SOURCE: James, Susan E. “‘All the Words of Angels.’” In Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen, pp. 220-52. Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1999.

In the following essay, James examines Parr's involvement in the publication of works of humanist scholarship and the queen's own writings on religion.

Between the spring of 1544 and the spring of 1546, the queen involved herself in a number of projects related to humanist scholarship and to the reformed religion that ultimately earned her the ire of the conservatives. Her involvement in these projects should also have earned her the interest of posterity but as she chose to keep much of her activity out of the public limelight, the bits and pieces of extant evidence connecting her with such major publications as Cranmer's Litany, the Grafton-Whitchurch primer, and the English translation of Erasmus's Paraphrases vary in strength and number. Her connection to the founding of...