At a moment when the English people were revaluating the merits of internal and external authority, the seemingly private religious expression of women could speak to newly urgent public concerns. But the way that private expression resonates as public experience is markedly different when the woman writer is herself a public figure. The transitional spirituality in the work of Queen Katherine Parr reflects an England moving tentatively between the old faith and new. Parr herself also functions within her texts as a figure of transition. In The lamentacion of a synner, she models her work according to Lutheran prescriptions outlined in the Preface to the Epistle to the Romans. In so doing, she follows the pattern of Pauline devotion (outlined by Luther) in an attempt to revaluate her ‘wreched former lyfe’ as a Catholic.