""This article examines the texts recounting the trials of Anne Askew (c.1521- 1546) and Anne Hutchinson (c.1591-1643). Anne Askew was burnt for eucharistic views contravening Henry VIII’s Six Articles, whilst Anne Hutchinson was a dissident exiled from the Puritan colony of New England. Scholarship on these two Annes usually focuses either on gender roles or on doctrinal controversy. This article proposes that gender and doctrine are intertwined in the concepts of activity and passivity invoked in these narratives and expressed through the metaphors of sowing seed, pregnancy and birth. These metaphors echo, in unsettling ways, Aristotle, Luther and the Bible. Key words: heresy trials, female dissidents, Anne Askew, Anne Hutchinson""

ABSTRACTRecent scholarship has questioned the accuracy of John Foxe's depiction of Anne Boleyn as an evangelical and a patron of reformers. It has even been suggested that Foxe exaggerated or invented the material he presented on the evangelical zeal of Henry VIII's second queen. A thorough examination of…

Early medieval England is well-known for its assortment of royal saints; figures who, though drawn from nearly five centuries of pre-Conquest Christianity, are often best known from eleventh-century hagiography. Common among these narratives is the figure of the “wicked queen”–a woman whose exercise of political power provides the impetus for the martyrdom of the royal saint. Flatly drawn and lacking in complex motivation, the treacherous woman of English hagiography is a trope, a didactic exemplar tailored to eleventh-century English audiences, and a caution of the dangers of female agency. Here biblical archetypes, clerical scholarship, and an inherent social misogyny unite in a common literary framework. Yet it is also true that each of these “wicked queens” has a unique transmission history that displays a complicated progression of the motif within a living narrative. This article examines the role of the treacherous woman as a narrative device in three royal hagiographies: Passio S. Æthelberhti, Vita et miracula S. Kenelmi, and Passio S. Eadwardi regis et martyris. In so doing, it explores the authorial motives and social influences that informed the composition of these figures, arguing that each is formed of a convergence of the historical and regional contexts of the saints’ cults with the political concerns and ecclesiastical anxieties of the tenth and eleventh centuries.