ABSTRACT
Apart from the Examinations which recount her two trials for heresy, Anne Askew’s name has been connected with three works in verse: a paraphrase of Psalm 54, the Newgate ballad, and ‘A Ballad of Anne Askew, intitled I am a Woman poore and Blind. ’ The first two poems appeared respectively in John Bale’s editions of Askew’s First and Lattre Examinations (1546, 1547), but were omitted from the section on Askew in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. ‘The Ballad of Anne Askew’ was entered into the Stationer’s Register in 1624 and printed the same year, although it was certainly in circulation before then, since Thomas Nashe referred to the ballad in 1596 in Have With You to Saffron-Waldron (113). Although Bale attributed the paraphrase of Psalm 54 and the Newgate ballad to Askew, the authorship of the three verses has never been ascertained, nor am I concerned to do so here. What interests me about these verses is the way they position Askew between writer and written, speaker and spoken, thereby foregrounding the structures of appropriations through which we inevitably read the story of the martyr, whether in her own words or in the words of others.
