KATHERINE PARR Brandon G. Withrow Book Review

Katherine Parr: A Guided Tour of the Life and Thought of a Reformation Queen
Brandon G. Withrow, author © 2009
P&R Publishing, Phillipsburg NJ
ISBN 1-59638-117-9
Retail price: $13.99

Katherine Parr was the sixth wife of King Henry VIII, the king who married eight women and brought an end to the Roman Catholic prominence in England during the Reformation Period of history. Once heralded by Pope Leo X as "Defender of the Faith," or FIDEI DEFENSOR, when not given permission to set aside his first wife by the church in Rome, he went ahead with his plans and set aside Rome altogether.

Katherine, however, went even further by embracing the protestant theology of he Reformation. As the term protestant arose from the word "protest," and though she and husband King Henry discussed the Christian faith regularly, by stepping beyond her spouse on religious matters she was treading on shaky ground. At one point, men of the King's court set out a plot to expose Katherine Parr's beliefs and thus be rid of her, but the secret mission, so-to-speak, backfired.

There is excellent biographical information in this thin volume about this interesting woman of the sixteenth-century, and to round the volume out, included are selected writings from her published works, Prayers and Meditations, and The Lamentation or Complaint of a Sinner, as well as correspondence to- and from the Queen.

There is one element of this book that I felt may have been handled in a different fashion. Throughout the first portion of the book, the biography, author Brandon Withrow included numerous mentions and citations of previous biographers' works.--so much so, that I found it distracting and disruptive of the flow of the content. How this may have been done in another way, is perhaps a good question to be answered by other biographers. For this reason, my view is to think of this edition as more of a textbook than for casual reading.

Mary Katherine May with husband Richard owns www.QualityMusicandBooks.com, an online Christian music, book, and gift webstore. The retail store, Quality Music and Books, is currently in process of relocation.