Anne Bulkeley and her Book: Fashioning Female Piety in Early Tudor England (review)

The subject of this study, British Library, Harley MS 494, is a collection of 33 devotional texts in English and Latin, including prayers and brief prose treatises, which was compiled during the volatile period between 1532 and 1535. In November 1534, the Act of Supremacy signaled the break with Rome and in the following June Thomas Cromwell ordered the erasure of all mention of the Pope from service and prayer books. The response to the reforms was swift; in the preface to his 1535 edition of the Goodly prymer, William Marshall scathingly referred to some devotions in traditional books of hours as 'popish, painted, and pestilent prayers'.

Harley MS 494 is a fascinating document of the devotional preoccupations within a particular milieu during this period. Professor Barratt has transcribed and edited the entire 113 folio manuscript and also provides a thorough analysis of its patronage, sources, devotional and political context and raison d'être. This is no small task, as the diverse sources and structure of the manuscript are complex and far from transparent. It would appear that the manuscript was first owned by and (as Barratt argues) compiled specifically for Anne Bulkeley, a well-to-do laywoman with courtly connections, her mother being the first cousin of Elizabeth Woodville, the wife of Edward IV. The manuscript may then have been bequeathed to Anne's daughter, another Anne, who became a Fontevrault nun at Amesbury Abbey in Wiltshire.

At first the manuscript, which is a modest book on paper, appears to be a miscellany, a collection of disparate and unordered texts. No less than eighteen scribes have contributed, and there are several texts identified by Barratt as 'fillers' between the main items. However, she makes a case for the internal logic of the manuscript, arguing that it is more correctly described as an anthology with a cohesion and unity of purpose, albeit not one that is highly ordered. Several texts point to the Brigittine provenance of Syon Abbey. The principal scribe, Robert Taylor, was Clerk of Works at Syon Abbey during the early sixteenth century, and included are texts by English Brigittines Richard Whitford and William Bonde as well as Bridget of Sweden and continental women visionaries known at Syon. Certain prayers, such as the passion devotion to the Five Wounds, were also characteristic of Syon.

Large and powerful, Syon Abbey exerted influence at court and, although she was not a religious, Anne Bulkeley the elder can be positioned within the broader Syon 'texual community'. Indeed, Barratt suggests that the manuscript was made specifically for Anne Bulkeley's devotional requirements, and that the compiler and Anne's 'spiritual director' was possibly the Syon monk Richard Whitford. This might distinguish the collection from a preces privatae or book of prayers collected by an owner for private use. It is unlikely that the discursive Brigittine prose treatises and several obscure contemporary texts would have been accessible to Anne to collect herself, without the intervention of an educated controller.

The omissions in the anthology are as revealing as the inclusions. Issues that could be construed as controversial are avoided, evidence that a compiler sensitive to prevailing debates was responsible for the work. In keeping with the official condemnation of aspects of traditional religion, no suffrages to the saints are included, and very few prayers directed to individual saints. Similarly there are no prayers with indulgences attached, but several Marian prayers, which were not yet subject to attack. The manuscript is unillustrated, possibly also a response to an increasingly negative attitude to images. Also strangely absent, given the pronounced Brigittine orientation of the anthology, are passages from Bridget's visionary revelations. Barratt attributes this to the compiler's deliberate distancing from the Elizabeth Barton affair. Barton, a Benedictine visionary and occasional visitor to Syon Abbey, was hanged for treason in 1534.

Why was this anthology necessary when...