ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the way that one surviving piece of evidence for the life of Dame Katherine Styles leads to fascinating details concerning one early sixteenth-century woman's social and family networks, transitional attitudes towards piety, interest in fashionable goods, reading habits, and concern about the preservation of her heritage for her many children and grandchildren. Katherine Styles produced her last will and testament in 1530, a period in England when religious expression and devotion was in the process of undergoing some major transitions. Testaments produced across the years c. 1525 to 1540 do frequently exhibit a fluctuation between overtly Catholic and apparently Protestant forms of devotion and commemoration. Alongside the apparently proto-Protestant sentiments at the beginning of her will, Katherine's interests in the newer ideologies of the early sixteenth century also seem to be signalled by one of her bequests.
