“An Englishe box”: Calvinism and Commodities in Anne Lok’sA Meditation of a Penitent Sinner

Abstract

Anne Lok’s A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner (1560), the first sonnet sequence in English, articulates changing conceptions of social authority in early Elizabethan England through the formal tension of the sonnet sequence—the strain between sonnet and sequence, lyric and narrative. This strain is apparent in the complex relation between the individual sonnets of the sequence and the text of Psalm 51 which appears in the margin. The psalm provides a model for the speaker’s lyric authority, but it also provides a narrative of the founding of the New Jerusalem which tacitly celebrates England’s return to Protestantism under Queen Elizabeth. By creating a lyric authority out of the logic of commodity circulation and Calvinism, however, the speaker tacitly challenges Elizabeth’s assertion of absolute monarchical power. The authority of Lok’s speaker consequently points to the need to reimagine the class dynamics embodied in the English sonnet.