Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’
- Chapter 1 ‘To seke the place where I my self hadd lost’: acts of memory in the poetry of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
- Chapter 2 ‘Remembre not (lorde) myne offences’: Katherine Parr and the politics of recollection
- Chapter 3 ‘Better a few things well pondered, than to trouble the memory with too much’: troubling memory and martyr in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments
- Chapter 4 Text, recollection and Elizabethan Fiction: Nashe, Deloney, Gascoigne
- Chapter 5 The Doleful Clorinda? Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, and the vocation of memory
- Chapter 6 ‘Tell me where all past yeares are’: John Donne and the obligations of memory
- Chapter 7 ‘Of all the powers of the mind … the most delicate and fraile’: the poetry of Ben Jonson and the renewal of memory
- Chapter 8 ‘This art of memory’: Francis Bacon, memory and the discourses of power
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 2 - ‘Remembre not (lorde) myne offences’: Katherine Parr and the politics of recollection
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’
- Chapter 1 ‘To seke the place where I my self hadd lost’: acts of memory in the poetry of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
- Chapter 2 ‘Remembre not (lorde) myne offences’: Katherine Parr and the politics of recollection
- Chapter 3 ‘Better a few things well pondered, than to trouble the memory with too much’: troubling memory and martyr in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments
- Chapter 4 Text, recollection and Elizabethan Fiction: Nashe, Deloney, Gascoigne
- Chapter 5 The Doleful Clorinda? Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, and the vocation of memory
- Chapter 6 ‘Tell me where all past yeares are’: John Donne and the obligations of memory
- Chapter 7 ‘Of all the powers of the mind … the most delicate and fraile’: the poetry of Ben Jonson and the renewal of memory
- Chapter 8 ‘This art of memory’: Francis Bacon, memory and the discourses of power
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
O heavenly Father, God almighty, I praie and beseeche thy mercy, benignely to heold me thy unworthy servaunt, that I maie by gefte of thy holy spirite fervently desire they kyngedome, that I maie knowe thy wil and worke therafter … Keepe me, lord, from the sleighty invasion of the olde wily serpente. Defende me from the counsailes and cursynges of yvell tungues. Leat thy mighty arme be my shielde against all the malignity of this wicked worlde.
Remembre not (lorde) myne offences. Instructe, prepare me to repent, to be sorie for my synnes. Make me to love Justice and hate wronge, to dooe good and absteyne from all yvels, that I maie be worthy to be called thy chylde. To the bee honour and glorie for ever and ever. Amen.
Catharine [Katherine] Parr, Prayers or medytacions, sig. d5v–d6vIn June 1545, two years after becoming queen, there appeared Prayers or medytacions, wherin the mind is stirred paciently to suffre all afflictions here, to sette at naught the vaine prosperitee of this worlde, and alwaie to long for the everlasting felicitee: collected out of certayne holy workes by the moste vertuous and gracious Princes Catharine, Quene of Englande, France and Irelande. In the event, the collection only included two concluding prayers. Later in November of that same year, an expanded edition was published that was now brought to a close with five prayers – and the extract above, which probes the relationships between sin, repentance and memory, is taken from ‘An other praier’ in this collection.
Half a century later, in 1592, Mary Sidney would emerge for the first time as a published author with A Discourse of Life and Death. Written in French by Ph. Mornay. Antonius, A Tragædie written also in French by Ro. Garnier. Both done in English by the Countesse of Pembroke. Thus, Parr and Mary Sidney both made their debuts in print culture with a title page that proclaimed their authorial identities in terms of their sex and their elevated rank. In such undertakings, both women may have had in mind the cultural prejudices that Richard Younge was to bemoan in the next century that, ‘alas! most men regard not what is written, but who writes: valew not the mettall, but the Stampe which is upon it’. Whatever the case, in 1545, Parr was memorialised in print as the king’s consort and seemingly with her husband’s blessing: Prayers or medytacions rolled from the presses of the royal printer, Thomas Berthelet. And in December of that year her stepdaughter, Princess Elizabeth, offered her father a New Year’s gift in the shape of French, Italian and Latin translations of the collection.
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- Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature , pp. 65 - 89Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011