SOURCE: King, John N. “Patronage and Piety: The Influence of Catherine Parr.” In Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, edited by Margaret Patterson Hannay, pp. 43-60. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985.

In the following essay, King examines the influence of Parr on the development of women's learning and religious life in sixteenth-century England.

At the very end of the reign of Henry VIII (1509-47), a circle of aristocratic women emerged who sponsored humanistic scholarship and patronized the translation and publication of religious works into the vernacular. Under the auspices of Catherine Parr, the king's last wife, this group of powerful women broke with traditional modes of patronage and devotion which had flourished at the Tudor court at the time of Lady Margaret Beaufort and Catherine of Aragon, respectively the grandmother and first wife of Henry VIII. In place...