Jane Grey’s Prayer Book and the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing (2026)

Some 15 years ago, Janel Mueller published Katherine Parr: Complete Works and Correspondence (University of Chicago Press, 2011) in which she asserted that the prayer book Jane Grey famously carried to the scaffold was previously owned and penned by Parr herself. Dr. James P Carley, Distinguished Research Professor at York University and an expert on the history and provenance of early Tudor manuscripts, reviewed Complete Works in a cover article for The Times Literary Supplement in June of 2011.[1] Professor Carley very kindly contacted me while preparing his review to solicit my opinion. As it happened, we entirely agreed that Mueller’s assertion is not supported by the evidence and is certainly incorrect.[2] Our shared opinion is cited in Palgrave MacMillan’s Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing released in June 2026, though details are lacking.[3] This brief article fills in those details.

I tend to treat history much as an attorney would treat a court case: unless there is very solid evidence, some “smoking gun” to reveal what really did or did not happen, I prefer to treat such propositions as more probably false than true. The evidence to support Mueller’s claim that Parr previously owned Jane’s prayer book is extremely circumstantial and does not allow for any real conclusion.

There is no reliable evidence whatsoever to demonstrate that Kateryn Parr ever owned the book Jane carried to the scaffold, for example. Mueller asserted that the manuscript was penned by Parr, which, if true, would obviously be evidence that Parr owned the book at some point. But Mueller offered no evidence of any kind to support her assertion that Parr penned the book, other than a tangential claim-in-passing of having compared the handwriting in the prayer book to an authentic example of Parr’s own handwriting. I made the same comparison, photographically illustrated in my published transcription of the prayer book, but I arrived at an opposite conclusion. I therefore argued that Jane’s prayer book was instead penned by a professional scribe.[4] My argument seems (so far) to have prevailed, to the extent that even the curators at the British Library express scepticism regarding Mueller’s claim. If Parr did not pen the book, then a huge piece of circumstantial evidence that Parr owned the book is removed.

Further, the book is illuminated, and manuscript illumination was also a very highly specialized skill that required equally specialized materials, plus knowledge and mastery of techniques that could be acquired only through years of apprenticeship with a master illuminator or limner. It is difficult to imagine Kateryn Parr acting as her own amateur limner, since manuscript illumination was a pursuit largely limited to low-born men. No English aristocratic or royal women are known to have taken up illumination, even as a hobby.[5] But when one considers the detail contained within each of the many five- and fifteen-millimeter initials that appear repeatedly between folios 62 recto and 137 recto of Jane’s prayer book, it becomes all but impossible to imagine Parr creating them herself, even as a hobby. The skill evidenced by the decoration of the prayer book strongly indicates that the decorations were produced by a specially trained professional illuminator or limner.

Mueller also claimed that the so-called Kendal Prayer Book now in Kendal Town Hall (Cumbria) also belonged to Parr and is very similar in appearance to Jane’s prayer book. Mueller interprets the similarity as evidence that Parr necessarily penned and owned both. But the Kendall Prayer Book, like Jane’s prayer book, cannot be linked in any way to Kateryn Parr. A popular rumor suggests that the book may have originated at Kendall Castle, which was for some time was thought to have been Parr’s birthplace. But since we now know that Parr was not born at Kendall and that the castle was a ruin by the time Parr was an adult, the association between Parr and the Kendall Prayer Book is broken (i.e., the Kendall Prayer Book, like Jane’s prayer book, was created after 1540, yet Kendall Castle was already a ruin by 1540 … therefore the Kendall Prayer Book cannot have come from the castle). Further, the similarities between the handwriting and decoration of the Kendall Prayer Book and Jane’s prayer book may just as easily be evidence that both volumes were produced in the same scribal workshop. After all, there were a limited number of makers of handwritten miniature prayer books working in England in the 1540s.

So, in short, I can only say that there is zero reliable evidence to indicate that Jane’s prayer book was penned by Kateryn Parr  and given to or bequeathed by her to Jane Grey. The idea is, in my opinion, nothing more than romantic “wishing it were so.”

J. Stephan Edwards, PhD, FSA
Palm Springs, California
5 September 2026
Also 2 September 2016 at Lady Jane Grey Reference Guide

NOTES: 

[1] James P. Carley, “Italic Ambitions: The works of Henry VIII’s last queen and the problem of identifying exactly what Katherine wrote,” The Time  Literary Supplement No.5644 (3 June 2011), 3–5.

[2] Carley, “Italic Ambitions,” 5.

[3] Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith, eds., The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2026), 1980.

[5] J. Stephan Edwards, The Lady Jane Grey’s Prayer Book: British Library Harley Manuscript 2342: British Library Harley Manuscript 2342, Fully Illustrated and Transcribed (Palm Springs: Old John Publishing, 2016), 8.

[6] Only two female limners are reasonably well known from the first half of the sixteenth century in England, though both were Dutch by birth. The first of these chronologically was Susanna Horenbout (or Horenbolt), who immigrated to England from the Low Countries in about 1522 together with her father Gerard and her brother Lucas, both also limners. Horenbout married into the upper gentry in 1525 and served as an attendant to Henry VIII’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, briefly in 1540 and to Queen Katherine Parr in 1543. There is nonetheless no evidence whatsoever to indicate that she taught the complex art of illumination to either of her royal mistresses during the short few months she was in attendance on each. See Lorne Campbell and Susan Foister, “Gerard, Lucas, and Susanna Horenbout,” The Burlington Magazine 128: 1003 (October 1986), 719–727. The other female limner working in England prior to 1550 was Levina Teerlinc, daughter of Simon Bening (or Benninck), himself a leading illuminator from Bruges. Teerlinc came to England in about 1545 and would go on to serve as a limner to Queen Mary Tudor and Queen Elizabeth I. Teerlinc is even less well documented than Horenbout, and no surviving work has yet been definitively confirmed as hers. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. ‘Teerlinc, Levina.’