ABSTRACT
Anne Askewe was burned as a heretic in 1546, having been found guilty of denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. Askewe’s place in history has been largely constructed within a narrative that views her first-person accounts of her examinations, and her martyrdom, as being important for the light they shed on the doctrinal struggles and conflicts of the last years of the reign of Henry VIIL1 This understanding of Askewe’s place in history has the effect, however, of placing her within a magisterial Protestant, his torical narrative which traditionally has had no place for a woman speaking in public on matters of faith.2 It is ultimately based on an appropriation of Askewe’s Exam inations, which commenced with the copious prefaces, notes, and conclusions with which John Bale surrounded Askewe’s words in his printed editions of her E xam inations.3 Bale’s additions to Askewe’s testimony implicitly make her words nonauthoritative, almost meaningless, without the polemical framework that his glosses provide for them. Indeed Bale’s edi tions of Askewe’s Exam inations embody a structure similar to that found in sixteenth-century versions of Lollard works, in which the fifteenth-century text is invariably constructed as of the past, as historical, in order to moti vate the need for the polemical glosses and conclusions that its Tudor editors attached to it. These textual framings of Lollard works usually embody a his torical narrative which implicitly demands a complete lack of continuity between the meaning of religious radicalism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a polemic needed to prove that the writings of fifteenth-century religious radicals were recoupable within acceptable categories of magisterial Protestant belief, Lutheran or Reformed, and a construction of the text’s edi tor as its protector and explicator. Placing Askewe’s texts within a similar nar rative framework allowed Bale to claim for himself this editorial role. It enabled Bale to make the meaning of Askewe’s testimony relate directly to
his own endeavor, stripping her words of their potential radicalism and mak ing the culturally valorized role of martyr the authorizing source for his own polemical struggle with his, and her, orthodox opponents.
