Catherine Parr | Biography

Queen Catherine Parr played a vital role in promulgating Protestantism and humanist learning in Tudor England both by producing and patronizing religious works in the vernacular. Her first work, Prayers or Meditations (1545), was a volume of meditational pieces collected from other texts. It is important for its status as one of the first popular publications of courtly devotional literature in the English Protestant tradition. Her Lamentation of a Sinner (1547) was among the earliest Protestant spiritual autobiographies in England. Her influence as a patron enabled such Protestant humanists as Roger Ascham, John Foxe, and Thomas Wilson (to name a few) to acquire appointments as tutors in noble households. The support they received from her court circle of intellectual women provided the impetus for such works as Ascham's Schoolmaster (1570) and Wilson's Art of Rhetoric (1553) and Rule of Reason (1551) as well as a wide array of...
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