Susannah Helman: Yuma. Good evening everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome you all to the National Library of Australia. I'm Susanna Helman, Senior Advisor in Collections here at the Library. Tonight's event is being held on the beautiful lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri Peoples. I pay my respects to their elders past and present and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Thank you for attending this event, either in person or online. Before I continue, I would like to ask you to please ensure your mobile phones are turned off or are on silent.

It's wonderful to see so many of you here today to listen to what is sure to be an illuminating lecture into the marginalia left by King Henry VIII and his last wife, Katherine Parr in their personal books. Marginalia, typically, the notes written in the margins of a text, but also encompassing small messages, drawings, doodles, and underlines, can often be as fascinating and revealing as the text itself. And can tell us a lot about the person who read or owned a book and the period in which it was made.

Tonight, we are delighted to have Professor Micheline White here to discuss the unique marginalia found in these royal books. Were these annotations simply personal reflections or were they calculated messages written for a watchful audience of courtiers? Professor White will guide us through a close reading of these royal markings to reveal how Henry and Katherine used their books, not just for learning or devotion, but as tools of self fashion in crafting images of piety, wisdom and authority. I'm now going to hand over to Professor Ros Smith from ANU to introduce Micheline. Please join me. Please join me in welcoming Professor Smith and Professor White.

Rosalind Smith: Thank you so much Susanna. And I just want to echo welcome to tonight's event. We're very excited about it. I'm Ros Smith. I'm the Chair of English at ANU and I direct the Cross-Disciplinary Centre for Early Modern Studies Studies. This is the third Centre for Early Modern Studies public talk that we've held at NLA, and I'm really very grateful for this collaboration that allows us to bring world-leading scholars of early modern studies to share their research with a broad audience here.

I'd like to thank the wonderful Events team who have been so helpful and knowledgeable, especially Fran, in putting this event together. And to our CEMS research assistant, Christina Clark, who has just been invaluable help with its organisation.

I'd also like to say hello and welcome to any scholars that are joining us online, especially from the International Consortium of Early Modern Centres. This is a network that's actually led from A NU that connects us with early modern centres in Oxford, in London, in Paris, and in Ireland to enable research collaborations across the globe.

So it's my very, very great pleasure to introduce my dear friend and colleague, Micheline White, to speak to you today. I invited Micheline to Australia because she's, in my opinion, one of the most superb scholars of early modern literature and culture at work in the field today. She recently won the 16th Century Society's Raymond B Waddington Prize for the best English language article on the literature of the early modern period, talking about the very things that she's going to talk to you about today. As well as being published in the leading journals in our field, her work has had wide public reach. It's been featured in interviews with 'The London Times', on CNN, at the 'Berliner Morgenpost, 'The Canadian Globe and Mail' and many other radio and television outlets. Micheline's publications include the groundbreaking collection, 'Women's Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain', 'English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625', and a forthcoming volume on women and communal worship edited with Jamie Goodrich, which is coming out with Delaware University Press this year.

I wouldn't have been able to ask Micheline here tonight without the assistance of the College of Arts and Social Science at ANU who generously supported my Australian Research Council future fellowship with additional funding for this event and for our symposium that's occurring tomorrow on early modern women's marginalia. It's not too late to come along. If anyone's inspired by Micheline's talk, we still have a couple of places and if you'd like to pick up a programme and register, please do.

I'd also like to acknowledge our college Dean Bronwyn Perry and our Research School of Humanities and Arts Director Kate Mitchell for all their support for CEMS over the past few years and for these events in particular. So over to Micheline, who is going to be talking to us about gorgeous books and royal annotations. Thank you.

Micheline White: Hello everyone. I just want to begin by saying what a great honour and a pleasure it is for me to speak here today in this beautiful room and in this beautiful city. I'm visiting Australia for the first time and I'm loving it. I would also like to begin by thanking Professor Rosalind Smith, the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the Australian National University and the National Library of Australia for hosting this talk. I would also like to acknowledge the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which funded my research. And I'd really like to thank all the libraries and institutions that have given me permission to share images with you tonight. These include Suly Castle, the Wormsley Library and the Wormsley Estate, the British Library, the Cardiff University Special Collections, the Newbury Library and Carlton University special collections.

Okay, so let's look at some fun books. I'm going to start my talk by introducing our two main characters. Henry VIII probably needs no introduction. He ruled in England for almost 38 years. He began his rule as one of the most handsome and fit monarchs in Europe, but when he died, he was obese and sick and a notorious wife killer. He is of course famous for beheading Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, for getting annulments from Katherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves, for rejecting papal authority and establishing himself as the head of the Church of England and for turning on and executing some of his chief advisors, including Thomas Moore and Thomas Cromwell, which you may have recently been absorbed in if you've been watching Wolf Hall.

Katherine Parr, I'm pleased to say is far more amiable. She gave up her love for Thomas Seymour to marry Henry in 1543 and she served as his sixth and final wife for three and a half years. She's known today as the one who survived. Indeed, she outlived Henry, married Thomas Seymour, but sadly died in childbirth only 15 months later. Now, there are several remarkable things about Katherine Parr. A year after they married Henry appointed her to serve as regent when he went to war in France. Katherine developed close bonds with all three of Henry's children and she encouraged Henry to reinstate Mary and Elizabeth into the succession.

She commissioned numerous portraits and enjoyed dancing and music. She was an intellectual who studied the Bible and promoted religious reform. And most unusually, she was the author of three religious texts. In the last year of Henry's life she angered the conservative members of his privy council who argued that her religious activism was heretical and a threat to Henry's religious authority and that of the clergy. Katherine avoided being arrested by giving a grovelling speech in which she reassured Henry that she was nothing more than a poor, arrogant woman and had only engaged him in religious debate to distract him from his illness and to learn from his superior wisdom. He immediately forgave her.

Alright, so my talk today is about some of Henry and Katherine's beautiful books and about the handwritten annotations they made in those books. In looking at the annotations, we will focus on what they can tell us about Henry and Katherine as individual readers, but also about what the annotations can tell us about their relationship.

So first let's just think a little bit about Henry and Katherine's books, about where and how they read them. Like all renaissance princes, Henry was an avid reader and book collector and he owned around 2000 books. Most of these were stored in official libraries which were found in major palaces like Greenwich or Westminster.

But because the court was so big, there were around a thousand people sometimes in the court, and because the neighbourhoods around the palaces would run out of food after a couple of weeks, the court was always moving. This meant that Henry and Katherine travelled with a selection of their books, which they kept in coffers. An inventory taken at the time of Henry's death records, the contents of Coffers 9, which belonged to Henry. This contained a desk of purple velvet with diverse pamphlets and writings and books as well as a pair of spectacles. Coffer 7, which belonged to Katherine, contained over 60 books. Sadly, the titles are not given in this list because what was of interest to those taking the inventory were the valuable book bindings and the books are listed by colour and fabric rather than by author or title. So we find an entry for quote 24 books covered with purple velvet and garnished with silver. Where of 21 are gilded, which is lovely, but not helpful.

Now let's think a little bit about how they read their books like book owners today, and like many of you, Henry and Katherine sometimes read with a pen or pencil in hand and they made various kinds of markings in their books. They wrote their names, they wrote their monograph and they annotated passages that they liked. Instead of post-it notes or highlighters, they used little hands, called manicules, or little dots in a squiggle, which I will call a trefoil.

Now before turning to look at some of these annotations in more detail, I just want to say a few words about how we might interpret them. Today as we mark passages in books that we do not intend to share, we undoubtedly feel that our annotations are personal and that they are private. They are marks by us and for us to return to if we want. However, if we are reading books that we will likely share with others, we might not annotate them at all, or we might think very carefully about what we're going to write, knowing that our notes might be seen and interpreted by others.

Shortly before his marriage to Katherine Parr, Henry commissioned a deluxe manuscript Psalter and the artist produced a lovely image here of Henry reading that Psalter all alone in his bed chamber. But in fact, this image is a fantasy. Renaissance kings and queens were never alone. Even their private, what we call their privy chambers were full of attendance, who dressed them, served their food, slept with them, and packed and unpacked their books. Katherine and Henry's reading was thus inevitably social and there is evidence that it was observed and commented on by numerous people. For example, Katherine's allies frequently praised her for her voracious reading and studying. Her enemies accused her and her ladies of reading illegal books, of hiding them in their coffers and of acting like priests and professors of theology. We also know that some of the annotations that Henry made in his books were seen and even copied by other people.

For example, Andrea Clark has noted that Henry placed a manicule beside a passage about divorce in one of his books, and then that same passage was cited by a team of scholars who were arguing for his desire for a divorce. So it's clear that people saw Henry's manicules. In another example, all of the annotations that Henry made in this manuscript Psalter were painstakingly copied out by a scribe and transposed into a printed Psalter. So someone literally copied out all of his marginalia into another book. It was probably seen by many people. My point then is that Henry and Katherine's reading and note-taking took place in crowded spaces, and because of this, it is important to view their marginalia as personal but also visible to those in their orbit and thus performative and quasi-public to some degree.

Okay, so in the first part of the talk then we'll talk about Katherine Parr's annotations in a book at Sudeley Castle. There are a total of six books known today that have annotations by Katherine Parr. One of them is at Sudeley Castle in Winchcombe and Gloucestershire. This is the place where Katherine Parr died a few days after giving birth to a daughter Mary, and it's a lovely place to visit. The book she signed is a sermon by the Greek church father John Chrysostom. And we can see that Katherine has signed her name on the bottom of the page, Katherine the Queen KP, and this is how she signed all of her official correspondence. We see there's a nice flourish on the bottom and she always wrote KP, presumably to distinguish herself from Katherine of Aragon who would be KA.

In addition, we can see that she has copied out eight verses or maxims from the book of Ecclesiasticus, a book of the Bible which was understood or believed to have been written by King Solomon in the 16th century. The handwriting you see, which might look a bit odd, is called Secretary Hand. And while it's a bit tricky to read it at first, I think by the end of the talk you'll have gotten the hand of it, hang of it. Now, we will consider these maxims more carefully in a minute, but right now we can see that they offer ethical advice. For example, the first two are exhortations to stay away from those who don't fear God and to distrust riches.

Okay, so how should we interpret Katherine Parr's signature and these eight maxims and what might be interesting about them? The first thing I want to note is that works by John Chrysostom were trendy and cutting edge in 1540. The book that Katherine signed was a recent translation of one of his sermons based on a well-known saying, no man is hurted, but of himself. Chrysostom who had died in 4 0 7 had been the archbishop of Constantinople, but his Greek works were lost for or unknown to Western scholars and were only rediscovered in the 15th and 16th century after the Ottoman capture conquest of Constantinople in 1453. By the mid 1540s, several aspiring scholars in England translated some of Chrysostom's sermons and dedicated them to Henry VIII. In doing so, they praised Henry for his I fashionable enthusiasm for Greek learning, and they suggested that the circulation of Chrysostom's works enhance the prestige and intellectual tenor of his court.

So here's just an interesting example. There are many, but this is one. A different volume of sermons by Chrysostom was dedicated to Henry by the scholar John Cheek in 1543. So that's the same year that he marries Katherine Parr. This book opens with a woodcut that depicts Henry as King Solomon and it asks Henry to continue to display his wisdom by promoting Chrysostom's works. So this is just a very quick snapshot of the cultural context, but I'm sure that we can now see that this enables us to see something significant about Katherine's signature. By owning and signing a volume of Chrysostom's sermons, Katherine was signalling to others including Henry, that she was his intellectual partner and that she was part of a community of cutting edge forward thinking readers committed to the recovery of previously lost Greek texts. If we translate it into modern context, it would be as if she signed a book about AI, this cutting edge, trendy, interesting topic that everybody wants to know about and she's right there.

So the second thing that we want to consider are the eight verses that she copied into the fly leaf of this volume. As I mentioned earlier, the verses are from the book of Ecclesiasticus, which as I mentioned was attributed to Solomon in the 16th century. So just like John Cheek here, associated Chrysostom with Solomon, with Henry, Katherine Parr is associating herself with Chrysostom and King Solomon on the very opening pages of her book.

Now unfortunately we don't know for sure what physical copy of the book of Ecclesiasticus Katherine was using, but it is very suggestive that Henry owned and annotated the books of Solomon that included the book of Ecclesiasticus. Yeah, you can see here the very last item is the book of Ecclesiasticus, and this book was printed in 1544, 1545, so while he was married to Katherine.

So Katherine may have used this volume in copying out her own verses. Now if we look at the book of Ecclesiasticus, we see that Katherine was interested in the verses from chapter 5. So she mostly copies out all of these and then she adds a couple from another couple of chaplain. What she was doing then by copying them by hand into her book was indicating that she valued Solomon's maxims and that she sought to use them to direct her queenly behaviour.

So what are these maxims that Katherine adopted and what might be interesting about them? The first thing that's interesting about these maxims is that they have a fascinating relationship to the content of Chrysostom's sermon. Chrysostom's sermon is directed to a congregation of poor people who have been oppressed by the powerful and the wealthy. It attacks the vicious behaviour of quote kings and princes. Chrysostom's main argument is that true Christians cannot actually be hurt by poverty, injustice, or persecution, and he exhorts his oppressed audience to focus on Christian values and wait for the reward of eternal life.

Katherine's biblical maxims then, I will argue, seem to function as responses to Chris Odom's harsh assessment of the rich and powerful. It is almost as though Katherine is using Solomon's words to insert herself into this imagined exchange between Chrysostom and his congregation and to depict herself as a queen who is different, a queen who is not cruel and who seeks to ensure that Henry's court is a place where virtue flourishes and vice is defeated. In other words, Katherine's maxims announced her desire to drain the swamp.

So for example, Chrysostom attacks judges who are supposed to promote justice, but who actually oppress the poor. Katherine we see on these two bottom maxims uses Solomon's words to assert that she will use her power to help rather than harm those in trouble. See, that thou justify small and great alike refuse not the prayer of one that is in trouble and turn not away thy face from the needy.

Chrysostom also attacks the wealthy, arguing that they are too attached to earthly pleasures and are led into sin. Katherine, of course, was very rich and she thoroughly enjoyed extravagant jewels, gem encrusted books and expensive fabrics. My favourite entry in her personal accounts is for quote two dog collars of crimson velvet embroidered with damask and gold rings of gilt silver.

Katherine's second maxim then I would argue goes some way to clarify that although she's surrounded by luxury, she understands that salvation lies elsewhere. Trust not in wicked riches for they shall not help in the day of punishment and wrath.

Okay, so in addition to having this kind of fascinating relationship to the content of Chrysostom's sermon, the other thing that makes these maxim so interesting is that they are clearly aligned with annotations that Henry made in his book of Solomon and maybe Katherine had even seen that book. So here is Henry VIII's the book of Solomon, which includes Proverbs, Ecclesiasticus Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus. It's currently in the British Library. Henry read the opening of this book very carefully and he made a dozen annotations in pencil on the first f5 chapters of Proverbs. So we can see here that there's a manicule on the left and in the right we see one of his trefoils and one of his brackets.

Now, if we compare the two books, what we notice is that Parr's maxims and Henry's annotations are focused on the very same virtues and vices. For example, Henry placed a trefoil in a bracket beside a passage that explains that God will ultimately destroy those who do not fear him. Then shall they, the wicked, call upon me, but I will not hear and that because they hated knowledge and received not the fear of the Lord. Katherine's maxim in her book we notice is also about fearing God. Delight not thou in the multitude of ungodly men and have no pleasure in them for they fear not God.

Henry also made annotations beside passages about following God's word and pursuing wisdom. So we find a trefoil beside let thine heart receive my words and keep my commandments and now shall live. A little later on a couple of pages later, he also annotates, well is hymn that findeth wisdom and obtain ath understanding. Katherine we note wrote out a very almost identical verse, be gentle to hear the word of God that thou may understand it and make a true answer with wisdom. Now, Katherine's selection of a verse that stresses her passivity and that she will gently hear presumably the word being preached or taught to her, is particularly interesting since it was her biblical reading and religious activism that led the conservatives to accuse her of insubordination and heresy.

Now, the affinity between, and actually a lot of there were eight maxims, so most of them map onto something that Henry annotated, but the affinity between Katherine's and Henry's annotations is most interesting when we consider Henry's annotations about the harlet and the good wife in the fifth chapter of Proverbs. So Henry was apparently very agitated by this long passage attacking the harlet, and he makes 4 annotations or 3 annotations. He writes a 'note bene'. So when you see this thing that kind of looks like a W, it's an N for note bene. Oh, and you can see the bene there. He left trefoil, so three dots and a squiggle and a long bracket. The passage here that animated this was, for the lips of a harlett are a dropping honeycomb and her throat is softer than oil, but at the last she is bitter as wormwood and as sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down unto death and her steps pierce through unto hell. She regardeth not the path of life. So unsteady are her ways that thou cannot know them.

Now these markings were hardly academic or hypothetical. Henry had had Catherine Howard executed in 1542 for her adulterous relationship with Thomas Culpepper, a gentleman of the king's privy chamber, and she was castigated as a harlet by ambassadors. So when we read this, it's pretty hard not to see Henry here recollecting her adultery and justifying his violent and deadly response.

And it is surely noteworthy then that when we look at Katherine's annotations, one of the verses she chose to copy out of Solomon was about avoiding inconstancy and waywardness. So she writes, be not carried away with every wind and walk, not in every path for so dot the sinner that half a double tongue. Right and so his thing about the ways, the paths. Katherine is reassuring everyone that she will walk in the right path.

Now Henry also note annotated a passage celebrating the good wife. And so, it's a little bit hard to see, but in the bottom here he is written for wives and he also has an N there for note bene. Let thy well be blessed and be glad with the wife of thy youth. Loving is the hind and friendly is the row, let her breasts always satisfy thee and hold the ever content with her love. Now, it would appear that Henry barked this passage more than once, right? So he writes the note bene, but then he comes back and writes again, for wives suggesting that Solomon was not only instructing him to be glad with his wife, but was also instructing wives, in this case Katherine Parr, to be lovely, friendly and sexually satisfying so that she could quote hold him content ever with her love.

So we cannot prove that Katherine saw Henry's annotations or that Henry saw Katherine's maxims, but it is very suggestive that they are so closely aligned and that Katherine's maxims provide a perfect response to Henry's concerns. Parr's annotations explain that she will fear God, avoid inconstancy and gently hear the word of God. In copying out these passages, Katherine engaged in a task that was undoubtedly personal, but it was also surely performative and designed to be seen by others. These annotations could only have served her well in projecting a particular kind of image at court, one that would distinguish her from Catherine Howard and protect her from her enemies.

Okay, so now we're going to turn to look at a different kind of marginalia. So this is annotations by Henry, which were made in a book produced by Katherine Parr. So in addition to being a reader, which was expected of a queen, Katherine Parr was a writer and the author of three important religious texts, an unusual fact that was not expected of Queens and that provoked both admiration and hostility.

The book that we'll be looking at is her first book, the Psalms or Prayers, which was published in 1544 as Henry was preparing for war against the Scottish and the French. Now this book is actually rhetorically a bit complex, and so we're going to spend a few minutes just thinking about how the book worked before we turn to look at Henry's annotations.

So Katherine's book is a translation of a collection of Latin psalms, what are called psalms, but they're not actually psalms per se. They're not biblical psalms per se. They are original prayers that are made up of verses, someone's described them as a collage prayer. So they're made up of verses from the psalms, which were believed to be by King David. So they're collage psalms. In these Psalms or Prayers, the speaker uses David's language to repent, to ask for wisdom, and to ask God to defend him from his enemies.

Now, Psalms or Prayers is a book that could be used for a variety of devotional purposes. The enemies could be spiritual, they could be real, they could be foreign, they could be domestic. But in April of 1544, the book functioned as a piece of wartime propaganda designed help Henry win his war.

Okay, so how could a prayer book help Henry win a war? In the early modern world war or other forms of political instability were understood in religious terms. People believed that God inflicted war on them as a way of punishing them for their sins, but that God might relieve them if they repented and asked for mercy. In this context, Katherine Parr's Psalms or Prayers helped Henry in two ways.

First of all, the prayers provided a script for Henry's subjects to use. So here's just an example. I've just chosen this passage. So a reader of this book, one of Henry's subjects, could use it to repent, to ask God to support Henry's war effort and to ask him to destroy the enemies. So they might say, turn away thy anger from me that I may know that thou art more merciful unto me than my sins deserve.

But there is another way to read this text and English readers would've understood that the I, in the text, the speaking I, was one that they could inhabit, but that this eye was also a representation of Henry's voice. This is because Henry was understood to be David's, sorry, Henry was understood to be England's David and he was expected to lead his country during troubled times by repenting and asking God for help.

So to illustrate what I mean, it's useful here for us to look at an image from David's Psalter sorry, from Henry's Psalter that we've already looked at. This is the Psalter that Henry commissioned in the mid 1540s. Psalm 68 is prefaced by an image of Henry as David, and throughout this [unclear] there are all these images of David, but they're all Henry, he's David. Okay, so right, so this is Psalm 68 is accompanied by this image of Henry as David at the moment where God is punishing David for having taken a census against his command. And this is a story from 2 Samuel. The image and the text work together here to depict Henry as an exemplary king declaring his distress and asking God for help.

What I'm suggesting is that Katherine Parr's book does the same thing using words instead of an image. It depicts Henry, and readers would've understood that it depicted Henry, as a new David fulfilling his duty at a time of crisis by repenting and asking for mercy.

The thing that's extraordinary then about the Psalms or Prayers and which has been overlooked until very recently is that Henry entrusted or allowed Katherine to translate this book and to represent him as an exemplary king to his people. This book provides evidence then that Henry valued and used Katherine's literary skills and it shows that Katherine was at the centre rather than the margins of political power in the buildup to the war. And this is sort of a new understanding of Katherine's role as queen.

Now, the Psalms or Prayers was issued for a wide readership in 1544, and it was reprinted many times. But in addition to the regular copies of this book that were widely distributed, Katherine and Henry ordered over a dozen fancy gift copies and these were distributed at court. Three gift copies have survived from 1544 and 2 have survived from 1545. Now, as you can see, these books are spectacular. They are printed on vellum, so animal parchment, which was very expensive. They have a hand illuminated title page. They have a painted royal coat of arms on the verso, and when you see them in real life, the teal colour is just so vibrant. And the first initial on the first page, the oh Lord has been overpainted with gold and a Tudor rose.

Now of interest to us is that Henry read and annotated, one of these gift copies. The copy in question is in the Wormsley Library, and it was unknown to scholars until very recently. So several years ago, just as I was beginning to study the Psalms or Prayers, I learned that there was a copy at the Wormsley Library, which is in the Children Hills outside of London. Also a beautiful place to visit. And they kindly allowed me to go and examine the book.

At the time I was really only interested in the illuminated title page and Henry's coat of arms, and I spent an hour or two looking at them and taking notes. I was just about to leave and I thought I should really check every page. So this is a 180 page book. And I was slowly flipping through the book, looking at every page. Sixty-five pages in I was surprised to see a very faint manicule made with a graphite pencil in the right margin, and there's a closeup of it. Six pages later I saw another manicule and another, then I found some trefoils, these sort of squiggly marks with a tail in both ink and in graphite. In total I found 14 markings. Not only was I very excited to come across a reader of Katherine Parr's books, but I was stunned because I thought the markings looked very similar to markings made by Henry VIII.

Just the day before I had been studying Henry VII Psalter, which we've already looked at manuscript salter in the British :ibrary, which he had annotated. And so the trefoils just looked familiar. But the Wormsley volume is not signed and has no official marking of having been in Henry's library. So I knew that I would need to develop a method to determine whether the annotations were Henry's or not.

Fortunately, people's manicules tend to be very distinctive, and as the book historian William Sherman has observed, they can sometimes be easier to identify than people's handwriting. So I've assembled a little collection of some of my favourite manicules. We have examples here from the Carlton Library, the Newberry Library, the Sudeley Castle, the Cardiff Special Collections, and the British Library. Alright, anyone want to guess which one is Henry's? Alright, so bottom right. Now, one of the things that I'm sure you've noticed right away is that the shape of a hand is very distinctive. All manicules have a pointed index finger, but after that they vary quite a lot. Some of them have thumbs, some of them even have 5 other fingers, which I'm not sure how that works. Some of them we see the phelanges of 3 of the fingers. In other cases we see that there are only 2. The index finger and 2, and other ones there are 3. This there seem to be a lot.

Another thing that I'm sure you've noticed is that the cuffs are very distinctive or the markings around the wrist. So in some cases we have squiggly lines. In some cases we have a rough, I particularly like this one, and then this is Henry. So Henry's cuff is very distinctive. Every single one of his manicules, there's two lines that cut across the wrist. We see here, they cut across the wrist, they veer towards the left, they meet and they often sort of hook up again towards the left.

You can also see that people place manicules very differently on the page. Most people angle the manicules either up or down, but for many people they're just horizontal. And in some cases you also find these totally vertical manicules, which seem to be pointing off the page completely.

Henry's manicules are remarkably consistent. So the manicules on the right hand side of his page always point down at an angle of 35 degrees and the manicules on the left margin always point up between at around 40 degrees. So they're always on the right side down, always on the left side up.

Okay, so let's just compare then some of the manicules in the Wormsley volume to some other minuscules, which are well established. They're in books by Henry that he signed, so we know that they're his for sure. So the manicules on the left are always going to be the ones, the new ones in the Wormsley volume, and the ones on the right are established manicules. So we can see, for example, this is one of the best ones. We can see that the shape of the hand is identical. We have the pointing finger, we have the three phalanges, and we have, although unfortunately a lot of the cuffs were cropped in the Wormsley volume, at some point the pages were cropped, which often happened in the 19th century because people were trying to clear the book of marginalia, unfortunately. But we can see the bere outline, you can see the outline of the cuff. You can also see that it's pointing down at the same angle and in the manicules on the right, Henry always points to the space between the lines of text.

Here are, I'll show you two examples from manicules that are on the left, in the left margin. We can see here that the shape of the finger is very similar. The ones on the left, sometimes they have a little bit of a bulge at the top of the index finger, we see the 3 phalanges, and here we can see the cuff. Now the cuff on the right is not particularly good. So this is actually a better example of the cuff on the, which matches with this one.
And I'll just show you one more. This was a very, very faint manicule, very hard to photograph, but we can see the basic features. Again, we see that they're angling up at the same degree.

The trefoils were actually quite a bit harder to examine because Henry made these trefoils, the squiggles, the squiggle with the three dots in a number of different ways. But in each case, I was able to match the trefoil in the Wormsley volume with one example or with examples of his trefoils elsewhere. So here you can see that the shape of the ink is similar and that the squiggle is similar to the trefoils that he made in his manuscript P
salter. Okay, so what does this new found marginalia about Henry VIII reveal and why might it be interesting? So first, I would argue that the marking shed new light on the challenges that Henry faced at the end of his life and on the strategies that he used to cope with those challenges.

Henry's marginalia in this book is not what you might expect. We tend to think of Henry as being ruthless and confident, but these annotations reveal a man who is anxious and unsettled. He marked passages in which the speaker admits his ignorance and his waywardness and a sinking feeling that God is punishing him and abandoning him. But Henry also marked passages in which the speaker asked God to forgive him, to purge him, and to give him wisdom. In other words, Henry's markings display both distress at the state of his soul, but also a hopefulness that if he petitioned God as he was supposed to do, God would help him.

Now, Henry probably made these markings during moments of intense mental anguish, but we must remember that he was rarely if ever alone. And so while I view them as poignant and personal, I also believe that they had a performative and political function. And that Henry was displaying to those in his inner circle that he was dealing with his failings in an exemplary way.

So let's just look at a few examples. Henry placed two manicules in Psalm 4, which is about repentance. The first one is beside a passage in which the speaker complains about physical suffering and assumes that it is a punishment for his sins. So Henry annotates, take away thy plagues from me for thy punishment hath made me both feeble and faint.

A few pages later, he marks a passage, turn away thy anger from me that I may know that thou art more merciful into me than my sins deserve. And this manicule is so faint that you can't really see it very well in the full image. So I've provided a little closeup there.

A few pages later. Henry also marks a passage, oh Lord God forsake me, not although I have done no good in thy sight.

I think you'll agree with me that these markings are pretty bleak, but they resonate with Henry's dire physical predicament. In the last years of his life, Henry was suffering from a purulent ulcer on his leg. In an encrypted diplomatic letter, so written in code in cypher, the Imperial ambassador wrote that in addition to his age and weight, Henry had the worst legs in the world, but no one dare tell him.

So Henry may have been reticent about his medical woes in front of his subjects and military allies, but in the margins of Katherine's gift book, he was able to engage head on with some unpleasant facts. He was England's divinely ordained monarch, yet his ageing body was feeble and faint. Although he believed that his actions were just, he also believed that God's sickness as a punishment in marking these verses, then Henry confronted the ugly truth, but also revealed himself to be an exemplary monarch begging God not forsake him.

Now it's very interesting that 11 of the 14 annotations are actually found in the fifth psalm, which is a psalm for the obtaining of Godly wisdom. This psalm is a bit of a mixed bag and it contains many passages about the beauty of wisdom or about the speaker's feeling of ecstasy when he is inflamed with wisdom. But Henry did not annotate any of those passages. Instead, he marked passages about sin, ignorance, and waywardness, and about the speaker's hope that God would teach him, make him wise and set him on the right path.

So for example, on one page, Henry marked three passages asking God to purge him, teach him, and set him on the straight way. Oh Lord God, touch my mouth that my iniquity may be driven away. Dwell thou in my heart that my sins may be purged. Teach me lest my ignorance increase and my sins wax more and more. Let thy spirit teach me the things that be pleasant unto thee that I may be led into the straight way out of the air wherein I have wandered overlong.

Henry was clearly very concerned with waywardness because only a few pages later he marks the following verse. Stay and keep my feet from every ill way less my steps were from thy paths.

His final two annotations are in a more optimistic key. Henry marks a passage where the speaker asks, let thy wisdom rule and guide my thoughts that they may always please thee.

And my favourite one is his last manicule. It's sort of a summative verse where he basically kind of says, I've said everything I have to say, and I'm leaving you now. I'm leaving myself now to your mercy. I have declared my cause before the do with thy servant according to thy mercy.

Again, if we look at all of these verses pertaining to ignorance and wisdom, they align very closely with Henry's situation in the last two and a half years of his life. As a king who had decided to go to war against the Scottish and the French, Henry had made momentous and costly decisions, which almost bankrupt his realm. As his illness progressed, he faced a number of domestic crises that really did require wisdom. His son Edward, was only 9 and Henry would need to set up some kind of regency government. But how? In addition, a significant number of his subjects were adopting Protestant attitudes towards the mass, and he needed to decide what was the best way to deal with what he regarded as heresy.

In the margins of Katherine's gift book. Then we see Henry grappling with his challenging predicament and asking God to teach him, give him wisdom and set his kingdom on the right path.

So for my final point, I want to return to Katherine. And I want to think about the fact that these handwritten annotations in the Wormsley volume are in a book written and gifted to him by Katherine Parr, his wife and consort. In this sense, the annotations in the Wormsley book are different from the annotations that he made in his Bible or in books written by authors with whom he had no personal relationship. The late scholar Natalie Zeman Davis has observed that a book is always quote a source of ideas end quote, but it can also be quote a carrier of relationships. I argue that this book and its marginalia register complex transactions between the king and queen.

The Wormsley Library copy provides a unique window into the different layers of Katherine and Henry's relationship. At the most basic level, the content of the book provides evidence that Henry valued and used Katherine's literary skills to produce a work with timely religio-political value for him.

Henry's admiration for Katherine's literary labour is heightened even more in the gift books. They're expensive. They were given out to courtiers and with the coat of arms on the title page, the [unclear] of the title page, they clearly announced that Katherine's work as an author was important to the crown. This is a crown publication that Katherine has written. But finally, the Wormsley volume shows that Henry used the gift copy that Katherine gave him. As we have seen on at least two different reading sessions, one in pen and one in pencil, Henry paused during his reading and used a pencil or pen to engage with a number of specific problems. In doing so, he used his writing instrument to activate the royal I, which was always implicit in Katherine's book. He used the text, she translated to talk to God and to ask for help.

This was his duty, of course. And so in addition to enabling his subjects to pray for him, Katherine provided a space for Henry to fulfil his monarchical duties and to display that fact to those around him. So while the Wormsley volume was certainly Katherine's book. So while the Wormsley volume was certainly Katherine's gift to Henry, I suggest that Henry's annotations might be read as a counter gift to Parr, a permanent and visible testament to the facts that Henry valued her labour and needed his wife's remarkable literary skills.

Thank you.

Susannah Helman: Thank you Micheline for that wonderful presentation. We now have time for a few questions, as the lights go up, please wait until you have the microphone before diving into your questions. Any, yep.

Audience member 1: Thank you very much. That was a fascinating lecture. My question is actually about the signs in the margins. Are the trefoils and manicules, do you think interchangeable or do they indicate different significances for the writer?

Micheline White: Yeah, that is an excellent question and I spent a lot of time thinking about that and I was not able to find an answer to that. To me, they seem interchangeable. There didn't seem to be any specific emphasis in the manicules versus the passages that had trefoils, but it's such a great question and I wonder why, how did he decide it's your hand too tired to do a manicules so you do a trefoil? I'm not sure. Yeah.

Audience member 2: Thank you. That was extremely enjoyable. Coming back to the first book that you examined, where you were looking at the passages that she'd written out, I am a person who does both calligraphy and illumination. So when I look at that, it seems to me that those were all written in one sitting, your hand changes the width of the pen, that you're cutting changes and so on. Which means that this was not a casual thing that was done from time to time, but something that was considered all in one time exposition there. So I think that that's interesting in the context of what you were saying.

Micheline White: Yeah, that's a great point. So it's not like she just wrote one and then wrote another. She must have already thought very carefully.

Audience member 2: Exactly.

Micheline White: And what's so interesting is that I showed you the passage from Ecclesia, so it's way at the beginning, but from Ecclesiasticus 5, she does a whole bunch in a row, and then the first one is actually from Ecclesiasticus 16, and then there's one that's from a different one. So it wasn't even just that she looked and decided I'm going to copy out these, and in fact, she even skipped a couple. So you're right, they were very carefully culled and they would've all been prepared in advance. And as you point out, the handwriting is the same throughout. So yeah, great point. Thank you.

Audience member 2: The other comment again from a calligraphic point of view is you talked about the fact that the manicules on the right and the manacles on the left are different. That is absolutely a function of the way that your hand must move with the pen, and that is what gives you that blobby top is it's the natural way that you have to use the pen in a particular way. You can't actually make it any other way.

Micheline White: Yeah, thank you. I did spend some time trying to imagine how he did them, but I'm not a calligrapher, so that wasn't my main, yeah.

Audience member 3: Wonderful talk. Thank you. My question is how excited were the Wormsley people when you said, I think this is actually Henry VIII's version?

Micheline White: Pretty excited. Yeah. But it took a long time, so I thought my hunch, I just thought these look really familiar. And what's so interesting is that the previous owners, so they have a record of, the book has only been owned by a couple of people, but unless you really went through every page, you never would've noticed them. And there was no indication in any of the materials that accompanied the book, from the catalogue, from when it was sold by Sotheby's. At one point there was no mention of any marginalia, so no one had looked at every page before. So always look at every page.

And they have the book on display now actually. So people visit the library and they always have, it's a wonderful, it's like one of the best book collections in England, and you can go on guided tours and they have a display cabinet, and so now they have the book in the display cabinet open to one of the manicules. Yeah.

Audience member 4: My question up here.

Micheline White: Yes, sorry.

Audience member 4: Hi. Thank you very much. As everyone said, it was absolutely fascinating. I first came across Katherine Parr and her love of books in the Shard Lake series by CJ Sampson, and I wondered, well, I assume you might've read it, but what your view was of the betrayal. I mean the whole plot in that being one of her very precious books being stolen and having to be retrieved. But for those who haven't read the Shard Lake series, I think following your lecture, it puts even more context around it.

Micheline White: So I have read that, but it was a very long time ago, but the incident of Katherine Parr, of her being almost arrested is only actually told 25 years later. And so there's a lot of speculation about what was it that made Katherine's enemies go after her so much. There's a lot of hypothesis about, was it this other book that was printed later, the Lamentation of a Sinner that got her in so much trouble, which I think is quite probable, but certainly her writing was of great concern to people. And so her champions really emphasised that she wrote these important books and her enemies basically never mentioned anything about her writing unless they're secretly plotting to take her down.

Staff member: I'm not sure whether or not this is a comment or a question, but perhaps you can consider it. So at about the time Christians were thinking about the status of women and Jews, they used one of the early more problematic writers on both subjects. So a reflection from an online listener.

Micheline White: Okay, thank you.

Staff member: I guess it's about Chrysostom.

Micheline White: Okay. I'll have to think about that.

Audience member 5: Thank you for your talk. It was fantastic. I was just wondering from a research perspective, at the beginning of this whole process, how did you find these books? Were you looking for the marginalia to begin with or were you just looking for the books and then took on this path? What was the journey?

Micheline White: Yeah, so I became interested, as I mentioned, I went basically to see that coat of arms. That's why I decided to go see the copy of the Wormsley Library because actually in the manuscript Psalter that I showed you, the image of Henry reading a Psalter, there was also a coat of arms. And so I had read Janelle Mueller is the scholar who had published the collected works of Katherine Parr, and in one of her footnotes, she mentions that there's a coat of arms in a gift copy. This was a different gift copy.

And so then when I learned there was one in the Wormsley Library, I was like, oh, I really want to go see the Coat of Arms, because one of the other copies is at Exeter College in Oxford, and I couldn't go to see the book because it was exams and they weren't accepting any scholars. And I was standing outside the gate, I really just want to look at this book. And I mean, they were lovely, and they let me come back later, but I couldn't go on that day. So then when I learned that there was another copy in the Wormsley Library, I thought, okay, I'll go there and look at this coat of arms. And what my question was, are they ,whoever did this coat of arms, were they sort of imitating Henry's Psalter? Is Katherine trying to tie her Psalms or Prayers to Henry's manuscript Psalter in a visual way? And then I just found the marginalia. Yeah. Yeah. So it was very unexpected. And then I had to learn a lot about marginalia and manicules.

Susannah Helman: Thank you so much. Unfortunately, we're out of time, but I hope you enjoyed tonight's event. Remember to check the Library's What's on page for more great upcoming programs and events, please join me in thanking Professor White. Thank you and good evening.