“And a Queen of England, Too”: The ‘Englishing’ of Catherine of Aragon in Sixteenth-Century English Literary and Chronicle History

Abstract

In her 1997 article “Reprinting Tudor History: The Case of Catherine of Aragon” Betty Travitsky focuses her attention on an early modern queen about whom much remains to be said. After tracing the editorial manipulations of commentary on Catherine of Aragon in the prefatory materials to eight editions of Juan Luis Vives’s Instruction of a Christen Woman appearing between 1529 and 1592, Travitsky observes that the editions of 1585 and 1592 represented a return to the most favorable and flattering portrayal of Catherine, that of the 1529 edition, despite being published by the “strongly Protestant printers Robert Waldegrave and John Danter.” Travitsky goes on to note that the “Catherine of Aragon celebrated thirty years later in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII had become depoliticized by the latter part of the sixteenth century, that she was seen by that time in decidedly non-threatening and non-sectarian terms, and perhaps that the type of pious, learned, domesticated woman she had come to represent had become more widely celebrated in that age.”1 I use Travitsky’s work as the starting point for a discussion of several texts in which this transformation occurs. My particular focus here traces the strategies employed in sixteenth-century chronicle histories to present Catherine of Aragon as a figure who demands to be compared to—and praised for the same attributes as—the literary archetype of wifely devotion found in the legend of Patient Griselda. Open image in new window Uxoria Virtutes from Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblems. By permission of the Newberry Library.