Œuvres spirituelles: Textes originaux et traductions françaises inédites du XVI siècle

In 1545, two years after her marriage to Henry VIII, Katherine (or Catherine) Parr published her Prayers or Meditations, a collection of short devotional statements and longer prayers in the tradition of the Imitatio Christi. In 1547, not long after her illustrious husband's death, she published The Lamentacion of a Sinner, extended reflections of a more markedly Reformed bent. Both works were soon rendered into French: young Princess Elizabeth (later Elizabeth I) translated the Prayers or Meditations into French, Italian, and Latin, and an anonymous writer translated the prose Lamentacion into French verse. Guy Bedouelle brings these four texts — the original English publications and their unpublished French translations — together in this new edition. (He does not include an anonymous French version of the Prayers or Meditations that appeared in 1546 and was reprinted in the nineteenth century.)

The Prayers or Meditations deal with sin, salvation, and the mercy of God and seem designed to appeal to a wide range of Christian sensibilities. The Lamentacion, by contrast, centers on hot-button Reformed issues: justification by faith, the primacy of scripture, and the doctrine of election. Its author denounces the sale of indulgences and criticizes the pope and "such rifraf as the bishop of Rome hath planted in his tyranny and kingdom" (126). In it, the pope becomes "Pharao" and Henry VIII, "our Moyses" (151–52). The texts provide strong evidence of Katherine Parr's continuing role on the English religious and political stages. Both texts were well-known during the sixteenth century, which produced some twenty editions of the Prayers or Meditations and four of the Lamentacion. A laudatory preface to the Lamentacion by William Cecil — later secretary of state under Elizabeth I — points further to this work's potential political significance. Moreover, as the sixth (and last) wife of Henry VIII, Katherine Parr created a kind of family home for the royal children — Mary, Elizabeth, and Edward, all of whom would eventually sit on the English throne — seeing to their intellectual and spiritual development. As Bedouelle points out, although the religious politics of the younger children, Elizabeth and Edward, bear the closest resemblance to their stepmother's, it may well have been her regard for Katherine Parr that kept Mary, when she came to power, from executing Katherine's brother William despite his support of Lady Jane Grey's claim to the throne.

The texts and translations also bear witness to the lingering influence of Marguerite de Navarre. Although Katherine Parr drew from numerous sources, her chief inspiration was surely Marguerite. The Lamentacion sounds in many ways not only like Marguerite's Miroir de l'âme pécheresse (translated into English in 1544 by Princess Elizabeth) and Triomphe de l'Agneau, as Bedouelle notes, but also like her Prisons, particularly the argument that the "school" of the cross surpasses all the world's books. It is no coincidence that the translation of the Lamentacion into verse makes its similarities to Marguerite's poetry even more striking, as does its title, La Complainte de l'âme pécheresse.

Bedouelle's attribution of the Complainte to Jean Bellemain (or Belmain), the French tutor of Edward VI and a follower of John Calvin, is convincing, and his notes contain valuable information: comments on translation and form, scriptural and other allusions, and references to critical texts. (Similar annotations to the other texts would have been useful — although Elizabeth's translation, to be fair, is of interest more in terms of the transmission of ideas than as a subject for detailed analysis.) Bedouelle also provides a glossary for the Complainte and, as an appendix, Bellemain's prefaces to two other translations: the 1552 Anglican liturgy, and a letter from Saint Basil the Great to Saint Gregory of Nazianzus. Somewhat peripheral to Katherine Parr, these prefaces nonetheless provide insight into Bellemain's views on translation and French orthography; he expresses his distaste for movements to bring spelling into accord with pronunciation, arguing that mute letters must be preserved to illustrate etymology and distinguish homophones, and criticizing "rimeurs" (277) who change spelling to make their rhymes look better.

This volume sheds new light on spiritual, literary, and political exchanges between sixteenth-century England and France (and perhaps Switzerland) and makes even clearer the roles of prominent women — Marguerite de Navarre, Katherine Parr, and Elizabeth I not least among them — in facilitating these exchanges.