A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner

My cruell conscience with sharpned knife
Doth splat my ripped hert, and layes abrode
The lothesome secretes of my filthy life,
And spredes them forth before the face of God.

‘A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner’ (1560)
in Susan Felch (ed.) The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock (Arizona, 1999), ll. 151-4

Have you ever forgotten a birthday, failed to keep a promise, or gossiped about a friend? At one time or another, I think we’ve all felt the prick of a guilty conscience. Yet, in the above lines excerpted from a 1560 sonnet sequence, appended to a volume of sermon translations by Anne Lock, conscience does not so much come lightly pricking as violently wielding a ‘sharpned knife'. In the guise of a forensic examiner cum prosecutor, ‘cruell conscience’ ‘splat[s]’ open the penitent sinner’s ‘ripped hert’, triumphantly displaying the ‘lothesome secretes of [her] filthy life’ as evidence of her guilt. God’s judgement awaits.

‘A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner: Written in Maner of a Paraphrase upon the 51. Psalme of David’, offers a graphic, visceral, and impassioned dramatization of sixteenth-century Calvinist faith. The ‘Meditation’ comprises five prefatory sonnets and twenty-one psalm sonnets. An original prose translation of Psalm 51 (one of the seven Penitential Psalms) is printed in the margins, with, broadly speaking, each sonnet in the sequence developing a single line from the psalm. The psalm details King David’s expression of profound remorse for his adultery with Bathsheba and murderous intentions towards her husband, Uriah.

Style of Luca Giordano. The Toilet of Bathsheba. after 1705. © The National Gallery, London. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Adultery and murderous inclinations are surely reasons enough for a guilty conscience. Yet, while the penitent sinner in the ‘Meditation’ does suggest that ‘the profe of myne example [shall] preache / The bitter frute of lust and foule delight’ (291-2), the main thrust of the sequence is a more generalised sense of anxiety about her sinful condition: ‘I am but sinne, and sinfull ought to dye’ (175). The sonnets are voiced by a penitent sinner who suffers from, and indeed cultivates, acute awareness of her own depravity. In a state of spiritual abjection, she repeatedly turns to God in the hope that his mercy and grace will save her. She holds fast to the idea that the ‘endlesse nomber’ (107) of her sins will find a counterpart in the ‘endlesse nomber of [God’s] mercies’ (106). While her ‘feble’ faith is ‘with heavy lode opresst’ (247), in other words, it is not altogether lost. In fact, for Calvin and his adherents, suffering aligns one with Christ and thereby enriches faith. Fervent Calvinist anguish may not resonate with many twenty-first century readers. Yet, in our own world of ideological extremes, this sonnet sequence offers us a thrilling and at times unsettling dramatization of faith formation. What does it mean to cultivate belief? And how can poetic or artistic innovation shape self-expression in the face of uncertainty, precarity, and vulnerability?

The sonnet form has consistently been a locus of adaptation and experimentation, from sixteenth-century Petrarchan sonnet translations by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, to work by Patience Agbabi and Paul Muldoon in the twenty-first century. Likewise, the ‘Meditation’, too, capitalises on the affordances of the sonnet, transforming the vicissitudes of Petrarchan love into an expression of spiritual vulnerability. Notably, the ‘Meditation’ holds the twin distinctions of being not only the earliest extant poem to blend psalm paraphrase with the Petrarchan sonnet, but also the first known sonnet sequence written in English. The sequence is thus a key text in the history of the sonnet, predating better-known sequences such as Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591) and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) by Sidney’s niece, Lady Mary Wroth.

The ‘Meditation’ is appended to Anne Lock’s translation of four sermons delivered by John Calvin in 1557. The volume in which these texts appear is prefaced by a dedication to Lady Katherine Bertie, the duchess of Suffolk, signed ‘A.L’. Lock herself was embedded in a London merchant community that was deeply concerned with furthering the English Reformation. In the 1550s she corresponded with the Scottish Reformed minister John Knox, who advised Lock in his letters to follow her conscience in deciding whether to join him in exile during Mary I’s Catholic reign. By 1557 Lock had arrived in Calvin’s Protestant vanguard in Geneva, where she likely heard Calvin preach in person and probably started work on her sermon translations. She returned to England in 1559 and the volume containing both these translations and the “Meditation” was published by the Protestant printer John Day the following year.

Against the backdrop of mid-sixteenth century religious and political turmoil, the ‘Meditation’ offered a creative repackaging of Calvinism for an English audience. Following the ascension of Elizabeth I to the throne in 1558, there was considerable uncertainty about her specific brand of Protestantism. Among returning exiles in particular, there was concern about the extent to which they and their devotional practices would be tolerated. The ‘Meditation’ is an example of a creative attempt to further the spread of Calvinist ideas and stimulate the English Reformation.

‘A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner: Written in Maner of a Paraphrase upon the 51. Psalme of David’ in Sermons of John Calvin (London, 1560; STC 4450), sig. Aa1r. Early English Books Online, courtesy of the British Library.

Critics have widely speculated on the attribution of the sonnet sequence to Lock thanks to a headnote that seems to disavow authorship. This headnote continues to provoke debate among scholars. For some it is a modesty topos and/or an addition by Lock’s publisher. For others, it is an invitation to go in search of alternative authorial candidates. However, Rosalind Smith (2022) argues that rather than focusing on authorial attribution, the field of historical women’s writing would be ‘better served by attending carefully to how authorship is framed in a text, in each of its constituent parts, acknowledging the complexity and range of authorial positions that women could, and did, adopt’ (Smith 37). Scholars such as Susan Felch (1999) and Jake Arthur (2022) concur that in the absence of any better candidate, as well as for a variety of stylistic and contextual reasons, Lock remains the poem’s most likely author. Nonetheless, recent work, in particular by Smith and Arthur, frames the ‘Meditation’ as a rich case study for exploring methodological questions about authorial attribution and early modern female authorship.

While the intriguing headnote to the ‘Meditation’ obscures the gender of the poet, so too does the sequence itself mask the gender of the penitent sinner. Even though the Penitential Psalms are conventionally believed to be voiced by King David, the gender of the speaker is in fact ambiguous. A distinct affordance of this ambiguity is that the sequence’s malleable lyric ‘I’ invites every reader to inhabit the role of the penitent sinner as part of his or her own devotional practice. My decision to refer to the speaker as ‘she’ and ‘her’ in this article partly stems, I admit, from my desire to read the penitent sinner as the poetic manifestation of Anne Lock’s own Calvinist faith.

Although early modern religious writing may not immediately attract wide contemporary interest, or be deemed exciting, accessible, or relevant enough to pique student interest, I believe that the ‘Meditation’ deserves the status of a key text. Over and above the pacy, vivid, and compelling nature of the individual sonnets, the sequence as a whole is an outstanding example of poetic innovation and the development of early modern Protestant poetics. Additionally, the ‘Meditation’ invites further conversation about the nature of passionate belief, the study of historical women’s writing, the problems surrounding authorial attribution, and the interplay between poetic form and the literary transmission of gendered voices. Above all, the sequence is a striking testimony of Protestant faith, sincerely held and ardently expressed. For contemporary readers, whether or not they share in this faith, the ‘Meditation’ epitomises the power of poetry to articulate the innermost anguish of the soul.

Anna-Rose Shack is a PhD Candidate at the Amsterdam School of Historical Studies (ASH) at the University of Amsterdam.

Selected Bibliography.

Arthur, Jake. ‘Anne Lock or Thomas Norton? A Response to the Reattribution of the First Sonnet Sequence in English’, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 16.2 (2022), pp. 213-236.

Felch, Susan (ed.). The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock (Arizona: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999).

Sidney, Philip. ‘Astrophil and Stella’ in Katherine Duncan-Jones (ed.), Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works (2008), pp. 153-211.

Smith, Rosalind. ‘Authorship, Attribution, and Voice in Early Modern Women’s Writing’ in Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Danielle Clarke and Sarah C.E. Ross (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford, 2022), pp. 23-38.

Wroth, Mary. ‘The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth’, edited by Josephine A. Roberts (Louisiana State University Press, 1992).

21 July 2023.