Anne Askew

1521–1546EnglishEnglish Reformation

The young Englishwoman racked in the Tower for reading her Bible, who named no one and was carried to the fire in a chair.

Summary

Anne Askew lived 1521–1546, and was English. This wing places Anne Askew in The Reformation, 1500–1600.

Lived 1521–1546, English.
Stood in The Reformation (1500–1600).
Hangs on The Martyrs.
Tradition: English Reformation.

The life

Anne Askew was a Lincolnshire gentlewoman, married against her will to a Catholic neighbor and turned out of the house when she would not stop reading the English Bible. She went to London, sought a divorce, and kept talking about Scripture in a city where that had become dangerous. Arrested and examined, she answered her questioners with quick, exact replies and denied that the bread of the Mass became Christ's body.

Condemned already, she was taken to the Tower and racked, illegally, since she was a convicted gentlewoman, and so violently that the Lord Chancellor and another official worked the wheel themselves after the lieutenant refused. They wanted the names of noblewomen at court who shared her beliefs. She gave none. Her body was broken, and on 16 July 1546 she was carried to Smithfield in a chair and burned, aged twenty-five. The account she wrote in prison was smuggled abroad and printed within a year.

What was happening while he lived6 moments · 1500–1600

1516Erasmus prints the Greek New TestamentThe Dutch scholar Erasmus published the New Testament in its original Greek, with his own fresh Latin beside it, at Basel. For the first time a parish priest could check the church's Latin Bible against the words the apostles wrote. Luther and Tyndale both worked from it.
1521–1522The Wartburg: a New Testament in GermanFriends staged a kidnapping and hid Luther in the Wartburg castle, where he grew a beard, called himself Knight George, and translated the New Testament from Erasmus's Greek in about eleven weeks. It was printed in September 1522 and sold out almost at once. He wrote that he wanted the mother in the house and the common man in the market to hear it in their own speech.
1525–1526Tyndale's English New TestamentRefused permission to translate in England, William Tyndale printed abroad. The Cologne run was raided mid-printing in 1525; he escaped upriver with the sheets and finished the job at Worms, and copies reached England in 1526 hidden in bales of cloth and sacks of flour. By the account Edward Hall's chronicle and then Foxe preserved, bishops bought up the stock to burn it, and the money the bishops paid financed the next edition.
Oct 1529Marburg: the reformers fail to agreePhilip of Hesse brought Luther and Zwingli together to unite the movement. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles and broke on the fifteenth, what happens in the Lord's Supper. Luther chalked "This is my body" on the table and would not be moved; Zwingli reportedly offered his hand in fellowship and Luther declined it. The Protestant world stayed divided.
1534Luther's complete German BibleWith a team of Hebrew and Greek scholars, Luther finished the whole Bible in German, printed at Wittenberg by Hans Lufft. He hunted words in butcher shops and marketplaces to get the sound right. His Bible carried the Saxon chancery German he wrote in into every corner of the language, one of the strongest single forces in the making of standard written German, though not its sole origin.
March 1536Calvin's *Institutes*, first editionA twenty-six-year-old French exile published a small six-chapter handbook at Basel explaining the faith to a hostile king. He kept enlarging it for the next twenty-three years; the 1559 edition runs to four books and eighty chapters. That same year he was pressed into staying in Geneva against his own wishes.

The Reformation: the whole era→

Go further

Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.

Search Anne Askew at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites

Why this one hangs here

Was racked in the Tower to make her name her friends, gave no names, and was carried to the fire in a chair.

Hangs on The Martyrs: The witnesses who paid with their lives, from the arena at Carthage to the present day, and the confessors who paid with everything short of their lives.

Standing beside himThe Reformation · 19 on this stretch of wall

John Wycliffe1330–1384

Argued that Scripture belonged to the people in their own tongue, and set in motion the English Bible that carries his name, made by his Oxford circle a century and a half before Tyndale. They burned his bones, and the river carried the ashes to the sea.

Jan Hus1372–1415

Preached Christ as head of the church in Prague's own language, and sang at the stake in 1415.

Martin Luther1483–1546

Sent ninety-five theses against indulgences to his archbishop, and later, before the emperor, would not take back a word of what he had written.

Miles Coverdale1488–1569

Finished what Tyndale could not and printed the first complete English Bible from a press, and four years later put the Great Bible in every parish church.

Thomas Cranmer1489–1556

Put the church's prayers into plain English, then took back his own recantation and burned for it.

William Tyndale1494–1536

Translated the New Testament from the Greek so a plough-boy could read it, and paid for it at a stake in 1536.