ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the fact that Anne Lock lived in both Mary's London and Calvin's Geneva between 1553 and 1559, and it argues that her volume engages with both these cultural contexts. It describes her readers as conflicted and confused, and the volume's conceptual dynamism derives from the way it attacks Catholic devotional experiences and seeks to replace them with Reformed ones. The chapter focuses on the Catholic devotional context begins with the simple observation that Calvin's sermons are about Hezekiah's song, a text that was well-known to lay readers from the Office of the Dead, an Office found in the Primer and sung at funerals and anniversary masses. Lock's Epistle' reveals that she understood her translations as a corrective to the Catholic devotional practices revitalised under Mary, and she uses homey parables to threaten and entice readers to abandon those practices and embrace an experience grounded in Reformed soteriology.
