ABSTRACT
U i d women have a Renaissance? Arguing for gender as one crucial fac tor in the differential cultural advances shown by historical eras, Joan Kelly followed up her question a decade ago with negative evidence drawn mainly from literary texts.1 In their depictions of Renaissance court life, women fall gracefully silent as they accede to the place and roles allotted them in men’s discourse. But perhaps Kelly’s secular out look was inadequate to address the complex of social facts. For Renais sance England there is another-even an arguably prior-question. Did women have a Reformation? A collection o f essays recently edited by Margaret Hannay attests that they did, and yet the issues o f female selfaffirmation and self-expression remain vexed.2 A gender differential shows just as clearly in the religious area o f literary production. When they promote the faith o f Protestantism, learned sixteenth-century En glishwomen almost exclusively play the facilitating roles o f patrons, translators, and compilers; they do not author works o f their own. As far as I know, if private letters and transcripts of legal testimony are dis counted, Reformation England can claim nothing over late medieval En gland on the score of original female authorship in prose. Against Julian of N orw ich’s Showings or Revelations o f D ivine Love (short text in 1 3 7 3 , long text after 1393) and the dictated Book o f M argery Kem pe (1436 - 38), English Protestantism might at best hope to set the First and Latter E x aminations o f Anne A skew e (1545-47) as redacted by John Bale, were it not for one notable exception.
