2010/09/01 by Patricia Pender
Arts and Humanities · #Scottish History and National Identity #Historical Studies of British Isles #Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
paper · doi:10.1525/hlq.2010.73.3.507
Focusing on The Examinations of Anne Askew (1546-47), Patricia Pender considers three acts of reading, showing how this process is material and textual, embodied and interpretative. The first is Askew's selective reading of the Christian scriptures, which she uses to confound her Catholic interrogators; the second is Bale's strategic elucydation of Askew, which he uses to place her in a tradition of Protestant dissent; and the third is a late modern critical paradigm that can mourn Askew as the victim of masculinist literary history but that might also reassess her as a sophisticated reader and rhetorical agent in her own right.