Lok and the sonnet sequence

The first sonnet sequence in English appeared in print in 1560 at the end of a translation of four sermons by Calvin. Sermons of John Calvin, upon the Songe that Ezechias made … was entered into the Stationer's Register on 15 January 1560. The translator of the sermons is named “A. L.” at the end of the dedicatory epistle and since at least the nineteenth century has been identified as Anne Lok, a Marian exile and prominent member of the London merchant community. Appended to the end of the sermons is A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner: Written in Maner of a Paraphrase upon the 51. Psalme of Dauid, a collection of twenty-six sonnets (five prefatory and twenty-one “meditations”) which are deeply Calvinist in tone and content but which employ the particular form of the sonnet devised by Surrey a few decades earlier. A preface to the sonnets by the translator claims this “meditation” “was deliuered me by my frend with whom I knew I might be so bolde to vse & publishe it as pleased me,” but no friend has been positively identified. Patrick Collinson has suggested that this preface indicates that Lok did not write the poems which follow (his candidate is John Knox). Yet as Roland Greene notes, this is a “routine disclaimer of authorship” by a female writer in this period in which “one recognizes this [preface] as a circumlocution that generates an understanding beyond what it actually says, an acknowledgment that ‘I wrote this book.’”