Representations of Women in Tudor Historiography: John Bale and the Rhetoric of Exemplarity

The writings of Anne Askew and the Princess Elizabeth have received attention as two of a small number of published works by women in the Tudor period. The lengthy additions and glosses of their editor, John Bale, have garnered much less notice. Bale appropriated these writings for the use of protestant polemic, and presented their authors as exemplary historical agents worthy of emulation by men and women alike. By situating these two women in his apocalyptic rewriting of the past, he created for women a place in the new protestant history of the realm. The struggle of the True and the False Churches provided for Bale a fluid situation in which women might be required to assume behaviours typically labeled masculine; he used these writings, and the sanction of historical precedent, to advocate an active, public role for educated women.