In 1546, awaiting death by burning in Newgate Prison, Anne Askew wrote an account of her court examinations, in which she justified her behavior and defended her Protestant beliefs. Her writings, taken up by two of England's foremost reformers, were printed with interpretive glosses and circulated in England and abroad for the next hundred years. As material evidence of both the constancy of Protestant believers and the unbroken history of a doctrinally pure religion in England, Askew's Examinations have outlived her, securing for her a place within the history of the English Reformation. A recent biographical entry announces the terms of that abbreviated celebrity specifically: “Anne Askew's learning and steadfastness made her an exemplary martyr in the eyes of sixteenth-century Protestant England, and her story, based on her own account of her examinations and torture [has been] powerfully retold, first by John Bale and later by the Elizabethan martyrologist John Foxe.” In the sketch, the salient moments of Askew's career are simple and few. She is an example of English Protestant fortitude, fortunate enough, in retrospect, to be powerfully narrated by writerly men who count.

I begin with a dictionary entry on Askew, not to be flippant, though flippancy here is tempting, but rather to talk about two related issues: first, the inevitable thinning out of meanings that results from recorded history, and, second, the misperceptions that such brevity inevitably supports in discussions of agency and cultural change.