SOURCE: Beilin, Elaine V. “Anne Askew's Dialogue with Authority.” In Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and France, edited by Marie-Rose Logan and Peter L. Rudnytsky, pp. 313-22. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Beilin maintains that the Examinations use Askew's doubly marginal status as a Reformer and a woman to turn the tables on her Catholic, male interrogators by revealing their errors in thinking and focusing the attention of her readers on her own spiritual victory.

Responding to the “good people” who were expecting to hear the account of her examinations by the officials of Henry VIII's church and the city of London, Anne Askew, a Reformer from the Lincoln area, did not disappoint them.¹ For the Reformist cause she wrote an extraordinarily vivid account of her questioning, her responses, her imprisonment and torture, which were the...