I came to Anne Vaughan Lock’s “A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner” as a result of my son Hudson’s high-school ancestry-research project. At dinner, Hudson casually mentioned that a distant grandmother on my mother’s side was the first writer to publish a sonnet cycle in English. Not the first woman, he said. The first poet. I told him that his research must be wrong. The first English sonnet cycle was Philip Sidney’s “Astrophil and Stella,” published in 1591. To be certain, I checked with Pamela Macfie, a sixteenth-century specialist at the university where I teach. Macfie corrected me. The first sonnet sequence published in English, she said, is Thomas Watson’s “Hekatompathia,” from 1584.

But a cursory search suggested that my son could be on to something. An online biography described Lock as a poet, a translator, and a Calvinist religious figure, and as “the first English author to publish a sonnet sequence,” called “A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner,” in 1560—that is, more than thirty years before Sidney. As I discovered, the “Meditation” cycle appears at the end of “Sermons of John Calvin, upon the Song that Ezechias (Hezekiah) made after he had been sick.” Lock herself translated the sermons from the French. The sonnets appended to the sermons are a gloss of Psalm 51, in which King David repents of his adultery with Bathsheba. After a dedicatory epistle to the Duchess of Suffolk and the translated sermons themselves, Lock introduces the sonnets with an apparent disavowal of her authorship, saying that the sonnets were “delivered me by my friend with whom I knew I might be so bolde to use and publishe it as pleased me.”

For years, many scholars thought that the “friend” might be the Scottish reformer John Knox, who stayed with Lock and her husband, Henry, in London. But Knox wrote in Scots English, and as far as we know he didn’t write poetry. The disavowal is more likely an example of a “modesty topos,” as a woman in the sixteenth century who published original work would have been considered immoral. The few women who published poetry of any kind were not members of the merchant class, as Lock was, but of the nobility, such as Catherine Parr, whose “Prayers or Meditations” appeared in 1545, and the future Queen Elizabeth, whose translation of “A Godly Meditation of the Soul” appeared in 1548.

In 1989, the Princeton scholar Thomas P. Roche, Jr.,’s “Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences” established Lock as the author of the sonnets, putting her “Meditation” at the chronological head of the English-sonnet-sequence tradition. A flurry of scholarship followed: Susan M. Felch’s “Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock,” first published in 1999—an updated volume will be published later this year—summarized the textual evidence for Lock’s authorship, which includes unusual lexical choices consistent between Lock’s dedicatory epistle and the sonnets. Ben Burton asserted that, because Lock has no predecessor in French or Italian, her “Meditation” is both the first sonnet sequence written in the English language and the first sonnet sequence written by a woman in Europe.

Lock’s cardinal place in the history of the sonnet cycle may not be news to scholars. But for me—a poetry-loving, feminist, conflicted Protestant English-Ph.D. dropout—it was an endorphin-surge of a discovery. Whether or not she was my ancestor began to seem irrelevant. (My son’s ancestry chart went back to an eighteenth-century Ann Lock in Scotland; we haven’t been able to determine whether she’s a descendent of the sixteenth-century poet.) Lock’s name wasn’t in my old Norton anthology, published in 1993, in which “Astrophil and Stella” is hailed as the first of the great Elizabethan sonnet cycles. The newest Norton, published in 2018, includes Lock under the sub-heading “An Elizabethan Miscellany” and features a two-sentence introduction noting that her verse paraphrase of Psalm 51 is “arguably the first English sonnet sequence as well as an early example of the Protestant devotional lyric that led to the religious poetry of John Donne and George Herbert.” Only one of the twenty-six sonnets appears.

In 1517, Martin Luther published his Ninety-five Theses, which inaugurated a massive schism in the Western church, one that he likely never intended. Luther’s theses were, by and large, arguments against the sale of “indulgences”—signed papers that guaranteed the purchaser, or the purchaser’s dear departed relatives, reduced hours in Purgatory. At the time, northern Europe was primed for a break from the Holy Roman Empire, burdened by the debt incurred during the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica, in Rome. As Luther’s claims about the inefficacy of indulgences spread, with help from the new Gutenberg printing press, so did the idea of the solas, which formed the basis of the Reformation. Justification—redemption from sin, the state of righteousness before God—was a free gift of divine grace (sola gratia), received not for good works or by purchasing ecclesiastical favors but only by faith in Christ’s sacrifice (sola fide). And the Bible alone was the sole source of doctrinal truth (sola scriptura).

In 1534, King Henry VIII broke from the Catholic Church in Rome with the Act of Supremacy, declaring himself the “supreme head on earth of the Church of England.” Around this time, Anne Lock was born. Her mother, Margaret, worked as a silkwoman for Anne Boleyn, who was beheaded in 1536, supposedly for committing “high treason” but more likely because, although she had provided Henry with a daughter, Elizabeth, she had not given him a male heir. Lock’s father, Stephen Vaughan, was a prosperous London merchant who served as a diplomat in Henry VIII’s court and had ties to Thomas Cromwell, the King’s chief minister. Anne grew up in an intellectual, ardently Protestant home. In 1536, when Henry VIII began dissolving the Catholic monasteries, Vaughan was given twelve messuages—houses with lands and adjacent buildings. He began renting them out to Protestants.

Both of Anne’s parents died by the time she was seventeen, and, soon after, she married Henry Lock, the son of another wealthy merchant family with Protestant sympathies. The couple hosted Protestant dignitaries in their home, including the fiery Scottish reformer John Knox. Much of what we know about Anne Vaughan Lock’s life comes from Knox’s correspondence with her. When Mary Tudor, a Catholic, took the throne, in 1553, and began executing Protestants, Knox, like most Protestants, fled to the Continent. In 1556, he wrote three letters urging Lock to join him in the city-state of Geneva, where the French theologian and preacher John Calvin had established a kind of Protestant theocracy. “If I should express the thirst . . . which I have had for your presence, I should appear to pass measure,” Knox wrote in one letter. It seems that Lock’s husband was not keen on the idea. In another letter, Knox put on his preacher robes, telling her to “call first for grace by Jesus to follow that whilk”—meaning “which”—“is acceptabill in his sight, and theairefter communicat” with her husband.

Lock arrived in Geneva in May, 1557, along with her son, Henry; her infant daughter; and her maid. The baby died four days after their arrival. Lock stayed in Geneva with Knox and the other exiles for almost two years. Likely it was Knox who introduced Lock to Calvin, whose doctrine took the Reformation’s sola gratia to its logical end: if one can do nothing to earn God’s favor, then those who embrace Christ do so because God elected them to receive the gift. This teaching was likely a comfort to the Protestant exiles who had been used to their priests absolving them of their sins. (The doctrine of “double predestination,” in which those who don’t choose Christ are predestined to damnation, was likely an idea developed by Calvin’s successors.)