Most textbooks have said that the first English sonnet sequence was Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591). Yet three decades earlier, Anne Vaughan Lock’s A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, a 26-stanza paraphrase of Psalm 51, was published as an appendix in a 1560 volume of Lock’s own translations of a set of Jean Calvin’s sermons. – The New Yorker