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Literature professor unearths untold histories by studying women’s writing

By Alyssa Tremblay
Banner image by Nick Peate

While archival research has a reputation for being dry and dusty work, pouring through the words and works of those long passed can have the electrifying effect of bringing the dead back to life.

Associate Professor Micheline White knows this firsthand, as her analysis of a nearly 500-year-old prayer book translated by Katherine Parr, wife of King Henry VIII, revealed something extraordinary – handwritten annotations left by the infamous monarch himself.

White’s remarkable discovery, which offers an intimate glimpse into the sixteenth century King of England’s troubled mind at the time, garnered global attention, with coverage from prominent sources such as , , , and took center stage as the on Sunday, August 13, 2023.

“The markings reveal Henry’s anxiety about his sinfulness, waywardness, and ignorance,” White shares, “and his fear that God was punishing him with illness.”

“The markings are personal, but because Henry was never truly alone, they can also be read as performative markings that displayed that he was dealing with his failings in an exemplary way.”

Most curiously, the notes also provide insight into the royal couple’s unique political partnership, suggesting that Parr herself – principally remembered for her status as the sixth and final spouse to a man notorious for divorcing and beheading his wives – may have in fact served as one of his most important political allies and strategists.

For White, an expert on Katherine Parr, the discovery reaffirms her stance that studying writing produced by women can encourage us to reconsider popularized historical narratives and bring us closer to the truth.

Studying the understudied

Finding new things in old books is the name of the game when it comes to historical archival research.

“There are different kinds of scholars,” White explains. “Some offer new interpretations of texts that others have been working on for hundreds of years, and some go off to look at more obscure texts.”

White describes herself as someone who wanted to look at new things. As a graduate student, she specifically chose to study lesser-known women who had been writing religious works during the Renaissance in England.

This pursuit of the unknown led her, ironically, to read Psalms or Prayers by Katherine Parr, the notable final queen consort of the House of Tudor.

White says that Parr’s book – an anonymously published translated volume of wartime prayers from 1544 – had been largely ignored by historians and literary scholars. However, she noticed that Parr had not only translated the text from its original Latin but made strategic edits to transform the prayer book into a piece of political propaganda aimed at strengthening public perception of Henry as a military leader despite his waning health.

This discovery sparked in White an unexpected interest in Parr’s writing. With support from a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, she sought out a copy of the prayer book kept at the Wormsley Library in Buckinghamshire, England – a special gifted version of the book, illuminated and printed on vellum, one of only five in the world.

It was here that White noticed 14 faintly visible handwritten notes scratched in graphite and ink in the margins of the pages.

“When I saw these markings, I thought they looked a lot like Henry’s,” White recounts, describing how that same week, she had examined a different book at the British Library in London which featured examples of the King’s distinctive annotation style.

“The feeling of discovery is just amazing, but also overwhelming,” she says. “You’ve noticed something, but then you have to prove it.”

Measuring marginalia

To verify her hunch that the writing was Henry’s, White had to develop a method of identifying and comparing the annotations in the prayer book with other confirmed examples of the king’s marginal notes or “marginalia”.

Unlike aimless doodles and scribbles, marginalia are markings that serve the purpose of identifying parts of a text that are important to the reader.

Just as a student might jot down an asterisk or question mark in the margins of her textbook, someone appeared to have scattered that copy of the prayer book with two particular symbols: manicules (a hand with a pointed index finger) and trefoils (three dots and a line).

Working partially remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic and with help from several UK-based librarians and graduate students, White set about measuring the shape and size of each symbol, its placement on the page, even calculating the exact angle of each pointed index finger. 

One characteristic that jumped out immediately was that manicules were consistently drawn with cuffs or shirtsleeves at the wrist.

“Henry drew this distinctive cuff on all of his manicules,” White says, noting that this detail helped solidify her confidence in claiming the marginalia as Henry VIII’s.

After spending so much time scrutinizing the king’s markings, White says she’s now very aware of her own marginalia.

“I tend to leave checkmarks in pencil, but you know what’s funny? I must have added marginalia to a friend’s book once and forgotten to erase them before returning it. Because I recently saw the book again, and I noticed all these checkmarks in the margins. And I immediately recognized them as my own – they were absolutely my checkmarks!”

Rewriting the history of Katherine Parr

While Katherine Parr is far from being an obscure historical figure, White’s repeated discoveries about the queen’s life and legacy underline the importance of studying women’s writing.

“In English departments, Parr is studied as an author, with the fact that she’s a queen and political figure often mentioned in passing,” White explains. “Meanwhile, historians don’t really look at her writing, and scholars who study Henry VIII tend to ignore her and her literary output all together.”

By closely examining the books that Parr translated, wrote, sponsored and even read herself, White is able to paint a fuller picture of a powerful woman who played a critical role in both domestic and international politics.

Parr’s shrewd decision-making when adapting complicated religious source material suggests to White that the queen wasn’t sitting on the sidelines of Henry’s court.

“These prayer books weren’t just private works of devotion. They were at the center of political power and Henry used Parr’s literary skills to advance his war effort against France.”

Reading the Tudor Queens

White isn’t the only person fascinated by Parr’s writing.

As a professor in the College of the Humanities and Department of English Language and Literature, she’s noticed how keen her students are to study historical figures like Parr – complicated women who were writers, political leaders, patrons of the arts, and influencers.

In her fourth-year course “Tudor Queens: Sex, Power, and Writing in the Lives of Katherine Parr, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots”, students read everything from letters, royal proclamations, devotional texts, speeches and poems.

“These queens produced a lot of texts, for enjoyment, business and the running of the government,” White explains.

Perhaps inspired by the exposure to such prolific royal writers, she finds that her students in turn “hand in great papers at the end of the semester.”

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