English scholar, religious writer, Calvinist Anne Vaughan Locke was born into a pious Protestant household in London; her father, Steven Vaughan, was a diplomat in the service
Of King Henry VIII. Although Anne received no formal education, she was taught to read and write and she was particularly learned in theology.
In her early 1520s Anne married Henry Locke, who, like Anne, was committed to Protestant principles. In 1553 Scottish Protestant reformer John Knox lived with the Lockes in London before the accession of Catholic Mary Tudor led to his departure for the Continent. Knox, taken with Anne’s piety, wrote her several letters ITom Switzerland and invited her to join the community of Protestants in exile there. In May 1557 Anne accepted Knox’s invitation and moved to Geneva with her two small children; her husband joined them later. In Geneva, Anne began translating some of John Calvin’s sermons into English. After the death of Queen Mary and the accession of Elizabeth, which made England safer for Protestants, Anne returned to England; in 1560 she published her Sermons of John Calvin and dedicated her work to Catherine, dowager duchess of Suffolk, who had herself been a Protestant in exile.
Anne’s husband, Henry, died in 1571, and she remarried a preacher, Edward Dering. Anne’s second husband, ten years younger than herself, was an outspoken and active preacher whose views were initially applauded by the queen but were eventually found too critical of the Church of England. In 1576 Dering died after a brief illness, leaving a strong legacy of Puritan criticism against what he and his circle perceived as Elizabeth’s insufficient measures toward Protestant reform.
In 1583 Anne married again; her third husband was Richard Prowse, a cloth merchant and member of parliament who, like her first two husbands, demonstrated decidedly Puritan sympathies. At the end of her life, Anne published a translation from the French of Jean Taffin’s religious treatise, Of the markes of the children of God, and of their comfort in afflictions.
In recent years scholars have attended to the work appended to Locke’s translation of
Calvin’s sermons: A Meditation Of A Penitent Sinner: Written in Maner of A Paraphrase upon the 51. Psalme of David. This work, a reflection on the healing powers of faith, takes the form of twenty-six sonnets and is particularly notable as the first known sonnet sequence in English. Throughout her life, Locke remained within the domestic sphere circumscribed for sixteenth-century women but nonetheless made significant contributions to the religious writing of her period.
Jo Eldridge Carney
See also Religious Reform and Women;Transla-tion and Women Translators.
Bibliography
Primary Works
Anne Locke. A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner:
Anne Locke’s Sonnet Sequence with Locke’s Epistle. Edited and with an introduction by Kel Morin-Parsons. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: North Waterloo Academic Press, 1997.
Anne Vaughan Lock. The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Vol. 185. Edited by Susan Felch. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Renaissance English Text Society, 1999.
Secondary Works
Collinson, Patrick. Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism. Pages 273—289. London: Hambledon Press, 1983.
Donawerth, Jane. “Women’s Poetry and the Tudor-Stuart System of Gift Exchange.”
Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture. Edited by Mary Burke, Jane Donawerth, Linda Dove, and Karen Nelson, 3—18. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000.
World History
