Gospelling Sisters "Goinge up and Downe": John Foxe and Disorderly Women

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Gospelling Sisters "Goinge up and Downe": John Foxe and Disorderly Women Author(s): Megan L. Hickerson Source: The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Winter, 2004), pp. 1035-1051Published by: Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20477139Accessed: 17-02-2016 05:14 UTC

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Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXV/4 (2004)

Gospelling Sisters "goinge up and downe": John Foxe and Disorderly Women

Megan L. Hickerson

King' College, University of London

John Foxe's Actes and Monuments is a formative text of English Protestantism, the mar tyrs described within it generally thought to have been intended to serve as prototype English Protestants. However, Foxe's female martyrs, by defying their husbands, fre quently subvert expectations for female virtue, which did not go unnoticed by Cath olic polemicists.While failing explicitly to defend his female martyrs' virtue, Foxe did not intend to advocate female disorder. By conflating his martyrs with the type of the true church described in the book of Revelation, he embedded patriarchal values in his descriptions of disorderly women who are wholly submissive to their heavenly spouse, their defiance of their earthly husbands signaling their marital subjection. Nevertheless, in a niilieu in which women's obedience to spousal authority reflected and was thought crucial to political and social order, women's marital disobedience had the potential to supply a model of political resistance for men and women.

IN A POIGNANT ANECDOTE in his history of the Christian church, the Actes and Mon uments of these latter and perilous dayes (first published in 1563),John Foxe describes the arrest of the young Marian martyr Rose Allin by the heretic hunter Edmund

Tyrrell. Tyrrell's villainy is sexualized by his language, his physical cruelty com

pounded by his verbal attack:

Then that cruell Tirrill taking the candell from her, held her wriest, and the burning candell under her hand, burning crosse wise over the backe thereof, so long till the very sinnowes crackt asunder.... In which tyme of his tyranny, he said often to her: why whore, wilt thou not cry? Thou young whore, wilt thou not cry? &c. Unto which alwayes she aunswered, that she had no cause, she thanked God, but rather to rejoyce. He had, she said, more cause to weepe then she, if he considered the matter well. In the end, when the sinnowes (as I sayd) brake that all the house heard them, he then thrust her from him violently, and sayd: baa strong whore, thou

shameless beast, thou beastly whore. &c. with such lyke vile wordes.1

In Foxe's story of this young Protestant heroine, her persecutor, frustrated in

the face of a woman's strength and defiance, rationalizes her behavior by recategorizing her as sexually deviant. This strategy exemplifies the association

?john Foxe,^4r?es and Monuments of these latter and perilous dayes... (London: John Day, 1563), 1606;

idem,T7ie Ecclesiasticall History contaynyng the Actes and Monumentes of thynges passed in every kynges tyme in this Realme... (London: John Day, 1570), 2:2199-2200; idem, Actes and Monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, happenyng in the Church, with an Uniuersall history of the same... (London: John Day, 1583), 2:2006-7.

1035



1036 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXV/4 (2004)

between female disorderliness-disobedience, assertiveness, eloquence, erudition, independence-and sexual lasciviousness dominating early modern discourses of gender. As has been noted in much recent scholarship, a woman's virtue, honor, and reputation were viewed in early modern England through the lens of her sexual reputation.2 Chastity, silence, and obedience defined female honor while dishonor was defined by the opposite characteristics. Thus as honor was inextricable from chastity, so was the dishonor from sexual deviance. It is not surprising, in this context, that women defiant enough to find themselves on the road to martyrdom were often subjected to sexual insult: women like Allin, the Henrician martyr Anne Askew, or the book smuggler Elizabeth Young, whom Foxe shows being called a whore at least a dozen times during her examinations.

Given the ease with which a woman's credibility could be brought into ques tion through an attack on her sexual honor, Foxe's portrayal of women martyrs is often unexpected. As will be explored further, he frequently shows them disobey ing not just the public authorities, but also, and more problematically, their hus

bands, sometimes leaving them altogether. Foxe's departure from contemporary ideas about virtuous womanhood in his portrayal of these women seems to suggest a tolerance of female subversion of patriarchal authority in conflict both with its strong support in most reformed discourse and with his fellow reformers' concern to counteract the accusation that they encouraged their female converts to marital disobedience. Rather than advocate a tolerance of female disorderliness, however, or attempt to undermine the power relationship within patriarchal marriage, Foxe portrayed his Tudor female martyrs such that their disorderliness itself, while exem plifying godly defiance of unjust political authority, at the same time proved their virtuous adherence to patriarchal principles.

When Foxe began the Actes and Monuments project, English Catholics had already publicly criticized Protestant women for enjoying what were considered inappropriate liberties. In 1554, Queen Mary's confessor and bishop of Chichester, John Christopherson (d. 1558), had warned of the dangers of Protestantism to house hold order, caused by the subversive boldness of female converts to the new faith:

Thus did mens wyves to, that were become systers of the new fraternitye, order their husbandes. For where as the husbande dyd not favoure their secte, then would the wife no longer go to schole with hym in silence, as

Saynt Paule byddeth her, but would boldlye fall to teache hym, and tell

hym of his duety. And many of them were offended with Saynte Paule, that hadde commaunded them, that they shuld holde their peace in the

2For example, Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London

(Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 2, 79. Women did not have to behave in a disorderly manner to become

subject to sexual insult; even the appearance of lightness was thought to signal sexual deviancy and thus

dishonesty. See Carole Levin and Patricia A. SulHvan, eds., Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women

(New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 6; Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlo ttesville: University Press ofVir

ginia, 1992), 23; Linda Woodbridge, Women in the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Wom

ankind, 1540-1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 53.



Hickerson / John Foxe & Disorderly Women 1037

churches. For gladly would they have preached, if they might have bene

suffred, as some of them nevertheless did in corners.3

Miles Huggarde, the Catholic Marian propagandist, had also attacked Protestant women, and specifically female martyrs, in The Displaying of the Protestantes.4 First

accusing Anne Askew of obscenity, Huggarde attributes Protestant women in gen

eral with promiscuity, "whiche wemen are led with divers lustes, ever learning &

never able to attaine unto the truth." Ignorant despite their constant learning, the

very act of "constant learning" is bound to Protestant women's sexual inconti

nence: they are "led with divers lustes, ever learning." Huggarde repeats this con

nection, becoming more explicit: "Were not the sayd wemen ever lerning, &

never able to come to the knowlege of the truth, beyng led with divers lustes,

using their bodies with other men as well as with their supposed husbandes?"5 Like ancient women who followed heretics, the "simpering gosseppes and parottes ... lyke the wanderyng gyllottes," cover their evil lives "under color of sticking to the gospell." This is evidenced by the fact that they-"by saint Mary" -"are con

tented to runne from their husbandes into Germanie, the dongion of heretickes," exile evidently providing "a meete cover for such cuppes."6

Listing a litany of sexually predatory historical women who had brought about

the demise of otherwise good men, Huggarde assures his reader that he does not

distrust all women, praising "matrones, whiche are modest & sobre, obedient to

their husbandes, contented to applie their myndes to the governement of hous holde matters, and to bryng up their children in a goodly ordre." His criticism rather is directed at "suche onely whiche are curious in all matters, especially of that, wherof they have nothing to do."7 This includes religion, but the motives of

these "London ladies & other the lyke" are not always religious: their "scripture mouthes are ready to allure their husbandes to dye in the lordes veritie, because they would fayne have new"-new husbands, not new religion.8 Even worse than these manipulative living women, however, are Protestant women who become martyrs themselves.The decision to die is the worst sort of marital disobedience:

O wicked doughters of heresie, and dames of the devil himselfe. Is this your profession at your mariage daye, to bee at commaundement to your

3John Christopherson,^4? exhortation to all menne to take hede and beware of rebellion... (London: John Cawood, 1554), sigs. T2v-3r. The dangerous inversion of order accompanying Protestantism is high

lighted in the shoulder note aside this passage: "of wives to their husbandes."

4Miles Huggarde (or Hoggarde, 1518??88) was a London hosier and Catholic controversialist

during Mary's reign. Despite his professional obscurity, his Displaying of the Protestantes (London, 1556) is the most successful piece of Marian anti-Protestant propaganda. See C. S. L. Davies, Peace, Print and Protestantism (St Albans: Paladin, 1977), 303.

5Huggarde, Displaying of the Protestantes (London, 1556), fol. 74r. Huggarde is quoting 2 Tim. 3:6?

7. He continues, appaUed: "yea & one of them with anothers woman, taking it (as it is thought) for a

brotherly love...."

6Huggarde, Displaying of the Protestantes, fols. 74v-75v.

7Huggarde, Displaying of the Protestantes, fols. 76v-77r.

8Huggarde, Displaying of the Protestantes, fol. 77.




husbandes? And manye of you contrarye to their wylles maintayne your obstinacie by death.You ought, beynge Christians, and traded up in Christes fayth, rather to spend your lives for the defence of your chastitie, and the lives of your deare husbandes, then in the cause of heresie, the cause of your confusion.9

The decision to die for heresy is doubly criminal for a woman, for she who does this is not just a heretic; she is also a disloyal, disobedient wife as well as a woman

who studies religion, which she should not. The female heretic's violation is not just spiritual; it is also social, in a way that a man's cannot be.

Modern scholarship tends to accept that Elizabethan Protestants regarded Foxe's martyrs, including the women among them, as exemplars of virtuous behav ior. It is clear that the Actes and Monuments was instrumental in the fashioning of post-Reformation English identity, largely through its presentation of prototype Protestants, particularly the community of Marian martyrs.10 In light of the pres sure brought by Catholic criticism, however, and of early modern notions of gender and female virtue, the female prototype emerging from Foxe's work is riddled with problems. In 1981, Carole Levin highlighted the challenge of interpreting Foxe's portrayals of women, concluding that they both reinforced and modified traditional ideas of female virtue, but also that they defy broad categorization.1 1 In 1988, Ellen

Macek tried to pin down Foxe's methodology, arguing that he denied his female martyrs the moral liberation they clearly-to one "reading between the lines" of his text-experienced.12 More recently, Thomas Freeman has suggested that Foxe used judicious editing to either hide or divert attention from the marital troubles of his female subjects, both sustainer of martyrs (like Joyce Hales and Elizabeth Brown) and martyrs (like Anne Askew).13

Macek's and Freeman's interpretations are informed by what we know about early modern misogyny and its implications: Macek's by Foxe's "promotion of the Protestant ethic of patriarchal marriage" and Freeman's by reformers' concern to counteract Catholic accusations that they encouraged women to disobey and leave their husbands. They see his portrayal as predictable, his female martyrs virtuous, intended, according to Freeman, to deflect accusations such as Christopherson's and Huggarde's. If this was Foxe's plan, however, it failed. Enemy polemicists keen

9Huggarde, Displaying of the Protestantes, fols. 77v-78r.

10Mark Breitenberg, "The Flesh Made Word: Foxe s Actes and Monuments," Renaissance and Refor mation/Renaissance et R?forme 25 (1989): 391. See also,William Haller,77ze Elect Nation:The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe's Book of Martyrs (New York: Harper & Row, 1963); Steven Mullaney, "Reforming Resistance: Class, Gender, and Legitimacy in Foxe's Book of Martyrs," in Print, Manuscript and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol

(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 238-39. ^Carole Levin, "Women in the Book of Martyrs as Models of Behavior in Tudor England," Inter

nationaljournal of Women's Studies 4 (1981): 196-205. 12Ellen Macek,"The Emergence of a Feminine Spirituality in the Book of Martyrs," Sixteenth Cen

turyjournal 19 (1988): 63-80.

13Thomas S. Freeman, "The Good Ministrye of GocUye and Vertuouse Women: The Elizabethan

Martyrologist and the Female Supporters of the Marian Martyrs," Journal of British Studies 39 (2000): 8-33.




to exploit female disorderliness to its fullest potential eagerly attacked his female

martyrs as sexually and politically threatening. In 1566, in reaction to the first edi

tion of the Actes and Monuments (1563), Nicholas Harpsfield called it, among other

things, "a seditious book advanced by the evangelical sect against the controlling of

women," describing the female martyrs as unnatural, immoral, and disruptive, and

proving that Protestantism creates chaos, "because against God's law, women are

made to command." If this were not so dangerous, he sneers, it would be amusing

to read "the preposterous account, and prudent inversion of your Foxe." 14 Thomas

Harding, also during the 1560s, highlighted the vulnerability of the Marian women

martyrs to posthumous sexual insinuation by accusing the Guernsey martyr Pero

tine Massey-who was pregnant at the time of her execution-of fornication.15

Despite this sort of reaction to the first edition of the Actes and Monuments, Foxe

did not rein in his disorderly women martyrs in his later editions, and in 1604 the

Jesuit Robert Parsons exploited their vulnerability in an extended attack, typified

by a diatribe against Askew.16 Describing the burning ofAskew and her three male

companions in death, Parsons singles her out: "the Captayne of all," he writes, "was

a yong woman of some 24. or 25. yeres old, named Anne Askue.Who havinge left

the company of her husbandJohn Kime, a gentleman of Lincolneshire,17 did follow

the liberty of the new ghospell, goinge up and downe at her pleasure, to make new

ghospellers and proselits of her Religion."18 Parson's disapproval of Askew's "lib

erty" is immediately evident, and he grows more explicit:

Bale calleth Anne Askue, Iuuvencula, a yong heaffer or steere that abideth

no yoke: he seemeth not to be farre amisse ... she was a coy dame, and of

very evill fame for wantonnesse: in that she left the company of her hus

band, Maister Kyme, to gad up & downe the countrey a ghospelling &

ghossipinge where she might, & ought not ... yt is easily seene, what may be suspected of her lyfe.... Especially, seing that she seemed in a sort to

disdayne the bearing of his name, calling herselfe Anne Askue alias Kime....

By all which, and by the publike opinion and fame, that was of her light

nesse & liberty in that behalfe: every man may ghesse what a Iuuvencula

14Alan Cope (Nicholas Harpsfield), Dialogi Sex contra Summi Pontificatus, Monasticae Vitae, Sancg torum, Sacrarum Imaginum Oppugnatores, et Pseudomartyres (Antwerp: Christophori Plantini, 1566), 747.

15Thomas Harding (1516-72) was a tutor to Jane Grey and warder of New College, Oxford,

during Edward Vis reign. Harding converted to Catholicism upon Mary's inheritance and left England for Louvain during Elizabeth's reign, where he remained until his death. His attack on Massey, whose

unborn baby burst from her stomach during her burning, occurred during a polemical battle with John

Jewel, Elizabeth's bishop of SaHsbury. See Thomas Harding, A Reioindre to M. Jewels Replie against the Sac

rifice of the Masse (Louvain: Joannem Foulerum, 1567), fols. 184v?85r.

16Robert Parsons (b. 1546) was an Oxford feUow (BaHol) until leaving England in 1574 for the

Jesuit seminary in Louvain. He missionized England with Edmund Campion (beginning in 1580), set

up a secret printing press, and encouraged PhiHp II to invade England. Parsons died in Rome (where he was rector of the English CoUege) in 1610.

17Prior to her arrest, Askew had left her husband and ch?dren and sought a divorce.

18Robert Parsons, The Third Part of a Treatise intituled of Three Conversions of England: Conteyninge an

examen of the Calendar or Catalogue of Protestant Saintes, Martyrs and Confessors, devised by Fox (St. Omer,

1604), X,xi, 491-92.




she was & how fitt for Bales pen, & for Fox his Calendar. And the proud & presumptuous answers, quips, and nips, which she have both in matter of Religion, & otherwise, to the Kings Councell, and Bishops, when they examined her, and dealt with her seriously for her amendment: do well shew her intollerable arrogancy.19

While engaging with the details of Askew's fellow martyr John Lascelles's heresy, Parsons ignores her beliefs, focusing instead on her independent movement and "presumptuous" discourse. As she left her husband and used her maiden name as she "abideth no yoke"-she must have been wanton.

Askew's estrangement from her husband is extrapolated into whorishness, but so, importantly, is her wit.The combination of cleverness and questionable conduct was a potent one, and Parsons, like Huggarde before him, sees the two as mutually supportive, as is articulated in his rebuke of the Marian martyr Alice Dryver. Dryver was arrested with another future martyr, Alexander Gouch, with whom, as Foxe admits, she was found hiding in a haystack. Her interrogations in the Actes and Mon uments (of which no manuscript transcripts are extant) are long, and Dryver is repeatedly shown within them silencing her interrogators, which Foxe celebrates in the shoulder notes of the text.While Dryver's examiners are not shown challeng ing her sexual morality, this response-the one that Foxe must have expected-was supplied by Parsons.

Parsons's attack on Dryver, like his reaction to Askew's story, conflates female erudition and promiscuity, beginning with an allusion to an inversion of natural order: two martyrs were burned, "to witt, Alexander Gouch, and Alice Dryver, or rather Alice Dryver and Alexander Gouch, for that the woman was the doctor of the man." Following from and worse than this, the man "was not her husband, but a craftsman dwelling not farre from her ... who using to her house ... was instructed by her in the new ghospell." Gouch and Dryver were found together in a haystack: "no fitt place for such a coople to be conversant together."20 Although Dryver was married, "no mention at all of her husband, but only of this suspitious takinge of them together in the forsaid Haygulfe, wherby a man may easily ghesse, how light a ghospellinge sister she was." It is at this point in the narrative that Parsons both inserts a shoulder note-"Alice Driver a famous doctrix"-and adds: "yet doth Fox

make such accompt of her, and of her rare learninge in the scriptures, as of no one sister more in all his history."21

19Parsons, Third Part of a Treatise, X, xiv-xv, 494-96.

20Foxe admits in the Actes and Monuments that Gouch and Dryver were discovered together in a

haystack. He was doubtless aware of the implications of this. In a copy of a letter from the Bury Assizes

(British Library, Harleian 421, fols. 142r-43r, Dryver is Usted as one of several heretics brought before the Assizes, along with John Dryver, probably her husband. His name, however, disappears from the communication after its first mention, to be replaced by the name Alexander Gouch. Perhaps Gouch,

initially, claimed the name Dryver in an attempt to explain his presence with his female companion in a haystack. Gouch's name, however, is scratched out wherever it appears. It is reasonable to suppose that Gouch and Dryver were involved in an adulterous relationship, but even if they were not, this deduction was inevitably going to be made by Foxe's critics.

21Parsons, Third Part of a Treatise, XV, xxi, 254.




Parsons undermines the credibility of another female martyr by accusing her of promiscuity. Like Askew, Dryver inverts the gender order and is seen to be out from under the authority of a husband who is known to exist but whose absence from the story is noted. Parsons first implies and then establishes the martyr's sexual guilt, building a base upon which to rest the issue of her erudition-or rather, arro gance-and leading up to a challenge of her veracity: "For no man of wisdome will imagine (I weene) that Alice Driver, though she were never so prachant & forward in heresie, and bold through the pride therof, could make such a conference of her selfe ... yet was her bragg of havinge read the Bible throughout, fitt for a woman of her trade."22 Only a woman of Dryver's trade-that, of course, which Parsons implies she plied with Alexander Gouch-would boast of her own learning.

Parsons undermines Dryver's credibility by accusing her of promiscuity,

enhancing his distaste for her by noting, within her supposedly adulterous relation ship, her dominance over her male companion. He is similarly contemptuous in his response to Foxe's story of Margery and James Austoo, a married couple facing per secution together, who, according to Foxe, "answered as truly (God been therefore praysed) as ever did any," especially "the woman, to who the Lord had geven the greater knowledge & more ferventness of spirit."23 Parsons's response is bitter:

MargeryAustow, who called before the Bishop togethear with her husband, as she had byn his teacher and preacher at home; so would she also needs be his speaker in that place, which Fox in like manner signifieth ... yow may perceave how the world went, and that the gray mare was the better horse, which doth well appeare also by her answers, they being most arro gant and insolent, as other such franticke weomen had used before, and so not worth the repeatinge.24

Parsons attaches a shoulder note: "Margery Austow her husbands Maister in ghospellinge."

Foxe's characterization of his female martyrs as assertive, eloquent, and even arrogant was risky and provided ammunition for his detractors. Women unruly within their marriages through adultery, dominance over men, or both were obvious targets for Catholic polemic, but so were very young women, if not explicitly for promiscuity, then for immodesty, generally extrapolated from what Parsons labels arrogance or insolence. Parsons describes Rose Allin of the burnt hand, for example, as a "malepart yonge mayden," her testimony "immodest and insolent,"25 and similar criticism follows Elizabeth Folkes, the youngest of a group of six martyrs, who during the approach to her execution is described by Foxe

22Parsons, Third Part of a Treatise, XV, xxi, 258.

23Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), 1630; idem, Ecclesiasticall History (1570), 2:2214; idem, Actes and Monuments (1583), 2:2019.

24Parsons, Third Part of a Treatise, XIII, xxxiii, 161-62.

25Parsons, Third Part of a Treatise, XII, xxxi, 129 (shoulder note).




dramatically flinging her petticoat into the crowd:26 "And this is proper also to heresie," Parsons responds, "that the yongest and weakest will presume most, especially in woman kynde.... Thus relateth Foxe of his modest mayd."27

Parsons detects within the evangelical movement the corruption of women and an accompanying disruption or inversion of natural-gendered-order. He repeatedly refers to the female martyrs as insolent, presumptuous, arrogant, impu dent. He does not consider the substance of their heresies worth review; his con cern is their disorderly, impudent, immodest, and unwomanly behavior, behavior celebrated by Foxe: "John Fox delighteth every where in the malepart aunswers of his yonge maydens..."; "Thus relateth Foxe of his modest mayd..."; So wryteth Fox ... that this her immodest aunswere ... was by the motion of the spirit of God"; "Be noted the fond malice of Foxe, approving the arrogancy and contumelious speech of this woman."28 While in Parsons's view, as in his predecessor Huggarde's, a woman proved insolent or studious was a woman proved immodest, he had more than mere insolence to work with. Foxe exacerbated the potential for accusations of promiscuity to follow his women martyrs by failing to hide-and even highlight ing-the tendency of some of them to disobey or abandon their husbands.

Pre-Reformation hagiography is replete with stories of adolescent women defying patriarchal authority, usually by refusing to marry. This defiance, often the first step toward martyrdom, demonstrates their commitment to perpetual virgin ity, which in turn proves their faith. Foxe's portrayal of female disobedience, how ever, in which the privileging of virginity is eschewed and the women in question are normally married, does not cohere with this tradition, nor does the poignancy of his stories-unlike in traditional vitae sanctarum-depend upon it. Nevertheless, he not only includes women's disobedience in his presentation of them, but he enhances it, as in the stories ofJoyce Lewes and Alice Benden, both of whom are shown in the Actes and Monuments defying their husbands and behaving in ways potentially leading to slander. Lewes's male religious instructor, to whose house she "resorts continually" and who interferes with her husband's attempts to enforce his will, repeatedly undermines Thomas Lewes's authority.29 Alice Benden is also shown to be recalcitrant in the face of enormous pressure from her husband, who threatened to send her to prison himself (she turned herself in).30 Parsons notes her husband's hostility, and justifies it armed with Foxe's description of her gifting of her handkerchief as a keepsake to a male friend: "Which yet Fox will not deny," Parsons comments, "but that yt had byn more decent for a wife, to have sent & given to her owne husband ... perhaps her husband was not desirous to keep any relique of her." He laments, "this was the spirit of ghospellinge systers in those

26Foxe, Ades and Monuments (1563), 1610; idem, The Ecclesiasticall History (1570), 2:2202; idem, Actes and Monuments (1583), 2:2008.

27Parsons, Third Part of a Treatise, XII, xxvi, 126.

28Parsons, Third Part of a Treatise,Vlll, xlv, 445; XII,xxxi, 129; XIII, xxxi, 160; XXII, xxvi, 126.

29Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), 1619-20; idem, Ecclesiasticall History (1570), 2:2207; idem, Actes and Monuments (1583), 2:2012.

30Foxe, Ecclesiasticall History (1570), 2:2167-68; idem,Ades and Monuments (1583), 2:1981.



Hickerson /John Foxe & Disorderly Women 1043

dayes.'31 Corrupted, like Askew and Dryver, by the "liberty of the new ghospell," Benden was clearly adulterate. Her husband did not betray her, she-in the spirit of a "ghospellinge syster"-betrayed him.

Foxe described a number of his female martyrs in ways inviting such comment: Dryver, found in a haystack with Alexander Gouch; Lewes, who defied her hus band's authority in favor of another man's; Benden, who also rejected her husband's authority, and gave her handkerchief as a keepsake to another man; and Prest's wife of Cornwall, who, like Askew, left her husband and family to live alone and preach the gospel: these women's disorderly behavior is described in the Actes and Monu ments openly and usually without justification, usually, because one breaks the pat tern, serving in this as the exception literally proving the rule. The disorderliness of Prest, one of the last martyrs described in the Actes and Monuments, is justified, in words attributed to her but almost certainly composed by Foxe.32

Prest was executed late in Mary's reign, after examination by Bishop Trou bleville of Exeter. 33 According to Foxe, Troubleville began his questioning of his charge with the issue of her sex, his first words reminiscent of Huggarde's condem nation of "curious" women: "Thou foolish woman ... I heare say thou has spoken certeine wordes of the most blessed Sacrament of the altar.... Thou an unlearned person and a woman.... It is not womans matters, at cardes and towe to be spoken of." He goes on: "Art thou not a mans wife?" Foxe interrupts the narrative:

[T]he Bishop entred into talke of her husband. To whom she aunswered agayne, declaring that she had a husband and children: and had them not.... But standing here as I do ... in the cause of Christ and his truth, where I must either forsake Christ, or my husband, I am contented to sticke onely to Christ ... and renounce the other.

Here, Foxe adds, Prest remembers Christ's words: "He that leaveth not father or mother, sister or brother, husband. &c."34

Nikki Shepardson has recently argued that in his portrayals of female martyrdom in Histoire des vrays tesmoins, published in 1570, the same year as Foxe's second edition of the Actes and Monuments in which he first tells the story of Prest's abandonment of her husband,35 Jean Crespin worked out the tension between the

31Parsons, Third Part of a Treatise, X, xxxii, 510.

32While he may have been influenced by the memories?as many as twelve years old?of wit

nesses, Foxe did not, as he admits, have transcripts of Prest's examinations. There is no record of her examinations in the Devonshire Records Office in Exeter: Bishop Turberville s register is in Chanter 18

(microfiche MFC4/7/3-7); the deposition records of the bishop's Consistory Court are Chanter 855. 33 The bishop of Exeter was surnamed Turberville (from D'Urberville), but Foxe calls himTrou

bleville throughout the Prest story. 34Foxe, Ecclesiasticall History (1570), 2:2249; idem, Actes and Monuments (1583), 2:2050. Christ

never, in the gospels, alludes to the rejection of husbands; rather, his list of kin includes fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, children, and wives. Foxe misleads his reader by inserting "husband" into the list (and removing "wife").The relevant chapters are Matt. 10 and 19, Mark 10, and Luke 14.

35Prest's wife makes only a brief apperance in the first edition o? the Actes and Monuments of 1563. Her interview with Bishop Troubleville, and the information that she had left her family, appear for the first time in the second edition of 1570.




conflicting needs for subversion and order within the persecuted French Huguenot movement. He did this by reconstructing, in his martyrology, women's martyrdoms such that they "were seen as still supporting and illustrating the gendered ideology of Calvinism," one that taught obedience as women's route to salvation. When faced with a female martyr, like Marguerite Le Riche, who in life left her husband (in her case temporarily, only to avoid Easter Mass) rather than be bodily carried to

Mass, Crespin takes care both to elide reference to her husband from the point of her arrest-thus also eliding any articulated clash of obligation between Le Riche's domestic duties and her duty to God-and to assure his reader of her constant devotion to her family.36 Foxe's Prest, on the other hand, very unlike Crespin's Le Riche, fully articulates her abandonment from her family, wich Foxe himself celebrates, tagging her justification of her actions: "The wife renouncing her husband for Christes sake."37 When Troubleville articulates the opinion that inevitably derived from cases like this, "but how chaunceth it that thou wentest away from thy husband? If thou were an honest woman, thou wouldest not have left thine husband & children, and runne about the countrey like a fugitive."38 Prest answers:"as my master christ counselleth me, when I was persecuted in one Citie I fled unto an other," continuing, "I fled not for whoredome, nor for theft, but because I would be no partaker with him & his, of that foule Idoll the Mass."39 Through Prest, Foxe both acknowledges the implications of her separation from her husband and offers scriptural justification for it. Following Christ's instructions, Prest, persecuted "in one Citie," fled to another, proving her allegiance to her heavenly master through her rejection of father, mother, sister, brother, husband. After various tribulations, including examination by Troubleville's Chancellor Blaxton before his concubine and her friends, Prest is pressured once more to recant: "Nay, that will I not.... God forbid that I should lose the lyfe eternall for this carnall and short lyfe. I will never turne from my heavenly husband to my earthly husband: from the fellowship of Aungels to mortall children."40 Prest went cheerfully to her fiery death, says Foxe, "as though she had bene prepared for that day of her mariage to meete the Lambe."41

Foxe writes Prest's death as a heavenly marriage, a microcosmic ceremony reflecting Christ's relationship with the collective body of the elect, his church. His vision of her death as marriage to Christ is informed by his apocalyptic vision, which is in turn heavily influenced by the work ofJohn Bale. Having cut his martyrological teeth on an appropriation of the fifteenth-century Lollard Sir John Oldcastle, Bale was the first editor and publisher of Examinacion(s) of Anne

Askew, released in two books, First Examinacion (1546) and Lattre Examinacion

36Nikki Shepardson, "Gender and the Rhetoric of Martyrdom in Jean Crespin's Histoire des vrays tesmoins" Sixteenth Century Journal 35 (2004): 167-70.

37Foxe, Ecclesiasticall History (1570), 2:2249; idem, Actes and Monuments (1583), 2:2050. 38The reference here is to sexual honesty, which Prest, as is revealed in her answer, understands.

39Foxe, Ecclesiasticall History (1570), 2:2250; idem, Actes and Monuments (1583), 2:2050.






(1547).42 Following their first printing, First Examination and Lattre Examinacion appeared together in four further editions, once with Bale's commentary, in 1547, and three times without it, in 1548, 1550, and 1560. Askew was thus unusual among Foxe's Tudor martyrs in notoriety, having been written as a martyr-and a disorderly woman-years before Foxe came to her.

Bale (unlike Foxe) justifies Askew's pursuit of a divorce with energy and con viction,43 but he is less explicit in his defense of her when Edmund Bonner, the bishop of London, is shown raising the question of her chastity: "There are manye that reade and knowe the scripture, and yet do not follow it, nor lyve therafter." This exchange, as the textual Askew acknowledges in her response,44 addresses her sexual behavior.45 Bale also understood this, and he uses the exchange, not to address Askew's lifestyle, but rather to raise the issue of clerical celibacy: "I marvele that Byshoppes can not se thys in themselves, that they are also no followers of the scriptures. But paraventure they never reade them ... Christ sayd to the hypocrite.

Whye seist thu a moate in thy neybers eye, and consyderest not the great beame that is in thyne owne eye? Luce 6. Matth. 7." He goes on, chastising the clergy for coveting honors and wealth, and then: "If we loked so earnestlye to Christes insty tucyons, as we loke to the popes to be observed, these wolde also be seane to, by acte of parlement, so wele as prestes marriage whom Christ never inhibited."46

Bale does not attempt to defend Askew's chastity, and twice in his immediate response to her self-defense he addresses Bonner's question in the manner of Christ defending Mary Magdalene, signaling the hypocrisy of her accuser(s), and then closing his elucidation: "Godly ded thys woman in defendynge here her innocen cye." Why? Not because she is chaste, but rather, "For S. Peter sayth, i. Petri 4. Se that non of yow suffer as an evyll doer. But in your harde sufferynges, commit your sowles unto god with wele doynge, as unto your faythfull creator."47 In his next elucidation, again following hard upon the heels of Bonner's implication but oth erwise without contextual cause (this elucidation follows the description ofAskew being pressured to sign an orthodox confession), he writes: "Thys godlye woman

42 Anne Askew's autobiographical accounts of her examinations were first edited and pubHshed by John Bale as The First Examinacion of the worthye servaunt of god Mastres Anne Askewe the yonger doughter of Sir Wyllyam Askewe knyght of Lyncolne shyre/ latelye martyred in Smithfelde by the Romysh popes upholders (Marpurge: Hessen, 1546); and The Lattre Examinacion of the worthye servaunt of God mastres Anne Askewe the yonger doughter of Sir Wyllyam Askewe knyght of Lyncolne shyre, latelye martyred in Smithfelde by the wycked synagoge of Antichrist (Marpurge, 1547).

43Bale argues that Askew was a good wife, who bore her husband, John Kyme, ch?dren, but that because Kyme forced her from their home she was entitled to leave him according to 1 Cor. 7. Bale goes on to argue that as Askew was forced to marry against her w?l, her marriage was not strictly lawful, and that in any case she could not have thought Kyme (who as a CathoHc hated God in his role as the archi tect of marriage) worthy of their marriage (Bale, Lattre Examinacion, fol. 15).

44Bale, First Examinacion, 34v. Wh?e Bale claims that Askew wrote the Examinations herself, no

manuscript of them remains extant, and Foxe used one of Bale's editions as his source. It cannot be assumed that Askew wrote the accounts?thus my reference to the "textual" Askew.

45In context, a woman's "honesty" is her chastity, and her "conversation" her moral behavior.

46Bale, First Examinacion, fols. 34v-35r.

47Bale, First Examinacion, fol. 35r.




wold corrupt her fayth with no soche beggerye, least she in so doynge shuld admit them and their pope to sytt in her conscience above the eternall God.... A vyrgyne was she in that behalf, redeemed from the earthe and folowynge the lambe, and havynge in her forehead the fathers name written."48

Bale's description ofAskew's virginity is echoed in the work of his immediately preceding the First Examinacion in chronology of publication, Actes of the English Votaryes, in which he describes "true vyrgynyte" as "a fayth uncorrupted, or a beleve governed by the onlye worde of God without all superstycyons of men."49 Of this virginity alone was Mary commended, as he also argues in the Image of both churches (1541-47), an exegesis of the New Testament book of Revelation, which he was writing when Askew died.50 In this work he explores the contrast between spiritual and physical virginity in discussion of Revelation 14, in which it is written that the redeemed are "not defiled of woman for they are virgins":

Never is the maydenhede of the soule lost, tyll erroniouse doctrine be received from the messengers of Antichriste the Byshoppes and Hipo crites. The virgyns, or uncorrupted belevers do folow the lambe wherso ever he become. They go after Christe, that belevinge his worde, doeth fashion their lyves unto it ... the spirit of the Lorde hath purifyed their hartes throughe faythe.51

Askew should be contrasted, as "true sylver" is to "rustye yron," to the false saints who earn their status through a rejection of marriage.52 Sectaries-priests, nuns, monks, saints-know nothing of "true vyrgynyte" because "they chefelye depende upon mennys tradycyons and rules." Like Mary, Askew is innocent, not because she has lived a physically chaste life, but because she has committed her soul to God, which is evident in her rejection of"soche beggarye" -the man-made tradi tions of the anti-Christian church. This makes her sexual history irrelevant, and

makes her chaste, even a virgin. Bale's description ofAskew's spiritual virginity takes place in the context of his

apocalyptic belief, as expressed in Image of both churches. As he claims in the opening paragraph of the preface to First Examinacion, her story is exemplary of the truth of Revelation's prophecy of the "horryble persecucyon of Antichrist" against Christ's true church as well as evidence of the irnminence of Christ's return, his victory over

Antichrist, and the "lattre judgement daye." Askew's is one of the martyred souls described in Revelation 6, "kylled for the worde of God, and for the testimony whiche they had," and given "long whyte garmentes ... verye large and comelye," which spread upon them "a full innocencye, perfyghtnesse, and cleareness."53 Bale

48Bale, First Examinacion, fol. 37.

49John Bale,The Actes ofEnglysh votaryes, comprehendynge their unchaste practices and examples by all ages (Wesel, 1546), fol. 5r. Bale, in describing Mary's virginity, cites Luke 1.

50John Bale, The Image of both churches, after the most wonderful and heavenly revelaci?n of Sa?nete John the Evangelist (London: John Wyer, 1550), 2:sig. 1.5r.

51Bale, Image of both churches, 2:sig. 1.4v-5r.

52Bale, Lattre Examinacion, fol. 7

53Bale, Image of both churches, l:sigs. F8v, Glr.




evokes the image of these gowns in the First Examinacion, in the context ofAskew's refusal to submit to Bonner:

Hys rBonner's] sekynge was here, to make her to worshyp the first beast, whose deadlye wounde is healed agayne Apoc. 13. But she wolde not so have her name [e]raced out of the lambes boke of lyfe.Apoca. 20. Rather wolde she contende to the ende, hopynge by the myght of hys sprete, at the last to overcome, and so to be clothed wyth the promysed whyte aparell,Apoca. 3.54

To Bale, the white garments reflect the spritual purity of the elect clothed in them: they are an "aparell of innocencye, worne only by those whose "workes were pure and cleane before God, risynge onlye of fayth, and were never defyled wyth the fylthy tradycions of men."55 Large enough to cover the old deformities of those

wearing them, the gowns are made "whyte in the preciouse bloude of the Lambe," by those "belevyinge to be puryfied by the meryte of his death." Askew and others clad in them are "accepted, taken, and allowed for the cytezens of heaven."56

Bale alters the gowns described in Revelation to fit his martyrs, removing

fleshly chastity from the innocence bestowed and symbolized by them, and thus reconciling human sexuality to the idea of purity, saying of the elect: "though con cupiscence dwelle in them they shall desyre none evyll."57 This sort of modification is typical of Bale, and is echoed in his paraphrase of Revelation 14, which describes the forty-four thousand virgins, redeemed from earth, undefiled by women.58 As

with the innocence of the begowned martyrs, Bale transforms the virginity of the redeemed from a physical state into a spiritual one: the virgins have protected their faith from "straunge doctrines," and "prophane worshippinges"; the "spousage of their soules" has been "broken by no fylthye tradicions of men," or "very whore dome in the spirite";59 they are married, "chast virgine[s] unto Christ," like Askew with the "maydenhede of the soule" intact. In Bale's paraphrase, physical virginity disappears as an exalted state, the purity described in Revelation becoming, instead, a solely spiritual condition.

Foxe and Bale were great friends, and shared a similar apocalyptic belief. Bale's influence on Foxe's martyrology is extensive, including in the construction of the

martyrs-evidence of the imminence of the last days-as in spousage to Christ.The white garments of Bale's Revelation, covering Christ's brides with their concupis cence intact, permeate the Actes and Monuments, and Foxe, for and through his male

martyrs as well as females ones, visualizes and frequently articulates their journeys toward martyrdom as betrothals, and their deaths as moments of marriage or marital consummation. The rhetoric of marriage used in this respect does not originate

54Bale, First Examinacion, fol. 35v.

55Bale, Image of both churches, l:sig. D8v

56Bale, Image of both churches l:sigs. D8v, H2v; Bale, Lattre Examinacion, fol. 61r.

57Bale, Image of both churches, l:sig. H3r.

58Bale, Image of both churches, 2:sig. fBr. 59

Bale, Image of both churches, 2:sig.glr.




with Foxe, but it does contextualize his ability to portray imperfect women as per fect, disorderly women as martyrs. Prest is exemplary: her testimony provides a backdrop against which to consider his acceptance and portrayal of the life choices of Askew, Lewes, Benden, Dryver, and the multitude of martyrs, male and female, whom he shows defying their social and familial obligations. Far from expressing discomfort with it, Foxe celebrates Prest's abandonment of her husband as an active choice signaling her as elect, married to Christ.

Foxe's portrayal of women martyrs has interesting implications. Until the late 1980s, discussion about the impact of reformed thinking on women and ideas about gender tended to argue for growing opportunity and esteem for early modern women, depending on their confessional context. Such work spotlighted as crucial to women's lot either Protestantism's deprivileging of virginity and emphasis on literacy and personal spiritual development, or the option of female

monasticism under Catholicism, women's personal identification with female saints, and the extrafamilial support available to them within the Catholic hierar chy.60 More recently, monographs often taking the form of local studies are reveal ing the increased restriction of European women's autonomy and freedom of

movement across confessional boundaries, in the context of both Protestant and Catholic Reformation-what is now being called "the Reformations." As Merry Wiesner has recently suggested, "if any Reformation was successful in the sixteenth century, it was that 'of the women' in the first sense, a restriction of women's sphere in independent actions and an increase in the power of male heads of households, both temporal and spiritual.'"61 It seems that rising concerns about gender and order in Protestant Augsburg, accompanied by the enhanced inscription of women in the household, were echoed in Catholic Seville, where a "theology of purity ... equated the good and the true with conformity to gender expectations."62 If the "moral ethic" of the Reformation must be understood as a "theology of gender "63

so must that of the Counter-Reformation, which also manifested itself in increased control of marriage and confinement of women in the household, as well as through enhanced claustration in cloister and brothel: in both contexts women out side male control, whether unmarried or merely wandering, were perceived as socially threatening.

60For example, Natalie Davis, "City Women and Religious Change in Sixteenth-Century France," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975; repr., Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); Steven Ozment,

When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicol

son, 1977); Keith Thomas, "Women and the Civil War Sects," Past and Present 13 (1958): 42-62.

61Merry E.Wiesner, "The Reformation of the Women," Archiv f?r Reformationsgeschichte, special edition, Die Reformation in Deutschland und Europa: Interpretationem und Debatten, ed. Hans R. Guggisberg and Gottfried G. Krodel in collaboration with Hans F?glister (Gutersloh: Gutersloher Verlagshaus, 1998), 208.

62Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton: Princeton Univer

sity Press, 1990), 177; Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989).

63Roper, Holy Household, 1.




Central to such work as Lyndal Roper's on Augsburg, Mary Elizabeth Perry's

on Seville, and a number of recent studies of early modern England, is the inter

section of ideas about gender with anxiety about social order.64 While according to

reformers and some of their modern critics, the Protestant promotion of marriage

purported to improve attitudes toward women, it was also considered the best way

to keep them under control in communities consumed with the desire for social

stability and godliness.65 In both the Protestant and Catholic West, therefore, the

interests of family and state intersected in the pursuit of order.66 Household gov

ernment and male authority operated to ensure political and social order, while at

the same time contributing to the justification of the sovereign power of the ruler.

As Susan Amussen has shown for early modern England, and Julie Hardwick for

France, "the symbiotic relationship between husband/father and family and ruler

and kingdom" informed the ordering of households, such that men's authority over

their wives, servants, and children was analogous to that of kings' authority over

their realms and subjects.67 Necessarily orderly individual households were consid

ered the building blocks-the smallest units-of orderly society, and order was reli

ant upon the perceived stability of men's authority over women and other

dependents.68

64See also Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print

Culture (Ithaca: CorneU University Press, 1999); Anthony Fletcher, "The Protestant Idea of Marriage in

Early Modern England," in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick

ColHnson, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See

also Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (Lon don: Routledge, 1994).

65Susan C. Karant Nunn, "The Reformation of Women," in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 3rd ed., ed. Renate Bridenthal, Susan Mosher Stuard, and Merry E. Wiesner (Boston: Hough ton Mifflin, 1998), 184-87.

66Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil BlackweU, 1988). Sarah Hanley sees this occurring in France through the promulgation of new

laws governing marriage, and Joel Harrington, in Germany, through enhanced enforcement of existing laws. See Sarah Hanley,"Fam?y and State in Early Modern France:The Marital Law Compact," in Con

necting Spheres: European Women in a Globalizing World, 1500 to the Present, 2nd ed., ed. Marilyn J. Boxer

and Jean H. Quartaert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Joel F. Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

67See Amussen, Ordered Society, and Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage; Julie Hardwick, The Practice of

Patriarchy: Gender and Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), xi, 221. This was so at least on a rhetorical level. As Hardwick, The Practice

of Patriarchy, 226, notes in her study of the "middling sort" in France (her focus is notaries and their

fam?ies), however, "in a society that was ideologicaUy and rhetoricaUy fiercely patriarchal, many indi

vidual instances show that women and subjects had considerable room to maneuver." On patriarchal

thought in early modern England, see also Gordon Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The

Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes, Especially in Seventeenth-Century England

(Oxford: Bas? BlackweU, 1975). 68See Merry E. Wiesner, "The Early Modern Period: ReHgion, the Fam?y, and Women's Public

Roles," in Religion, Feminism, and the Family, ed. Anne Carr and Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen (LouisviUe, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 150-52. What Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cam

bridge: Polity Press, 1988), 23-24, calls "traditional patriarchal thought" (pre-seventeenth century) assumed that "the fam?y, and the authority of the father at its head, provided the model or the metaphor for power and authority relations of aU kinds," assimilating aU power relations into paternal rule. See also

Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought, 16.




In this context it is not surprising that accusations of female disorder served as

powerful weaponry in polemical battles, and as we have seen, Foxe's detractors eagerly exploited the questionable behavior of some of his female martyrs. Foxe and before him Bale, however, reconciled their female subjects' behavior to their godliness by effectively rewriting their marital status:Askew's spiritual virginity and Prest's heavenly marriage serve to remove them from their earthly husbands' authority-their familial obligation.69 While thus reconstituted in a manner arguably unthreatening to patriarchal order, however, Askew, Prest, and their "gospelling sisters" nevertheless remain figures of defiance and subversion: their disobedience toward their husbands has significant political implications.

Natalie Davis, in 1975, broke ground in reading the implications of problem atic gendered imagery, famously arguing that the disorderly, even carnivalesque "woman on top" topos served, in early modern France, both to widen behavioral options for women and to sanction political disobedience against unjust rule for both sexes.70 Joy Wiltenburg has more recently traced the conflation in early modern street literature between women's escape from male control and their own subversive power.71 Although Wiltenburg argues that such literature, describing women's "licentious urge for dominance," reflects male anxieties about the success of patriarchal rule, Foxe's heroines, while neither comic nor grotesque, do, like the female figures examined by Davis, validate the right of women to "rise up and tell the truth."72 As women who do this, they are also emblematic, like Davis's carni

valesque women, of the right to resist unjust rule.While the woman martyr's dis obedience to religious authority is predictable in martyrology, the justification and even celebration of Prest's disobedience toward her husband challenges more than the institutions of false religion.The female martyr, very unlike Crespin's Le Riche, but like the disorderly female characters described by Wittenburg, is politically threatening. Her dramatic declaration, "God forbid that I should lose the lyfe eter nall for this carnall and short lyfe.... I will never turne from my heavenly husband to my earthly husband: from the fellowship of Aungels to mortall children," while serving to subjugate her to a patriarchal if heavenly marital authority, at the same time proclaims a rejection of the system of order and control supporting obedience to royal authority. In this, it is provocatively reminiscent ofJohn Ponet's promise in his Marian justification of political resistance, and even regicide: "ye shalbe sure also to make a chaunge from your earthly countrey, to the heavenly Paradise ... from the company of men, to the feloweship of Angelles."73 While reconciling Prest's

69This constitutes an interesting contrast to some Lutheran women's defense of their own asser

tiveness, noted by Wiesner, according to which they based their right to speak out on matters of religion on their obligation to their families and larger households; see Wiesner, "Early Modern Period," 157?58.

70Natalie Zemon Davis, "Women on Top," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975; repr., Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 131.

71Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power, 1.

72Davis, "Women on Top," 147.

73John Ponet,^4 Shorte Treatise of politike power... (Strassborg, 1556), sig. M4r. Bishop ofWinchester for Edward VI, Ponet (1514-56) was the highest ranking ecclesiastic of the Marian exiles, and the first

English reformer to advocate tyrannicide. He died in exile.




marital disobedience, Foxe also justifies her resistance, not so much to religious (which is understood) as to political authority, represented by her earthly husband.

Foxe's celebration of Prest's defiance echoes a justification of resistance to political authority articulated before him by the most politically radical of his fellow Marian exiles.While using a woman's disobedience toward her husband in this way, however, he simultaneously perpetuates an ideal of wifely submission to a family patriarch consistent with contemporary views regarding female virtue. His disorderly women martyrs are ultimately conceived as subordinate to a husband, their rejection of earthly authority, including that of their earthly husbands (and thus monarch), proving their abject self-abnegation, their obedience to their heavenly spouse.The faithfulness of the woman martyr to Christ thus reconciles her social disorderliness to her godly virtue: in Bale's construction, it earns her white robes, making her a virgin. In Foxe's, the white robes become wedding garments,

making her a bride of Christ, but one very unlike her adolescent, unmarried, pre Reformation sister, whose status derives from her commitment to perpetual physical virginity. Not intended as models of female behavior, Foxe's disorderly female martyrs do not ultimately oppose the ethic of female obedience within godly marriage, for in their white robes they are, in earthly terms, unmarried. Nevertheless, it is likely that while most women reading Foxe were merely edified by the example of his suffering female martyrs, some saw Askew, Prest, and their female fellows as examples for emulation of women preaching, prophesying,

wandering, and even leaving their husbands in the name of their faith, women perhaps including the seventeenth-century prophetess Anne Wentworth. Keith Thomas has noted the similarity between the accusations of wantonness following Askew, and those leveled more than a hundred years later against Wentworth, whose separation from her husband exacerbated the problem of her "delirious verse."74 It is virtually inconceivable that Wentworth, a literate, persecuted religious radical, had not read Foxe's stories of Tudor martyrdom,75 at least in abridgement, but however much her marital problems resembled Askew's, it is Prest's words, again so reminiscent of Ponet's subversive text, that are echoed in her defense of them: "It was necessary for the peace of my soul, to absent my self from my earthly Husband, in obedience to my Heavenly Bridegroom." 76

74Thomas, "Women and the Civil War Sects," 52. 75 A canonical text by the end of Elizabeth's reign (during which it saw five editions), the Actes and

Monuments was ubiquitous in the seventeenth century, seeing four new folio editions (1610,1632,1641, 1684) as well as numerous abridgements, despite its temporary ban by Archbishop Laud. Richard Hel

gerson, in Forms of Nationhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ranks the nicies and Monu ments in importance in "shaping England's religious self-understanding" with the English Bible, the Book

of Common Prayer, and Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (253). Christopher Hill, in The World Turned

Upside Down (London and New York: Penguin, 1971), marks the end of Laudian censorship with the immediate recirculation of the Actes and Monuments (96). Importantly, Foxe is known to have been

widely read by women. See Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1999), 65-66.

76Anne Wentworth,^4 Vindication of Anne Wentworth (London, 1677), 4.



Gospelling Sisters "Goinge up and Downe": John Foxe and Disorderly Women

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