of Henry VII: the manuscript in which it appears also contains an account of the birth and christening of Prince Arthur, their eldest son, which lends credibility to the attribution. The prayer is a tender and emotional greeting of Christ in the sacrament of the altar. The third is a translation of a prayer attributed to St Thomas Aquinas made by a precocious Princess Mary Tudor: its cool rationality contrasts with Queen Elizabeth’s affective piety. The final passage is another translation, of a spiritual exercise composed by a beguine from Brabant in the Netherlands, Maria van Oisterwijk, who died in 1547.
