ABSTRACT
O n 24 May 1546, Henry V III’s Privy Council sent two yeomen of the Chamber with “letters to oone [Thomas] Kyme and his wief for their apparance within x [i.e., ten] dayes after receipt.” 1 Had the mat ter been settled simply when they appeared, we might have known little more about the identity of the nameless wife of Thomas Kyme. But this “w ief5 was already well known to the authorities — it was at least her third encounter with the law, including a two-week long imprisonment during which time she was interrogated about her religious beliefs.2 Be cause of her continuing confrontations with conservative ecclesiastic and state authorities connected with the late Henrician court, a particular and contradictory aspect of her identity survives in the various documents re lating to her trials and execution by fire on 16 July 1546 at the age of twenty-five.3 The picture that emerges in some materials produced by the
Anglo-Catholics is that of a recalcitrant heretic who denied the central ten e ts o f th e e s ta b lish e d fa ith , m o st esp ec ia lly th e d o c tr in e o f transubstantiation. In texts and images created by reformist hagiographers, she appears as a Protestant martyr and saint. In keeping with the Protestant condemnation of relics, they do not focus devotion on Askews body as a relic. Rather, in their translation of the woman into sainthood, they replace her bodily remains with textual ones, endowing her identity with more mundane qualities than those typically attributed to medieval saints, but nevertheless claiming for her story the miraculous ability to expose the wickedness of the enemies of reform and to convert the hearer to the right faith.
