“BUT I HOPE, that after to haue ben in youre graces handes: there shall be nothinge in it worthy of reprehension and that in the meane whyle no other (but your highnes onely) shal rede it.” Elizabeth wrote these words as part of her dedication to Katherine Parr in her New Year's gift of 1545 accompanying her translation of Marguerite de Navarre's Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse. However, three years later, in 1548, John Bale corrected her translation, added Scriptural citations, and printed the book as A Godly Medytacyon of the christen sowle. He also added his own dedication to Elizabeth. Elizabeth's translation went on to be published four more times by the end of the sixteenth century.

Like the lacuna in a close examination of all of Elizabeth's dedications to her family members, it also seems as though the five sixteenth-century printed editions have not gotten nearly enough attention. The scholarly consensus of Bale's edition is that Bale printed Elizabeth's translation in 1548, safely after Henry VIII was dead, to mobilize Elizabeth's name and translation to promote Protestantism within England. John N. King notes that “despite the pre-Reformist origins of the text, Bale uses it as a vehicle for exaggerated praise of Elizabeth's Protestant zeal.” Aysha Pollnitz and Jaime Goodrich agree that Bale published Elizabeth's translation as part of his effort to advance the English Reformation. Patrick Collinson suggests that Bale turned Elizabeth's translation into “a godly Protestant manifesto” and “in effect hi-jacked Elizabeth's juvenile exercise for the Protestant cause.”

Some scholars go so far as to suggest that Bale's afterword, in which he lists previous women who served as queens regent or regnant, is a subtle promotion of Katherine Parr to the regency of Edward VI. Both Anne Lake Prescott and Patrick Collinson suggest that Bale lists so many women who had served as regents it is hard to imagine he was not supporting Katherine Parr to be one for Edward. Yet, few scholars grapple with the importance of Bale's publication beyond these ideas, and what gets even less treatment is the later editions of Elizabeth's translations.