‘In a mirrour clere’: Protestantism and Politics in Anne Lok’s Miserere mei Deus

Abstract

In 1560, Anne Lok published a translation of four of Calvin’s sermons on Isaiah 38, prefaced by a dedicatory epistle to Catherine Brandon and followed by a sonnet sequence in two parts — five sonnets ‘expressing the passioned minde of the penitent sinner’, followed by a longer sequence paraphrasing the 51st psalm. 1 It is an unsettling text in a number of ways. Generically anomalous, it contains the first sonnet sequence not only to be written in English, but to combine the Petrarchan genre of the sonnet sequence with that of psalm paraphrase. Compiled by a middle-class woman from the community of Protestant exiles in Geneva, it emerges from beyond the English court, in contrast to the texts of aristocratic women surrounding Catherine Parr which form the major precedent for women’s publication in England before 1560. The text’s strangeness disturbs the practice which underpins criticism on early modern women’s writing of this period: characterizing women’s textual activity in terms of a restricted class of aristocratic authors, in a secondary or derivative relationship to male-authored texts, and confined to religious genres and topoi. Lok’s text draws upon largely male-authored French Calvinist and Anglo-Genevan traditions of psalm paraphrase to construct a text in which textual virtuosity works to out-trope the sonnets and psalm paraphrases of Thomas Wyatt, Lok’s main poetic predecessor in England. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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