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ABSTRACT
Who wrote “A Meditation of a penitent sinner” that was appended to Anne Lock’s translation of Sermons of John Calvin Vpon the Songe that Ezechias made (1560)? Lock (c.1533–90) introduced this poem with the disclaimer that it was “delivered me by my frend with whom I knew I might be so bolde to use and publishe it as pleased me.” Although Lock was not known to have written English verse, professional scholarship attributed the “Meditation” to her with near unanimity until 2017, when Steven W. May argued that Thomas Norton (1532–84) was its likely author. In response, Jake Arthur challenged May’s thesis in 2022, arguing in particular that May’s linguistic methodology was flawed. This article refutes Arthur’s rejoinder by clarifying how the stylistic evidence fits into the larger argument and summarizing the evidence that Norton is beyond reasonable doubt the friend who gave Lock the “Meditation” for her 1560 translation of Calvin.
Notes
1 Sermons of John Calvin, upon the songe that Ezechias made after he had bene sicke (London: John Day 1560), STC 4450.
2 Felch, The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock (Tempe, AZ: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999). My references to Lock's works cite this edition.
3 Micheline White notes the lack of evidence for Lock's responsibility for the poem and refers throughout to “the ‘author’ of the “Meditation” (“Dismantling Catholic Primers and Reforming Private Prayer: Anne Lock, Hezekiah's Song, and Psalm 51,” in Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain, ed. Alec Ryrie and Jessica Martin. [Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012], 94n). Rosalind Smith concludes that the Meditation is “probably attributable to Lock,” in Sonnets And The English Woman Writer, 1560–1621: The Politics Of Absence (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 25.
4 Ben Burton, “'The Praise Of That I Yield For Sacrifice’: Ann Lock And The Poetics Of The Eucharis,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 30, no. 3 (2006): 89–118 (96).
5 See the cross indexing under “Verse Forms and Rhyme Schemes” in Bibliography and Index of English Verse Printed 1476–1558 (London: Mansell, 1988), and William A. Ringler, Jr., Bibliography and Index of English Verse in Manuscript 1501–1558, prepared and completed by Michael Rudick and Susan J. Ringler (London: Mansell, 1992).
6 The Canticles or Balades of Salomon (London, 1549) (STC 2768); the verse forms are listed in Ringler, Jr., Bibliography and Index of English Verse Printed 1476–1558, TP 1373.
7 A preservative, or treacle, agaynst the poyson of Pelagius latlie renued by the furius secte of the annabaptistes (London: [S. Mierdman] for Androw Hester, 1560; STC 24368). Turner was the Duke's personal physician.
8 Critical texts of these poems are found in Steven W. May and Alan Bryson, Verse Libel in Renaissance England and Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 195–7.
9 For example, Edward Thorndike and Irving Lorge, The Teacher's Word Book of 30,000 Words, 4th ed. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1963) established frequencies for these words from a corpus of perhaps ten million words. The TCP controls a corpus of over a billion words, thus providing an incrementally more representative measurement.
10 Jean Taffin, Of the Markes of the Children of God, tr. Anne Prowse (formerly Lock) (1590), STC 23652.
11 “Anne Lock and Thomas Norton's Meditation of a Penitent Sinner,” Modern Philology 114, no. 4 (2017): 793–819.
12 Selected Poetry, Prose, and Translations, with Contextual Materials (New York: Iter Press, 2021), 79.
13 On David and Bathsheba, see 2 Samuel 11.
14 Arthur, “Anne Lock or Thomas Norton?,” 220.
15 Ibid., 223.
16 The Tragedy of Gorboduc, Whereof three Acts were written by Thomas Notone and the two last by Thomas Sackvyle (London: William Griffith, 1565; STC 18684), sig. B2v.
17 Kimberly Anne Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women's Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 137–39.
18 My thanks to Paul F. Schaffner, and to Craig Berry, Douglas Knox, Joseph Loewenstein, Martin Mueller, and Stephen Pentecost of the EarlyPrint Lab for supplying me with this figure (private communication, September 15, 2022).
19 The authorship clinic at Claremont McKenna College, for example, directed by Ward E. Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza, developed a battery of nineteen different tests based on such language parameters as hyphenated compound words, feminine endings, relative clauses, contractions, and words prefixed by “where” and “there”. See “Oxford by the Numbers: What are the Odds that the Earl of Oxford Could Have Written Shakespeare's Poems and Plays?,” Tennessee Law Review 72, no. 1 (2004): 323–451. The diagnostic occurrence of these kinds of markers could be established for Norton and Lock, but then the roughly 2700 words of the Meditation might not provide enough of a sample to identify either of them as author.
20 With the shift of EEBO from Chadwyck-Healey to the ProQuest platform, consistent and total TCP word counts have become much more difficult to obtain. Arthur reports finding “fewer than ten hits” on this word “meaning ‘surpassing’” (222), but my search on 9/1/2022 using four different spellings returned the same 243 hits on this word in the sense of “exceeding” or “surpassing” that I found before.
21 These are “bloom” and “feebled” above and “splat”, to be split open, that appears in the TCP search to 1590 only in the Meditation's “with sharpned knife/ Doth splat my ripped hert” (ll. 151–2). It is easy to understand why Norton found no later opportunity to use this word in his voluminous writings.
22 “assoile”, “disclosing”, and “forshe/owing”, occur in the Institution; “behight”, “langor/langour”, and “reft” appear in other works by Norton but not the Institution.
23 Words with asterisks are analyzed in May, “Anne Lock and Thomas Norton's Meditation,” 814–17.
24 These are: Orations, of Arsanes agaynst Philip the trecherous kyng of Macedone (London: John Daye, 1560?; STC 785); Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion (London: Reinolde Wolfe and Richarde Harison, 1561; STC 4415); The Tragedie of Gorboduc (1565), acts 1–3; metrical pslams in The Whole Booke of Psalmes (London: John Daye, 1562; STC 2430); and Pamphlets: five propaganda tracts Norton published in the wake of Pope Pius V's excommunication of Queen Elizabeth and the Northern Rebellion, 1569–70 (STC 18677.5, 18678a, 18679, 18679.5, and 18685.3).
25 From these are: “beknow”, “extend (upon)”, “glimpse”, “mining”, “sufficing”, “wrekeful”, and “yelden”.
26 Spiller, “A Literary ‘First’: The Sonnet Sequence of Anne Locke 1560,” Renaissance Studies: Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies 11, no. 1 (1997): 41–55 (46–48).
27 Beth Quitslund and Nicholas Temperley, The Whole Book of Psalms Collected into English Metre by Thomas Sternhold, John Hopkins, and Others, 2 vols. (Tempe, AZ: Renaissance English Text Society, 2018), 2.550, 564.
28 Beth Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 219–22.
29 “T. N. the translator to the Reader,” The Institution of Christian Religion, sig. *2v.
30 Norton may have worked even faster. In “The Printers to the Reders,” Reinold Wolfe and Richard Harrison explain that “maister John Dawes translated it and delivered it into our handes more than a twelvemoneth past.” But they were “constrayned … to procure an other frende of oures to translate it whole agayn” (The Institution of Christian Religion, 1561, t.p. verso).
31 See STC 16561 (1556) and 16561a (1558) for Whittingham's Psalm 51 in the Geneva psalter and STC 2427–29 for Day's editions 1560–61.
32 “‘Unlock my lipps’: the Miserere mei Deus of Anne Vaughan Lok and Mary Sidney Herbert,” in Privileging Gender in Early Modern England, ed. Jean R. Brink (Kirkesville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal, 1993), 21–22.
33 These are: STC 1309 (1543); STC 1303 (1545); STC 1296.5 (1545); STC 1275 (1550), and STC 22992 (1551?). Bale refers to “chaos” three times in STC 1275 and once each in the remaining titles.
34 See STC 23710 (Turner); STC 21613 (Salesbury); and STC 1735 (Becon). He served as chaplain to Edward Seymour, Lord Protector Somerset (1500–52), who employed Norton as well. Both he and Norton wrote commendatory verses for Turner's A preseruatiue, or triacle, agaynst the poyson of Pelagius.
35 The booke of common prayer (London: Edovardi Whitchurche, 1553; STC 16288a) in the Gospel for the third Sunday in Advent quotes from Matthew 11, “the lame walke, the Lepers are cleansed, and the deafe heare” (sig. B7). The phrase is identical in the Geneva Bible of 1560, “the lepers are clensed” (Matthew 11:5).
36 In her 1999 edition Felch isolated a number of words that looked like “Unusual lexical choices” before the TCP was available for testing such claims. She concluded that “Although such congruences are suggestive, they cannot be taken as definitive, since the tropes and rhetoric of the epistle, translations, and poems were common currency among nonconformist writers” (liv).
37 Jane Donawerth credits Linda Dove with first noting this reference in the Geneva Bible (“Women's Poetry And The Tudor-Stuart System of Gift Exchange,” in Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain [New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000], 3–18 (12, n. 23). Rosalind Smith interprets the Meditation “as a complement” to the sermons because both concern kings who suffered “affliction redeemed and cured by God's mercy” (Sonnets And The English Woman Writer, 21). I would modify Smith's conclusion to make the sermons a complement to the Meditation, since the David of Psalm 51 and the Meditation has yet to receive God's grace.
38 I summarize this labor in “Anne Lock and Thomas Norton's Meditation,” 796–8.
39 Felch (Selected Works, 79) reviews these arguments, then concludes: “Lock nowhere employs the ‘modesty topos’ to cloak her agency.”
40 The Complete Poems of Shakespeare, ed. Cathy Shrank and Raphael Lyne (London: Routledge, 2018), 9.
41 Margaret Hannay originated this argument (“‘Unlock my lipps’,” 21) which was picked up in Coles's Religion, Reform, and Women's Writing in Early Modern England, 126.
42 The customary title appears, for instance in The Table of Cebes the Philosopher (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1545; STC 4891) sig. A1v; Langland's The vision of Pierce Plowman (London: Richard Grafton for Roberte Crowley, 1550; STC 19907), sig. *2–2v; John Redman, A reporte of Maister Doctor Redmans answeres (London: Thomas Raynald for Wylliam Seres, 1551; STC 20827), sig. A2–2v; and Claude Paradin, The true and lyvely historyke Purtreatures of the Woll Bible (Lyons: Jean of Tournes, 1553; STC 3043), sig. A6–6v. A variation occurs in William Neville, The castell of pleasure (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1530?; STC 18475). On sig. A1v Robert Copland introduces himself as “Coplande the prynter to the auctour,” followed by a poetic dialogue with the purported author of the work.
43 A Faithful Declaration of Christes holy supper (London: John Day, 1560; STC 14018), sig. *3v.
44 The Politics of Early Modern Women's Writing (Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Ltd., 2001), 8. Clarke then surveys a number of women who published poetry anyway including Isabella Whitney (fl. 1566–1600), Aemelia Lanyer (1569–1645), and Lady Mary Wroth (1587-c. 1651).
45 Juan Luis Vives, A Very frutefull and pleasant boke called the Instructio[n] of a Christen woma[n] (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1529; STC 24856), sig. E2v; in A briefe and pleasant discourse of duties in Mariage, called the Flower of Friendshippe (London: Henrie Denham, 1571; STC 24077), Edmund Tilney states that “The chefest way for a woman to preserue and maintayne this good fame, is to be resident in hir owne house” (sigs. E2v–E3v), quoted by Arthur, 229–30.
46 Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 85, citing Michael G. Brennan's analysis of the patents in “The Queen's Proposed Visit to Wilton House in 1599 and the ‘Sidney Psalms,’” Sidney Journal 20, no. 1 (2002): 27–53.
47 The Countess had no aversion to print for she published her translation of Philippe de Mornay's Discourse of Life and Death in the same volume as her Antonius, A Tragœdie written also in French (London: William Ponsonby, 1592; STC 18138). Ponsonby reprinted the play as The Tragedie of Antonie (London, 1595; STC 11623). Lady Pembroke apparently also supplied Francis Davison with the text of her progress entertainment for the Queen, a pastoral dialogue in verse that he published under her name in his A Poetical Rapsody (London: V[alentine] S[immes] for John Baily, 1602; STC 6373).
48 Katherine Parr, Complete Works and Correspondence, ed. Janel Mueller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 453.
49 Ibid., 483, n. 150.
50 Margaret of Angoulême, A Godly Medytacyon of the christen sowle, tr. Princess Elizabeth (Wesel: Dirik van der Straten, 1548, STC 17320), (sigs. B2v–3, C2). Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit continued the tradition in her Morning and Evening Prayers (London: Henrie Middleton for Christopher Barker, 1574; STC 24477.5) where, among other confessions, she asks God “to pardon mee, which have sore offended thee in thoght, word, and deed” (Elizabeth Tyrwhit's Morning and Evening Prayers, ed. Susan M. Felch [Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008], 133).
51 The evidence supports, I believe, Margaret Ezell's conclusion that “the oft-cited injunction that women should be chaste, silent and obedient … .can no longer be taken as an accurate delineation of women's participation in early modern literary culture” (Margaret J. M. Ezell, “Women and Writing,” in A Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing, ed. Anita Pacheco (Malden, MA: Blackwells, 2002), 78. In the same volume, however, we find the standard appeal to “seventeenth-century gender ideology in which the ideal woman was required to be silent, chaste and obedient. Throughout the period women's entry into the public domain through publication … was associated with feminine transgression and particularly, promiscuity” (Bronwen Price, “Women's Poetry 1550–1700: ‘Not Unfit to be Read,’” in A Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing, 283).
52 Oxford Dictionay of National Biography, s.v. “Locke [née Vaughan; other married names Dering, Prowse], Anne (c.1530–1590×1607),” citing The Works of John Knox, ed. David Laing, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1895), 4.237–39.
53 The Works of John Knox, ed. Laing, 6.21–27.
54 “‘Halff A Scrypture Woman’: Heteroglossia And Female Authorial Agency In Prayers By Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit, Anne Lock, And Anne Wheathill,” in English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625, ed. Micheline White (Surrey, UK: Routledge, 2011), 161. A representative statement of the supposed prohibition on women is Mary Ellen Lamb's assertion that since the Church prohibited women's preaching, “publishing their own ideas about religion was impossible” (“The Cooke Sisters: Attitudes toward Learned Women in the Renaissance,” in Silent But for the Word, Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Patterson Hannay (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1985), 109.
55 The inscription in British Library shelf mark 696.a.40 reads, “Liber Henrici Lock ex dono Annæ vxoris suæ. 1559.”
56 For the technical disparities between this poem and the Meditation see “Anne Lock and Thomas Norton's Meditation,” 804–6.
57 Smith, Sonnets And The English Woman Writer, 1560–1621, 19.
58 The Development of the Sonnet (New York: Routledge, 1992), 93.
59 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Turbervile [Turberville], George.”
60 Louis Thorn Golding, An Elizabethan Puritan, Arthur Golding the Translator of Ovid's Metamorphoses and also of John Calvin's Sermons (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1937), 26–29. John Considine lists Golding's six translations of Calvin's works between 1565 and 1583 (Oxford Dictionay of National Biography, s.v. “Golding, Arthur”). Golding, too, had ample opportunity to use these rare words since Considine estimates that his “translations of prose works amount in all to about five and a half million words.”
61 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Gascoigne, George.”
62 Melbancke matriculated at St. John's College Cambridge in 1575, so is unlikely to have been born long before c. 1560. See ODNB.
63 Replying to Calvin on November 13, 1552 Norton mentions “your most courteous reply to my last.” Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation, ed. Hastings Robinson, 2 vols., Parker Society, vols. 37–38 (Cambridge, 1846–7), 1.340. Felch, Collected Works, xlix.