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“The Good Ministrye of Godlye and Vertuouse Women”: The Elizabethan Martyrologists and the Female Supporters of the Marian Martyrs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Thomas Freeman
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Extract

The images that the phrase “Marian Protestant” summons to mind are both dramatic and predictable. Whether they are of Cranmer holding his hand in the flame, Latimer exhorting Ridley to play the man, or more generalized images of men and women dying at the stake, we see the landscape of Marian Protestantism shrouded in the smoke from the fires of Smithfield and think of it exclusively in terms of martyrs. This unblinking fixation on the Marian martyrs is partly the result of an all too human fascination with violent death, but it is also the result of our dependence on John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563–83), popularly known as the “Book of Martyrs,” a sobriquet that does justice to Foxe's preoccupations when discussing the penultimate Tudor reign.

Nevertheless, to ignore the majority of Marian Protestants who did not die for the gospel is to study the steeple and believe that you have examined the entire church. Like the steeple, the martyrs are the most conspicuous group of Marian Protestants, yet like a steeple their existence depended on the support of the rest of the church. However, even this metaphor fails to do justice to those coreligionists who provided the Marian martyrs with physical, financial, moral, and emotional support. The relationships between the martyrs and their “sustainers” (to use Foxe's phrase) were profound and complex, with both parties drawing strength from each other. The relationships between male martyrs and their female sustainers are of particular interest and importance; in fact, it will be suggested in this article that these relationships had a decisive influence on the development of English Protestantism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 1: Anglo-American Puritanisms , January 2000 , pp. 8 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2000

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References

1 See Wabuda, Susan, “Henry Bull, Miles Coverdale, and the Making of Foxe's Book of Martyrs,” in Martyrs and Martyrologies, ed. Wood, Diana, Studies in Church History, vol. 30 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 245–58Google Scholar. Although the evidence suggests that Bull's and Foxe's research began independently, their work became intertwined, with Bull contributing data to the first edition of Acts and Monuments and Foxe supplying material for the Letters of the Martyrs, published a year later. At some time, the letters Bull had gathered came into Foxe's hands.

2 Although the best-known portions of Foxe's papers are in the Harleian and Lansdowne collections of the British Library, many of the documents collected by Bull and Foxe are now in the Emmanuel College Library (ECL) as MSS 260, 261, and 262 (for the provenance of these manuscripts, see Wabuda, , “Henry Bull,” pp. 246–48 and 258Google Scholar). Letters gathered by Bull and Foxe also form part of British Library (BL), Additional (Add.) MS 19400, a collection of letters (mostly autographs) of various Reformation figures, compiled from Sir Henry Spelmen's library. Wabuda has identified the letters on fols. 25r–26r, 29r, 54r–55r, and 71r as having been in Bull's possession; based on annotations on them, I would say that this is also true of the letters on fols. 27r, 42r–v, 44r–45r, and 46r–v (see Wabuda, , “Henry Bull,” p. 248Google Scholar, n. 12). Foxe annotated or endorsed letters on fols. 29r, 33r–34r, 82r–83r, and 98r. (The letter on fol. 50r–v is particularly interesting as it is clearly a castoff from the printing of the Acts and Monuments; instructions to the printer, marginal notes, and paragraph breaks are written in Foxe's handwriting on the original letter.) Nevertheless, other letters in BL, Add. MS 19400—e.g., letters to Robert Dudley (fols. 88r, 89r–v, and 93r), Robert Horne (fol. 91r–v), and by Walter Haddon (fols. 86r and 95r–v)—almost certainly never belonged to Bull or Foxe. But while BL, Additional MS 19400 is not composed entirely of documents from the collections of Bull and Foxe, it is reasonable to assume that any materials pertaining to the Marian martyrs in this manuscript were once owned by Foxe, and in some cases, also by Bull.

3 The congregation arrested along with its leader, Thomas Rose, on New Year's day, 1555, consisted of both men and women, while eight of the twenty-two members of a congregation arrested at Colchester were women. See Foxe, John, The Ecclesiastical History Contayning the Actes and Monumentes of These Latter and Perillous Dayes … (London, 1570)Google Scholar, Short-Title Catalogue (STC) 11223, p. 1652, and Actes and Monumentes of These Latter and Perillous Dayes … (London, 1563), STC 11222, p. 1604Google Scholar. (Each of the four editions of this work published in Foxe's lifetime, all printed by John Day in London, will hereafter be designated by the year of their publication—i.e., 1563, 1570, 1576, and 1583. All references to this book will be made to the first edition in which the material being quoted or cited appears.) Judging by a letter written by two members of the largest underground congregation in London, who were arrested at a meeting in Islington on 12 December 1557, there were women present at that ill-fated gathering (BL, Add. MS 19400, fols. 84r–85r). Two of the women executed for heresy in Mary's reign, Elizabeth Warne and Margaret Mearing, were members of the London congregations; another three women executed for heresy, Alice Munt, her daughter Rose Allin, and Helen Ewring, were members of the Colchester congregation.

4 See, e.g., BL, Add. MS 19400, fol. 70r; Humphrey, Laurence, Joannis Juelli Angli, episcopi Sarisburiensis, vita et mors (London, 1573), STC 13963, p. 82Google Scholar, and 1576, p. 1966.

5 1576, p. 1978.

6 Fane was thanked for her aid by Saunders, Laurence (Certain Most Godly, Fruitful and Comfortable Letters of Such True Saintes and Holy Martyres … [London, 1564], STC 5886, p. 196Google Scholar; hereafter cited as LM). John Bradford (LM, pp. 336 and 403; ECL, MS 260, fol. 198r) and John Philpot (1570, pp. 2009–11; BL, Add. MS 19400, fol. 50r–v) also thanked her for her largess. Ridley described Lady Fane's generosity to him in a letter to Augustine Bernher (LM, p. 72; ECL, MS 260, fol. 279r). For the aid of Wilkinson and Warcup to imprisoned martyrs, see 1563, pp. 1295 and 1365; LM, pp. 23–24 (cf. ECL, MS 260, fol. 214r–v) and 75; Public Record Office (PRO), Prerogative Court of Canterbury, Prob. 11/42B, fols. 235r and 257v, also Prob. 11/53, fol. 320r. (Throughout this article, whenever a particular letter was printed by both Bull and Foxe, reference will be made only to the earliest work in which it appeared. If there are contemporary manuscript versions of a letter, the autograph alone will be cited. If no autograph exists, then all the contemporary manuscript copies of a letter will be cited. Letters by Bradford, Philpot, and Ridley are printed in the Parker Society volumes devoted to those worthies. Reference will be made to these volumes, however, only in the relatively rare cases when they contain a letter that was printed by neither Bull nor Foxe.) For examples of aid by less wealthy Protestant women, see LM, pp. 191, 241, and 412; ECL, MS 260, fol. 280r; and BL, Add. MS 19400, fol. 82v.

7 LM, pp. 478–89 (BL, Add. MS 19400, fols. 35r–40r), and Bodleian Library (Bodl.), MS 53, fols. 49r–70v.

8 LM, pp. 335 and 403–8; ECL, MS 260, fols. 198r–200v.

9 ECL, MS 260, fols. 180r–181v (cf. Townsend, Aubrey, ed., The Writings of John Bradford, 2 vols. [Cambridge, 1848–1853], Parker Society, 2:196–99Google Scholar [hereafter Bradford Writings]). For Marler's friendship with Bradford, see 1563, p. 1175.

10 1570, p. 2012.

11 ECL, MS 260, fol. 216r.

12 See Laing, David, ed., The Works of John Knox, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1846–1864), 3:369Google Scholar (hereafter cited as Works).

13 See Pettegree, Andrew, Marian Protestantism: Six Essays (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 89–92Google Scholar.

14 LM, pp. 414–18.

15 LM, pp. 401–3.

16 1563, p. 1193; cf. LM, pp. 131–32, and Knox, , Works, 4:219–22Google Scholar.

17 1576, pp. 1843–45 and 1966; 1563, p. 1237.

18 1570, p. 2078. Another unprinted letter is BL, Add. MS 19400, fols. 60v–61r. For other letters by imprisoned martyrs upbraiding backsliders who had gone to Mass, see LM, pp. 247–49; Ridley, Nicholas, A Pituous Lamentation of the Miserable Estate of the Church of Christe … Wherunto Are Also Annexed Letters of John Careless (London, 1566)Google Scholar, STC 21052, sigs. G3v–G5r.

19 A copy was sent to Joyce Hales (ECL, MS 260, fol. 81v), another to Royden and his wife (LM, p. 335; ECL, MS 260, fol. 40v), and a third to James Bradshaw (LM, p. 363; ECL, MS 260, fol. 171v). In the letter to Bradshaw, Bradford offered to send another copy to Shalcross and his wife.

20 ECL, MS 260, fols. 59v–62v.

21 For example, An Apologie or Defence against the Calumnacion of Certain Men … Abiding as Exiles (Wesel, 1555)Google Scholar; An Answer to a Certain Godly Mannes Letteres, Desiring ludgement, Whether It Is Lawfull to be Present at the Popishe Masse (Strasbourg, 1557), STC 658Google Scholar; Musculus, Wolfgang, The Temporysour, That Is to Say, the Observer of the Times, trans. P[ownell], R. (Wesel, 1555)Google Scholar, STC 18312; and Vermigli, Peter Martyr, A Treatise of the Cohabitacyon of the Faithfull with the Unfaithfull, translator unknown (Strasbourg, 1555), STC 24673.5Google Scholar.

22 Ridley, Pituous Lamentation, sigs. G3v–G4r (my emphasis).

23 An Apologie or Defence against the Calumnacion of Certain Men, sig. A5v.

24 H[olland], H[enry], ed., The Workes of Reverend Richard Greenham (London, 1612), STC 12318, p. 742Google Scholar. On the essential importance of deference and obedience as attributes of a wife, see Pollock, Linda, “‘Teach Her to Live under Obedience’: The Making of Women in the Upper Ranks of Early Modern England,” Continuity and Change 4 (1989): 231–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 LM, pp. 143–45.

26 1570, p. 2115.

27 1570, pp. 1802–3. The servant had been sent to get Bradford's advice for the woman (whom Foxe does not name) on whether she was justified in refusing to obey her father.

28 1563, p. 1677.

29 1563, p. 1619.

30 LM, pp. 604–5 (my emphasis).

31 LM, p. 413; ECL, MS 262, fol. 280v. Also see Garrett, C. H., The Marian Exiles: A Study in the Origins of Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge, 1938), p. 321Google Scholar. Joan Wilkinson left Elizabeth Brown four pounds in her will (PRO, Prerogative Court of Canterbury, Prob. 11/24B, fols. 233r–235r). Successive editions of the Acts and Monuments state that Elizabeth Brown remarried after the exile, first to one Bettes (1570, p. 1832; 1576, p. 1576), then to a man named Rushborough (1583, p. 1649).

32 LM, p. 324; ECL, MS 260, fol. 79v.

33 LM, p. 306, and ECL, MS 260, fols. 73r–74r (cf. Bradford Writings, 2:203–6Google Scholar).

34 BL, Add. MS 19400, fol. 78v.

35 1563, p. 1271. Joan Trunchfield would be caught and, on 19 February 1556, executed.

36 See Christopherson, John, An Exhortation to All Menne to Take Hede of Rebellion (London, 1554)Google Scholar, STC 5207, sigs. T2v–T3r; and Huggarde, Miles, The Displaying of the Protestants (London, 1556), STC 13557, fols. I5v–I6rGoogle Scholar. Huggarde even claimed that many Protestant wives fled into exile in order to give free rein to sexual appetites that had been bridled by marriage (ibid., sig. I3r).

37 Collinson, Patrick, “The Role of Women in the English Reformation Illustrated by the Life and Friendships of Anne Locke,” in his Godly People: Essays in English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), p. 275Google Scholar, and “‘Not Sexual in the Ordinary Sense’: Women, Men and Religious Transactions,” in his Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), p. 135Google Scholar.

38 See Stachniewski, John, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford, 1991), p. 42Google Scholar. Of ninety-one patients who confided their acute doubts about their salvation to the physician Richard Napier, seventy-two were women (MacDonald, Michael, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England [Cambridge, 1971], p. 220Google Scholar). Both Bradford and Philpot, however, wrote to Careless to assuage his ever-recurring bouts of spiritual despair (e.g., 1563, pp. 1535–37; ECL, MS 260, fol. 164r–v; LM, pp. 224–26; ECL, MS 260, fols. 148r and 166r–v; and BL, Add. MS 19400, fol. 46r–v). Careless wrote to William Tyms, consoling him in his doubts (LM, pp. 568–71; BL, Add. MS 19400, fols. 73r–74r), while Careless and John Knox wrote to reassure Thomas Upcher about his salvation (LM, pp. 582–83; ECL, MS 260, fol. 241r–v; Knox, , Works, 4:241–44Google Scholar).

39 1570, p. 2078.

40 Knox, , Works, 6:514Google Scholar. On the Knox-Bowes correspondence, particularly its chronology, see Frankfurter, A.Daniel , “Elizabeth Bowes and John Knox: A Women and Reformation Theology,” Church History 56 (1987): 333–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 See Knox, , Works, 3:344, 361–62, and 369–72Google Scholar. Although her doubts about her salvation began years before Edward VI's death, they may well have been exacerbated by the political and religious uncertainty following it. For one thing, the Bowes family seems to have lost no time in making peace with the new regime and in flatly repudiating the betrothal of Knox to Marjorie Bowes, which must have put tremendous pressure on Elizabeth. (Significantly, one of her most intense temptations to idolatry occurred in November 1553.) Eventually Elizabeth and Marjorie fled to Scotland, where Marjorie married Knox before the trio went into exile on the Continent (see Ridley, Jasper, John Knox [Oxford, 1968], pp. 140–44Google Scholar).

42 Knox, , Works, 3:337–55 and 364–91Google Scholar.

43 Ibid., 3:379–80.

44 Ibid., 4:222–25.

45 Collinson, Patrick, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (New York, 1988), pp. 75–76Google Scholar.

46 LM, pp. 415–16.

47 LM, pp. 243–45; ECL, MS 260, fols. 79v–81v.

48 Bodl. MS 53, fol. 49r; Bradford Writings, 1:307Google Scholar. In a letter written to Careless after Bradford's death, Hales stated that she had “bene manye tymes over come by fears for her salvation” (BL, Add. MS 19400, fol. 33r; this passage was deleted when the letter was printed in LM, pp. 471–73).

49 ECL MS 260, fol. 136r–v.

50 LM, pp. 303–5; ECL, MS 260, fol. 54r is a fragment of a copy of this letter.

51 LM, pp. 298–303; ECL, MS 262, fols. 272r–275r.

52 LM, pp. 426–27.

53 Collinson, Patrick, “A Mirror of Elizabethan Puritanism: The Life and Letters of ‘Godly Master Dering,’” in Godly People, p. 318Google Scholar.

54 Yates, John, God's Arraignment of Hypocrites (Cambridge, 1615), STC 26081, pp. 356–57Google Scholar; this was the first version of the story published. Simeon Foxe's version is in a memoir of his father first printed in the 1641 edition of the Acts and Monuments (see Foxe, John, Acts and Monuments of Matters Most Special … in the Church, 3 vols. [London, 1641], STC [Wing] F2035, II, sig. B3rGoogle Scholar).

55 See Cosin, Richard, Conspiracie for Pretended Reformation (London, 1592), STC 5823, p. 5Google Scholar; and Arthington, Henry, The Seduction of Arthington by Hacket (London, 1592), STC 799, pp. 10 and 14–15Google Scholar.

56 Haller, William, The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe's Book of Martyrs (New York, 1963), pp. 207–8Google Scholar.

57 For a discussion of this pastoral emphasis, see Morgan, John, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning and Education (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 86–87Google Scholar. For a good example of this pastoral approach, see Workes of Richard Greenham, pp. 341–45, 349, and 352–57.

58 See Collinson, , “Role of Women,” p. 275Google Scholar; and Willen, Diane, “Godly Women in Early Modern England: Puritanism and Gender,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 43 (1992): 570–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Penny, Andrew, Freewill or Predestination? The Battle over Saving Grace in Mid Tudor England (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1990)Google Scholar, surveys the Marian freewillers.

60 For example, Ridley, Pituous Lamentation, sig. F6r–v. Lady Anne Knevet thanked Careless for instructing her in “that most swete and comfortable doctryne of Gods free-election and predestination” (ECL, MS 260, fol. 49r). Stephan Gratwick, who would eventually join the ranks of the Marian martyrs, wrote to Mrs. Lounford congratulating her that God had revealed the truth of her predestined salvation to her (BL, Add. MS 19400, fol. 82r). Clearly Gratwick had been instructing her in predestinarian doctrines. This is especially interesting as Gratwick himself had been a freewiller as late as April 1556 (see ECL, MS 260, fol. 72r).

61 BL, Add. MS 19400, fols. 33v–34r. These passages were excised by Bull when he printed the letter (LM, p. 433).

62 ECL 260, fol. 132r.

63 Bodl. Lib., MS 53, fol. 125r.

64 BL, Add. MS 19400, fol. 73v; cf. ECL, MS 260, fol. 69r.

65 See Bodl. MS 53, fol. 119r. Bradford emphatically denied this charge (ECL, MS 262, fol. 101r; LM, p. 474), but the same complaint was made by certain freewillers to Joyce Hales (BL, Add. MS 19400, fols. 76v–77r). For Bradford disbursing money to Protestant prisoners, see LM, p. 377; ECL, MS 260, fols. 10v and 18v; and ECL, MS 262, fol. 28 1v.

66 ECL, MS 260, fols. 49v–50r.

67 ECL, MS 260, fol. 132r.

68 BL, Add. MS 19400, fol. 76v.

69 Joyce Hales showed a letter Careless had written rebutting freewill teachings to one “Newman” (BL, Add. MS 19400, fol. 78r). This was, in all probability, Roger Newman, who, like Joyce Hales, fled from his home in Canterbury (1563, p. 1679) and returned to Kent from exile at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign (BL, Harley MS 416, fol. 33r; Bradford Writings, 2:190Google Scholar; cf. LM, p. 470, where Newman's name is deleted).

70 Joyce Hales presented Thomas Panton, a radical clergyman, to a living in Canterbury in the 1560s; her heir, James Hales, would be a leading Puritan magistrate in Kent in the 1580s (Clark, Peter, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Restoration: Politics and Society in Kent, 1500–1640 [Cranbury, N.J., 1977], p. 151Google Scholar). During the height of his quarrel with Matthew Parker over vestments, Laurence Humphrey fled Oxford and was sheltered by Anne Warcup (BL, Harley MS 416, fol. 177r).

71 London Review of Books (23 January 1986), p. 17Google Scholar. For a discussion of this issue, see Stachniewski, , Persecutory Imagination, pp. 27–61Google Scholar. Also see Collinson, , “‘Not Sexual in the Ordinary Sense,’” p. 135Google Scholar.

72 Haigh, Christopher, ed., The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987), p. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 ECL, MS 260, fol. 80v; LM, p. 327.

74 1563, p. 1194. With minor variations in wording, these passages are in ECL, MS 262, fol. 279v.

75 BL, Add. MS 19400, fol. 76v (my emphasis).

76 Wabuda, , “Henry Bull,” p. 256Google Scholar.

77 See, e.g., 1563, pp. 874 and 1048; also 1570, p. 1683. An especially emphatic statement identifying the Protestant martyrs with the early Christian martyrs occurs on 1570, sig. *3v.

78 A diametrically different narrative strategy was employed by Catholic martyrologists, arising out of diametrically different polemical purposes. Catholic Reformation martyrology was primarily focused on the early Christian martyrs, and thus the problems of establishing continuity and conformity between the ancient martyrs and their contemporary successors did not exist for them. However, the Catholics had to defend the accuracy of the legends about the martyrs who were in their liturgical calendar (and in some cases defend the actual historicity of these martyrs). Thus the Catholics took great pains to establish and provide all the detail they could, particularly chronological details, in their martyrologies (see Ditchfield, Simon, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular [Cambridge, 1995], pp. 45–49, 52–55, and 314–15Google Scholar). I am grateful to Dr. Ditchfield for his discussion of this point with me.

79 Compare ECL, MS 260, fol. 161r, with 1570, p. 2010.

80 Compare ECL, MS 260, Ms. 215r–216r, with LM, pp. 607–11.

81 Compare ECL, MS 260, fol. 197r, with LM, p. 469.

82 Compare ECL, MS 260, fol. 79r, with LM, p. 322.

83 See Parish, Helen, “‘Beastly is their living and their doctrine’: Celibacy and Theological Corruption in English Reformation Polemic,” in Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe, ed. Gordon, Bruce, 2 vols. (Aldershot, 1996), 1:139–44Google Scholar. Also see Davis, Natalie Z., “City Women and Religious Change,” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif., 1965), p. 65Google Scholar. Note in this context the attacks on the Marian Protestant women who left their husbands (see nn. 53 and 54 above).

84 Knox, , Works, 6:513–14Google Scholar.

85 Compare ECL, MS 260, fol. 160r, with 1570, p. 2009.

86 For example, cf. ECL, MS 260, fols. 132r–133v, with LM, pp. 576–78; and ECL, MS 260, fol. 197r, with LM, p. 469.

87 Compare BL, Add. MS 19400, fol. 35r, with LM, p. 478.

88 See Davis, , “City Women,” pp. 83–84Google Scholar.

89 Usher, R. G., ed., The Presbyterian Movement in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, Camden Society, 3d ser., vol. 8 (1905), p. 35Google Scholar.

90 For an example of Catholic claims that Protestant women preached publicly, see Christopherson, Exhortation, sig. T3r.

91 Compare 1570, p. 593, with Capes, W. W., ed., Registrant Johannis Trefnant Episcopi Herefordensis (London, 1916), Canterbury and York Society 20, pp. 345–47Google Scholar. For the context of Brute's arguments, see Aston, Margaret, “Lollard Women Priests?” in her Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London, 1984), pp. 52–59Google Scholar. As for Foxe's declaration that brevity was the reason for censoring Brute's arguments, his account of Brute ran to thirty-seven folio pages (1570, pp. 566–603), while the material he excised from it amounted to little over a page. A reduction from thirty-eight to thirty-seven pages suggests that brevity was not Foxe's primary concern in omitting this material.

92 Foxe's presentation of female martyrs is discussed in Freeman, Thomas S., “‘Great searching out of bookes and autours’: John Foxe as an Ecclesiastical Historian” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1995), pp. 183–97Google Scholar. Compare Macek, Ellen, “The Emergence of a Feminine Spirituality in the ‘Book of Martyrs,’” Sixteenth Century Journal 19 (1988): 63–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It should be remembered that the women martyrs did not see themselves in this light, nor did their contemporaries. Letters to Marian female martyrs praise them in exactly the same terms applied to their male colleagues, with no gender distinctions made between them (see BL, Add. MS 19400, fols. 84r–85r; also see ECL, MS 260, fols. 229r–235r and LM, pp. 565–68).

93 It is interesting that neither Bull nor Foxe ever printed a letter written by a female Marian martyr. It is possible that this was due to censorship by the martyrologists, although no such letter appears in their papers. Another possibility is that the correspondents of the female martyrs may have felt that any moral guidance or theological advice from these women to their families, friends, and coreligionists should not be published because of the gender of their authors.

94 1563, p. 875.

95 1570, pp. 2115–17.

96 1570, p. 2104.

97 Smith's angry letter, now BL, Add. MS 19400, fol. 98r, was endorsed by Foxe on the reverse side of letter, so there is no doubt that the martyrologist knew of this letter and chose to remain silent about it. Smith's other letters were printed in 1563, pp. 1260–67. Among the many manuscript versions of these letters, some attributed to John Rogers or Thomas Matthew (which was Rogers's alias), are BL Lansdowne MS 389, fols. 27v–28v, 183v–185v, 304r–305r, and ECL, MS 260, fols. 251v–252r.

98 ECL, MS 260, fol. 227r; LM, p. 573.

99 1570, p. 2108.

100 ECL, MS 260, fol. 227r.

101 LM, pp. 572–73.

102 Compare ECL, MS 260, fol. 240r, with LM, pp. 623–64. Foxe did not print this letter at all.

103 Compare ECL, MS 260, fol. 238r–v, with LM, pp. 631–62. Again, Foxe did not print this letter.

104 Interestingly, it has been suggested that the letters of the martyrs that Jean Crespin, the Genevan martyrologist, printed had also been emended and rewritten by him (see Piaget, A. and Berthoud, G., Notes sur le livre de Jean Crespin [Neuchatel, 1930], pp. 57–61Google Scholar; and Watson, David, “Jean Crespin and the Writing of History in the French Reformation,” in Gordon, , ed., Protestant History and Identity, 2:49–51Google Scholar).

105 For example, Penny, D. Andrew, “Family Matters and Foxe's Acts and Monuments” Historical Journal 39 (1996): 599–618CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which uses letters of the martyrs as printed in the Acts and Monuments without examining, or even discussing, the extent to which Foxe had doctored these letters.

106 For the development of female historical writing, including autobiography, and the social and moral taboos against female literary self-expression, see Davis, Natalie Z., “Gender and Genre: Women as Historical Writers, 1400–1820,” in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Labalme, Patricia H. (New York, 1980), pp. 153–82Google Scholar.

107 Pollock, Linda, With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay, 1552–1620 (New York, 1995), p. 28Google Scholar.

108 Hasler, W., ed., The House of Commons, 1558–1603, 3 vols. (London, 1981), 2:290Google Scholar; PRO Prerogative Court of Canterbury, Prob. 11/164, fol. 358r–v.

109 Clarke, Samuel, A General Martyrologie (London, 1671), STC [Wing] C4515, bk. 2, p. 336Google Scholar.

110 Seaver, Paul S., Wallington's World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (Stanford, Calif., 1985), p. 74Google Scholar; Woolf, D. R., “A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre and Historical Knowledge in England, 1500–1800,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 645–679, at 673CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

111 Meads, Dorothy M., ed., Diary of Lady Mary Hoby, 1594–1605 (London, 1970), pp. 74–75, 111, and 175Google Scholar; Woolf, , “A Feminine Past?” p. 659Google Scholar.

112 See Gray, Irvine, “Smyth of Nibley's Will,” Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 78 (1959): 126–36Google Scholar, esp. 131; and Popplewill, Joyce, “Mary Smith's Will: A North Nibley Record 1666,” Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 110 (1992): 151–58Google Scholar. I am indebted to Jan Broadway for these references.

113 For the persistence and intractability of the problem of religiously motivated defiance of spousal authority, see Thomas, K. V., “Women and the Civil War Sects,” Past and Present, no. 13 (April 1958): 42–62Google Scholar.

114 Joyce Lewes is discussed above; for Careless's letter to Glascocke, see n. 26 above. For the almost unanimous disapproval, even by Puritan writers, of wives disobeying unbelieving husbands, see Davies, Katherine, “Continuity and Change in Literary Advice on Marriage,” in Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage, ed. Outhwaite, R. B. (New York, 1981), p. 70Google Scholar.

115 A few women did hold leadership positions in individual Lollard congregations, but this was highly exceptional. For Lollard women, see McSheffrey, Shannon, Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities, 1420–1530 (Philadelphia, 1995)Google Scholar.

116 For examples of this, see Willen, , “Godly Women,” p. 567Google Scholar, and Lake, Peter, “Feminine Piety and Personal Potency: The ‘Emancipation’ of Mrs Jane Ratcliffe,” Seventeenth Century 2 (1987): 150–53Google Scholar.

117 Eales, Jacqueline, “Samuel Clarke and the ‘Lives’ of Godly Women in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Women in the Church, ed. Sheils, W. J. and Wood, Diana, Studies in Church History, vol. 27 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 372–73Google Scholar.

118 Willen, , “Godly Women,” pp. 569–77Google Scholar.