SOURCE: McQuade, Paula. “‘Except That They Had Offended the Lawe’: Gender and Jurisprudence in The Examinations of Anne Askew.” Literature and History 3, no. 2 (autumn 1994): 1-14.

In the following essay, McQuade points out that Askew's Examinations reveal that she was aware that, unlike English civil courts, the ecclesiastical courts viewed her as a subject with legal rights at least equal to those of men.

We owe The Examinations of Anne Askew to an intermediate source—the Protestant bishop John Bale.¹ While waiting out the uncertain English political climate in the Protestant outpost of Wesel, Germany, John Bale saw into print Anne Askew's two compact accounts of her examinations on suspicion of heresy, adding a voluble preface and interspersing his own editorializing commentary upon her brief text. Disseminated in England early in the reign of Edward VI (January 1547),² Bale's heavy-handedness with Askew's account is deliberate. He wants to make sure...