Narrating Religious History in Anne Askew’s Examinations: A Postmodern Reading

Abstract

Although a private account of the religious history of the years of the Reformation in sixteenth-century Henrician England, Anne Askew’s Examinations bear a characteristically postmodern feature, namely, the democratization of the production of knowledge, more specifically historiography. Askew, an imprisoned Protestant woman in the Tower of London, who was neither a theologian nor a historian but rather a dissident, creates her own record of the religious, social, and political changes of her time. Consequently, the history which The Examinations relate is not restricted to the official narrative of the social, political, and religious center of the time but is also the other narratives of those located on the periphery and shared the same historical context of the center