Sola Scriptura: Reading, Speech, and Silence in The Examinations of Anne Askew

Abstract

From her provocative public reading of the Bible in Lincoln Cathedral in the early 1540s to her execution as a heretic in 1546, Anne Askew bears witness to the pivotal roles that reading, speech, and silence played in the religious debates of the English Reformation. Her reading of 1 Corinthians 7 provided scriptural authority for separating from her husband on the grounds of religious differences. She goaded the priests of Lincoln with her public perusal of the Bible, an action she had been expressly warned against and which she maintained silently, in the face of their disapproval, for six days. And she refused to acknowledge as legitimate any part of the Catholic Mass that Christ had not ‘confirmed with hys most precyouse bloude,’ claiming that she received more value from reading ‘five lynes in the Bible’ than from hearing ‘five masses in the temple.’1 In effect, Askew died in defense of her reading practice. Her Examinations negotiate rapid shifts in the cultural, religious, and legal discourses surrounding reading, speech, and silence in the last years of Henry VIII’s reign, illuminating one woman’s trenchant engagement with the Pauline prescriptions governing women’s religious expression in the English Reformation. Moreover, by emphatically insisting on her right to interpret the sacrament of the Eucharist symbolically, Askew also offers us a unique, early example of women’s rhetorical theory. In doing so, I will argue, she provides us with a crucial framework through which to reassess women’s gendered deployments of modesty discourse in the early modern period.