SOURCE: Mueller, Janel. “Devotion as Difference: Intertextuality in Queen Katherine Parr's Prayers or Meditations. Huntington Library Quarterly 53, no. 3 (1990): 171-97.

In the following essay, Mueller offers an account of Parr's Prayers or Meditations, which she says is more than a gesture to affirm her status in the royal household. It is, she states, a work which seeks to universalize religious experience and which involved considerable compositional challenges because of the author's gender.

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Nowadays we bring to our reading of those rarities—writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance and Reformation—two questions sharpened by the difference of gender. We inquire into the differential marked by the very fact of a woman's utterance, how she came to break the silence that bound the vast majority of her female contemporaries. We also ask what the voice is like, what difference it makes that a woman is writing. As we pursue such questions...