Anne Askew, a personal friend of Katherine Parr, was ultimately a victim of her society. Brought into an arranged, loveless marriage by the patriarchal customs of the time, she spent the majority of her life seeking a divorce. Her life was also intertwined with religious discrimination as her husband, a Catholic, routinely used and abused her, throwing her out when they had children. This ironically enough gave her the freedom to write her examinations, a pair of two books that addressed the patriarchal biases and moral failings of the church through chronicling her unique experience as an educated protestant woman in a male catholic society.