Interpreting letters and reading script: Evidence for female education and literacy in Tudor England

History of Education

Volumn 34, Issue 6, 2005, Pages 695-715

  Daybell, James ^a  

^a CENTRAL MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 29244471301     PISSN: 0046760X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00467600500313989     Document Type: Article

References (202)

1. On the education of boys in sixteenth-century England see J. Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966);
2. Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England (London: Routledge, 1965);
3. R. O'Day, Education and Society 1500-1800: The Social Foundations of Education in Early Modern Britain (London: Longman, 1982);
4. David Cressy, Education in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Edward Arnold, 1975);
5. Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran, The Growth of English Schooling, 1340-1548: Learning, Literacy and Laicization in Pre-Reformation York Diocese (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985);
6. Helen M. Jewell, Education in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998);
7. Nicholas Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England (London: 1989);
8. Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud, 1992);
9. Jeremy Black, idem, 'Archival sources for the grand tour', Archives, 20 (1992), 86-98.
10. For discussions of the nature of women's education see Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1999);
11. Alice T. Friedman, The influence of humanism on the education of girls and boys in Tudor England', History of Education Quarterly, 39(1985), 57-70;
12. Linda Pollock, "Teach Her to Live Under Obedience": The making of women in the upper ranks of early modern England', Continuity and Change, 4/2 (1989), 231- 58;
13. Norma McMullen, "The education of English gentlewomen 1540-1640', History of Education, 6/2 (1977), 87-101;
14. Barbara J. Whitehead (ed.), Women's Education in Early Modern Europe, A History, 1500-1800 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999);
15. Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956);
16. Dorothy Gardiner, English Girlhood at School; A Study of Women's Education Through Twelve Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929).
17. McMullen, The education of English gentlewomen', 91;
18. J.W. Adamson, The extent of literacy in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: notes and conjectures', The Library, 4th Series, 10 (1929), 163-93 (pp. 192-3).
19. Linda Pollock, With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay 1552-1620 (London: Collins & Brown, 1993), 6;
20. D.J.H. Clifford (ed.), The Diaries of Ijady Anne Clifford (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1990; reprinted 1994), 2.
21. Joanna Moody (ed.), The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady; The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599-1605 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998), xvii;
22. Muriel St. Clare Byrne (ed.), The Lisle Letters, 6 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), vol. 3, 217.
23. O'Day, Education and Society, 184;
24. Elizabeth McCutcheon, 'Margaret More Roper: the learned woman in Tudor England', in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, edited by Katherina M. Wilson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 449-80 (pp. 452-4);
25. Friedman, The influence of humanism', 57-70;
26. McMullen, The education of English gentlewomen', 94-7:
27. G. Kaufman, 'Juan Luis Vives on the Education of Women', Signs, 3/4 (1978), 891-6 (pp. 893-5);
28. Antony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities; Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986), 55-7.
29. Margaret R. Sommerville, Sex and Subjection: Attitudes to Women in Early-Modern Society (London: Arnold, 1995), 10-11.
30. David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 128.
31. See also David Cressy, idem, 'Levels of illiteracy in England, 15301730', Historical Journal, 20/1 (1977), 1-23 (p. 9).
32. Cressy estimates that only 1% of women were able to sign their names in 1500, compared with 10% of men. By the beginning of Elizabeth's reign some 5% of women and 20% of men are thought to have been able to sign, which rose to 8% of women and 27% of men by 1600. In the seventeenth century figures increased to 10% female literacy by 1640, compared with 30% male literacy. By 1700 the proportions rose to 25% for women and 45% for men (Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 176-7). It is not until the nineteenth century, however, that this gendered pattern of literacy breaks down;
33. David Vincent, for example, in his study Literacy and Popular Culture; England 1750-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), produces examples of geographical regions in which rates of female literacy outstripped those of men (pp. 24-5).
34. See also, David Vincent, idem, The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 12.
35. Many scholars share Cressy's gloomy pessimism about, the low numbers of early modem women able to write: Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 45;
36. Monaghan, E. Jennifer, 'Literacy instruction and gender in colonial New England", in The Book History Reader, edited by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 297-315.
37. More positive claims about female literacy, however, are forwarded by Kenneth Charlton in his essay 'Women and Education', in A Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing, edited by Anita Pacheco (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 3-21, which persuasively argues that 'by the turn of the sixteenth century most women in the upper and middle classes were able to read and write in a functional way' (p. 4).
38. For discussions of the limitations of signatures as indicators of literacy levels, and the need to apply more complex definitions of literacy, see Keith Thomas, "The meaning of literacy in early modern England', in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, Wolfson College Lectures 1985, edited by Gerd Baumann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 97-131 (pp. 102-3);
39. W.P. Ford, "The problem of literacy in early modern England', History, 78 (1993), 22-37 (p. 31);
40. R.A. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe: Culture and Education, 1500-1800 (London: Longman, 1988), 125-6;
41. Margaret Spufford, 'First steps in literacy: the reading and writing experiences of the humblest seventeenth-century spiritual autobiographers', Social History, 4/3 (1979), 407-435 (pp. 410-12).
42. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 105, 115. As universal estimates of literacy, it is thought that figures based on signatures overestimate the percentage of people who could write in a functional sense, beyond merely signing, and underestimate the percentage of people who could read.
43. For a more detailed discussion of the location and survival of women's manuscript letters see James Daybell, 'Women's Letters and Letter-Writing in England, 1540-1603", PhD thesis, University of Reading, 2000, ch. 2.
44. James Daybell, Ibid., 49-53. There is some evidence that semi-professional scriveners wrote letters for women lower down the social scale who were only partially literate:
45. William L. Sachse (ed.), The Diary of Robert Lowe of Ashton-in-Makerfier, Lancashire, 1663-74 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938), 24, 28.
46. Norman Davis (ed.), Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971-76);
47. C.L. Kingsford (ed.), The Stonor Letters and Papers, 1290-1483, Camden Society, 3rd Series, 29-30, 2 vols (London, 1919);
48. C.L. Kingsford (ed.), idem, 'Supplementary Stonor Letters and Papers (1314-1482)', Camden Miscellany, 13, Camden Society, 3rd Series, 34 (London, 1924), i-viii, 1-26;
49. the Stonor Papers have also recently been published as Kingsford's Stonor Letters and Papers 1290-1483, edited by Christine Carpenter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
50. Alison Hanham (ed.), The Cely Letters, 1472-1488, EETS No. 273 (London: Oxford University Press, 1975);
51. Thomas Stapleton (ed.), Plumpton Correspondence: A Series of letters, Chiefly Domestic, Written in the Reigns of Edward IV, Ricfard III, Henry VII and Henry VIII, Camden Society, 4 (London, 1839).
52. For a more recent edition of the Plumpton letters see Joan Kirby (ed.), The Plumpton Letters and Papers, Camden Society, 5th Series, 8 (1996).
53. On letter-writing and female literacy in the late medieval period see Roger Dalrymple, 'Reaction, consolation and redress in the letters of the Paston women', in Women's Letters and Letter-Writing In England, 1400-1700, edited by James Daybell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 16-28;
54. Julia Boffey, 'Women authors and women's literacy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England', in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150-1500, edited by Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; 2nd edition 1996), 159-82;
55. Paddy Payne and Caroline M. Barron, 'The letters and life of Elizabeth Despenser, Lady Zouche (d. 1408)', Nottingham Medieval Studies, 41 (1997), 126-56;
56. V.M. O'Mara, 'Female scribal ability and scribal activity in late medieval England: the evidence?', Leeds Studies in English, 27 (1996), 87-130 (pp. 109-10).
57. Dr O' Mara has identified over one hundred letters dispatched by women during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. On early medieval female literacy see Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 70-1, 153-4, 156-7, 272.
58. Malcolm B. Parkes, 'The literacy of the laity', in his Scribes, Scripts and Readers (London: Hambledon, 1991), 275-97.
59. James Daybell, '"Pies acsep thes my skrybled lynes": the construction and conventions of women's letters in England, 1540-1603', Quidditas, 20 (1999), 207-23;
60. Ralph A. Houlbrooke, 77k- English Family, 1450-1700 (Harlow: Longman, 1984), 101;
61. Albrecht Classen, 'Female epistolary literature from antiquity to the present: an introduction', Stadia Neophilologica, 60 (1988), 3-13 (p. 7).
62. Patricia Crawford, 'Women's published writings 1600-1700', in Women in English Society 1500-1800, edited by Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985; reprinted London: Routledge, 1996), 211-82"(pp. 211-14);
63. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
64. Alison D. Wall, 'Elizabethan precept and feminine practice: the Thynne family of Longleat', History, 75 (1990), 23-38 (p. 27);
65. Jean Klene, "Recreating the letters of Lady Anne Southwell', in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985-1991, edited by W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, NY: Centre for Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993), 239-52 (p. 246);
66. Jane Key (ed.), 'The Letters and Will of Lady Dorothy Bacon, 1597-1629, The Norfolk Record Society, 56 (1993), 77-112.
67. Barbara J. Harris, for example, has used the letters of the Lisle family, who during the 1530s were based in Calais, to examine the placing of their daughters in the households of the local French aristocracy and at the Henrician court: 'Sisterhood, friendship and the power of English aristocratic women, 1450-1550', in Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450-1700, edited by James Daybell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 21-50 (pp. 25-27).
68. On the role women as agents of pedagogical change see Kenneth Charlton, '"Not publike only but also private and domeslicall": mothers and familial education in pre-industrial England', History of Education, 17/1 (1988), 1-20;
69. Kenneth Charlton, idem, 'Mothers as educative agents in pre-industrial England', History of Education, 23 (1994).
70. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, Bacon/Townsend MS, L.d. 603, c. 1572.
71. National Archives, Kew, State Papers, Domestic, Additional, 46/24/224, n.d.
72. British Library, London [BL], Additional MS 48064, fols 19-21v (fol. 20), 1593.
73. Centre of Kentish Studies, Maidstone [CKS], De L'Isle MS, U1475 C81/97, 20 Apr. 1597.1 am grateful to Lord De L'Isle for permission to quote from these manuscripts.
74. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named The Governor (1531), edited by S.E. Lehmberg (London and New York, 1962), 19.
75. Hugh Paget, 'The youth of Anne Boleyn', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 54 (1981), 162-70 (pp. 163-4).
76. Female mastery of French appears to have been more widespread than knowledge of Latin, which was the preserve of only a select minority of women: Walter Ong, 'Latin language study as a renaissance puberty rite', Studies in Philology, 56/2 (1959), 103-24 (pp. 106-8, 110, 121).
77. James Daybell, 'Female Literacy and the Social Conventions of Women's Letter-writing in England, 15401603', in Daybell (ed.), Early Modern Women's Letter-Writing, 59-76.
78. Pollock, With Faith and Physic, 26.
79. Lambeth Palace Library [LPL], Talbot MS, 3197, fol. 172, 15 July 1582.
80. Muriel St Clare Byrne (ed.), The Lisle Letters, 6 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), vol. 5, 1126: Anne Basset to Lady Lisle, 15 March 1538.
81. NA, SP 10/5/5, 1 October 1548.
82. LPL, Talbot MS, 3203, fol. 399, 25 May n.y.
83. Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England, 180.
84. CKS, De L'lsle MS, U1475 C81/68, 6 Oct. 1595.
85. Susan Whyman, '"Paper visits": the post-restoration letter as seen through the Verney family archive', in Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600-1945, edited by Rebecca Bade (Aldershol: Ashgate, 1999), 15-36 (pp. 18-19).
86. Caroline M.K. Bowden, 'Female education in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England and Wales: a study of attitudes and practice', PhD thesis, University of London, 1996, appendix.
87. For an example of orthographic and lexico-grammatical analysis of women's letters see Carol L. Winkelmann, 'A case study of women's literacy in the early seventeenth century: the Oxinden family letters', Women and Language, 19/2(1996), 14-20 (pp. 16-17).
88. Lady Anne Clifford, Kendal Record Office. Exhibition Catalogue. (1990), 43.
89. A facsimile of this letter, dated 1655, is reproduced in Anlhony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), plate 25.
90. This has been noted for the Yorkist and early Tudor period: Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 1450-1550: Marriage, and Family, Property and Careers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 34-5.
91. Alison D. Wall (ed.). Two Elizabethan Wamen: Correspondence of Joan and Maria Thynne 1575-1611 (Wiltshire Record Society, 38, 1982), xxxii.
92. On women's handwriting see James Daybell, 'Women's Letters and Letter-Writing in England, 1540-1603: An Introduction to the Issues of Authorship and Construction', Shakespeare Studies, 27 (September 1999), 161-86 (pp. 163-4, 183 ns 20-21).
93. Desiderius Erasmus, De Conscribendis Epistolis (1522) in Collected Works of Erasmus, 25, edited by J.K. Sowards (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 20.
94. Key (ed.), 'The Letters and Will of Lady Dorothy Bacon', 83;
95. Folger, Cavendish/Talbot MS, X.d. 428 (48), Elizabeth Leche to Elizabeth, countess of Shrewsbury, 1565; Folger, Tamworth MS, L.e. 503, Bridget Eayre to Sir Humphrey Ferrers, c 1600; Bodleian Library, Oxford [Bodl.], Herrick Papers, Eng. Hisl. MS 474, fol. 109, Julian Herrick to William Herrick, 28 May 1599; LPL, Talbot MS, 3199 fols 267-267v, Dorothy Edmond to Earl of Shrewsbury, 8 April 1591; BL, Egerton MS 2713, fol. 481, Mary Hobart to John Hobart, 20 August 1597; Folger, Cavendish/Talbot MS, X.d. 428 (50), Elizabeth, Countess of Lennox to Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury, 1574.
96. BL, Add. MS 41140, fols 123-4, Dorothy Bacon to Nathaniel Bacon, [.1597]; BL, Add. MS 63109, fol. 10, Dorothy Bacon to Nathaniel Bacon, 20 Nov. [1597]; Folger, Cavendish/Talbot MS, Elizabeth, Countess of Lennox to Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury, 1574, X.d. 428 (50).
97. Hatfleld House, Hertfordshire, Cecil MS 94, fol. 105, Elizabeth Lady Lumley to Sir Robert. Cecil, 3 August-1602.
98. Bodl., Herrick MS, Eng. Hist. MS 474, fol. 68, Mary Herrick to William Herrick, 1578; Kendal Record Office Hothfield MS, WD/Hoth Box 44, Anne Dudley, Countess of Warwick to Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, 10 August n.y.
99. Bodl., Herrick MS, Eng. Hist. MS 474, fol. 68, Mary Herrick to William Herrick, 1578.
100. Alison Truelove, 'Commanding communications: the fifteenth-century letters of the Stonor women', in Daybell (ed.), Early Modern Women's Letter Writing, 42-58 (p. 53).
101. See also Alison Truelove, eadem, 'The Fifteenth-Century English Stonor Letters: A revised text with notes, a glossary, and a collation of those letters edited by C.L. Kingsford in 1919 and 1924', PhD thesis, University of London, 2001.
102. Ibid., 49-54.
103. J.S. Brewer et al. (eds), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII (21 vols and Addenda; London, 1862-1932), 1, 1545, 1/572, Sabine Johnson to John Johnson, 25 April 1545.
104. J.M Osborn (ed.), The Autobiography of Thomas Wythome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961).
105. Heidi Braymen Hackel, The "Great Variety" of readers and early modern reading practices', in A Companion to Shakespeare, edited by David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 139-57 (p. 141).
106. Thomas, 'The meaning of literacy', 99-100.
107. Thomas, 'The meaning of literacy', Ibid., 100.
108. Wall (ed.), Two Elizabetham Women, 30.
109. Hatfield House, Cecil MS 101, fol. 16, 8 July 1603.
110. References in women's correspondence to plays and play-going, while uncommon, do exist. A nineteenth-century reference survives to a letter purportedly from 'Lady Pembroke', Mary Herbert, dowager Countess of Pembroke to her son Philip Lord Herbert in which she mentions Shakespeare: 'we have a letter never printed, from Lady Pembroke to her son, telling him to bring James I from Salisbury to see As You Like It "we have the man Shakespeare with us'": Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (eds), The Collected Works of Mciry Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, Vol. I: Poems, Translations and Correspondence, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 301.
111. The authenticity of this lelter is in some doubt, and is firmly questioned by the editors: Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (eds), ibid., 353-4.
112. Likewise, a letter to Alice Carleton from John Chamberlain refers to her sister Elizabeth Williams as 'gon to the new Globe to a play' (30 June 1614): Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 204.
113. Bess of Hardwick's interest in architecture is demonstrated by a letter to Sir John Thynne written during his rebuilding of Longleat, in which she asked to borrow his plasterer for her own building plans at Chatsworth: David N. Durant, Bess of Hardwick: Portrait of a Dynast (London: Peter Owen Publishers, 1977), 47.
114. Letters have been used by several scholars to study men's reading: Jason Scott-Warren, 'News, sociability, and bookbuying in early modern England: the letters of Sir Thomas Cornwallis', The Library, 4 (December 2000), 382-402.
115. Warwick Record Office, Throckmorton Papers, CR 1998/Box 60/folder 1/4, Mary W[ilford] to [Ann Wilford], 17 Nov. n.y. This book could be Raymond of Capua's Vita di S. Catitrinu da Siena, which appeared in English translation in 1609 as The Life of The Blessed Virgin, Sainct Catherine of Siena.
116. LPL, Bacon MS 649, fols 1, 190, Anthony Bacon to Anne Lady Bacon, 1593, 2 June 1593.
117. BL, Add. MS 48023, fol. 32, Thomas Norton to Alice Norton, 29 December 1581. On female readers of Foxe's Book of Martyrs see Thomas S. Freeman, "The good ministrye of godlye and vertuouse women": the Elizabethan martyrologists and the female supporters of the Marian martyrs", Journal of British Studies, 39/1 (2000), 8-33 (pp. 31-2).
118. Charlton, Women, Religion and Education, 183.
119. N.H. Keeble and Geoffrey F. Nuttall (eds), Calendar of Correspondence of Richard Baxter, 1638-1696, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), vol. 1, 249;
120. Charlton, 'Women and Education', 14-15.
121. Jacqueline Eales, Women in Early Modern England, 1500-1700 (London: UCL Press, 1998), 41.
122. On women and news see James Daybell, '"Suche newes as on the Quenes hye wayes we have mett": the news networks of Elizabeth Talbot, countess of Shrewsbury (e. 1527-1608)', in Daybell (ed.), Women and Politics, 114-31.
123. Arthur Searle (ed.), Barrington Family Letters, 1628-1632, Camden Society, 4th Series, 28 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1983), 201, 206-7, 215, 223.
124. Vives, The Education of A Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, edited and translated by Charles Fantazzi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), ch. 5, 'Which Writers are to be Read and Which not lobe Read'.
125. On women's reading of printed books see Jacqueline Pearson, 'Women reading, reading women', in Women and Literature in Britain 1500-1700, edited by Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 80-99;
126. Susan W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women 1475-1640 (San Marino, CA: Huntingdon Library, 1982);
127. Louis B. Wright, The reading of renaissance English women', Studies in Philology, 28 (1931), 671-88;
128. P. Clark, The ownership of books in England, 1560-1640: the example of some Kentish townsfolk", in Schooling and Society: Studies in the History of Education, edited by Lawrence Stone (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), 95-111 (pp. 99-101);
129. Paul Morgan, 'Frances Wolfreston and "Her Bouks": a seventeenth-century woman book collector', The Library, 11/3 (September 1989), 197-219;
130. David McKitterick, 'Women and their books in seventeenth-century England: the case of Elizabeth Puckering', The Library, 1/4 (December 2000), 359-80;
131. Heidi Braymen Hackel, 'The Countess of Bridgewater's London library', in Books and Their Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, edited by Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 138-59.
132. Hastings Robinson (ed.), Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation Written During the Reigns of Henry VIII, King Edward VI and Queen Mary: Chiefly From the Archives of Zurich, 2 vols (Parker Society, vols 52 and 53, 1846-7), vol. 1, 2.
133. Cambridge University Library, Hengrave MSS, 88/1 fol. 37, Margaret Bourchier, Countess of Bath to John Bourchier, Earl of Bath, 3 Mar. n.y.
134. Staffordshire Record Office, Paget Papers, D603 K/1/5/14, n.d.
135. Warwick RO, Newdigate Papers, CR 136, BIOS, 4 May 1613.
136. LPL, Bacon MS, n.d., 656 fol. 47.
137. BL, Add. MS 41140, fols 121-122, 123-124, Lady Dorothy Bacon to Sir Nathaniel Bacon, [1597].
138. Robinson (ed.), Original Letters, 1: 118-19.
139. C. H. Garrett, The Marian Exiles: A Study in the Origins of Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 253.
140. LPL, Talbot MS 3203, fol. 410. Since the letter is undated it is impossible to identify to which Countess of Shrewsbury the book was presented. On Lady Russell's religion see Louise Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 34;
141. Stephen J. Barnes, The Cookes of Gidea Hall', The Essex Review, 21 (1912), 1-9.
142. P.W. Hasler (ed.), The House of Commons, 1558-1603, 3 vols (London, 1981), vol. 1, 467-69.
143. LPL, Talbot MS 3203, fol. 166, 17 December 1603.
144. My analysis here is based, at least in part, on Elizabeth Farber's scholarly edition of 'The Letters of Lady Elizabeth Russell (1540-1609)', PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1977. Working from the transcripts and translations provided here, I have in fact been able to identify the sources for many more of the quotes than Farber herself points to in her footnotes: letters 12, 13, 14, 20, 24, 35, 36, 44, 48, 51; NA, SP12/255/29; Hatfield, Cecil MS, 68 fol. 11, 30 fol. 26, 175 fol. 92, 53 fol. 88, 74 fol. 1, 179 fol. 92, 90 fol. 152, 197 fol. 53: letters from Elizabeth Russell to Sir Robert Cecil, 1595 to 1605.
145. Mary Ellen Lamb, 'The Cooke sisters: attitudes towards learned women in the Renaissance', in Silent But For the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works, edited by Margaret P. Hannay (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1985), 107-25 (pp. 108, 119);
146. Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women, 41-51.
147. Robinson (ed.), Original Letters, vol. 1, 4-7.
148. Warwick RO, Newdigate Papers, CR 136 B311, Lady Anne Newdigate to Robert Cecil, n.d.
149. Vivienne Larminie, Wealth, Kinship and Culture: the Seventeenth-Century Newdigates of Arbury and Their World (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1995), 121.
150. Vivienne Larminie, Ibid., 96, 131.
151. Lady Newdigate-Newdegate (ed.), Gossip From the Muniment Room Being Passages in the Lives of Anne and Mary Fytton, 1574 to 1618 (London: David Nutt, 1897), 115, 127-8. From the Ruine of Time, Beamont quotes lines 159-61, 'It is a comforle in great languishment / To be bemoaned with compassion kinde / And mitigates the anguish of the ininde'; his quotation from The Faerie Queene begins 'All naturall affection soone doth cesse' (Book 4, Canto IX, Stanza 2).
152. Newdigate-Newdegate (ed.), Gossip From the Muniment Room, 130, 132.
153. Newdigate-Newdegate (ed.), Ibid., 96, 118, 126, 130, 131.
154. Kendal RO, WD/Hoth Box 44, 23 March n.y.
155. BL, Add. MS 23212, fol. 152, n.d.
156. Newdigate-Newdegate (ed.), Ibid., fol. 135, n.d.
157. Ibid., fol. 152, n.d.
158. On women's involvement with poetry see Elizabeth Heale, 'Women and the courtly love lyric: The Devonshire MS (BL Additional 17492)', Modern Language. Review, 90/2 (April 1995), 296-313:
159. Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 48-61.
160. BL, Add. MS 23212, fol. 150v, n.d.
161. Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, Ibid., fol. 171, n.d.
162. Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, Ibid., fol. 177. n.d.
163. Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, Ibid., fols 143-14, n.d.
164. Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, Ibid., fol. 104v, n.d.
165. I am very grateful to Professor Steven May for his invaluable advice and assistance with this poem, especially in terms of possible rhetorical and structural models. He has suggested that Bourne's poem resembles the poem beginning 'I sigh. Why so?' in The Paradise of Dainties (1576), sig. E3;
166. and in terms of structure, if only superficially, Nicholas Breton's 'But whereto tends this tale?' (STC 3655, 1577), sig M1-P;
167. V.
168. Warwick, RO, Newdigate Papers, CR 136, B105, 4 May 1613.
169. Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson (eds), Early Modern Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) includes the work of over 30 sixteenth-century women poets.
170. Jean Klene, 'Recreating the Letters of Lady Anne Southwell', in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, 248-9;
171. Jean Cavanaugh, 'Lady Southwell's Defense of Poetry', English Literary Renaissance, 14/3 (1984), 284-5.
172. Jenijoy La Belle, 'A Love's True Knot: the letters of Constance Fowler and the poems of Herbert Aston', Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 79 (1980), 13-31.
173. Jenijoy La Belle, Journal of English and Germanic Philology,Ibid., 17.
174. See Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (eds), Women, Science and Medicine, 1500-1700 (Thrupp: Sutton, 1997).
175. Kendal RO, WD/Hoth Box 44, 23 March n.y. Margaret Clifford's interest in alchemy is evidenced by her receipt book (Kendal RO, Hothfield MSS, WD/Hoth A 988/5). There also appear to have been a number of manuscripts and books relating to alchemy within the Clifford household to which the countess would have had access. See for example WD/Hoth/A988/2, which is six leaves on alchemy and A/988/3, the translation dated 10 July 1603 of three works by or attributed to Arnaldus de Villa Nova (c. 1235-1313), alchemist, astrologer and physician. Margaret P. Hannay, '"How I These Studies Prize": the Countess of Pembroke and Elizabethan science', in Women, Science and Medicine, 108-21 (pp. 110-11).
176. BL, Lansdowne MS 18, fol. 36, 4 February 1574.
177. BL Lansd. MS 80, fol. 24, 29 May 1595.
178. Wall (ed.,) Two Elizabetham Women, 19.
179. BL, Add. MS 23212, fol. 97, Elizabeth Bourne to Sir John Conway, n.d.
180. R.A.B. Mynors et al. (eds), Collected Works of Erasmus; The Correspondence of Erasmus, 11 vols (1974-1998): Margaret of Hungary (1505-58), Epistle 2820, Brussels, 13 June 1533; Margaret Roper (c 1505-44) Epistle 2233 [Chelsea], 4 November [1529]; Margaret Welser Pautinger (1481-1552) Epistle. 1247, Augsburg, 9 December 1521.
181. Anne M. O'Donnell, 'Sixth Annual Bainton Lecture: contemporary women in the letters of Erasmus', Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook, 9 (1989), 34-72 (pp. 35-7).
182. Peter Iver Kaufman, 'Absolute Margaret: Margaret More Roper and "well learned" men'. Sixteenth Century Journal, 20 (1989), 443-56;
183. Elizabeth McCutcheon, 'Life and letters: editing the writing of Margaret, Roper', in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, 111-17.
184. Soeur Marie-Claire Robinueau et al., 'Correspondance entre Erasme et Margaret Roper', Moreanu, 12 (1966), 29-46, 121.
185. Robinson (ed.), Original Letters, vol. 1, 2, 4-11, 107-15;
186. Nicholas Harris Nicolas, The Literary Remains of Lady Jane Grey: With a Memoir of Her Life (London: Harding, Triphook & Lepard, 1825);
187. R.A. Chavasse, 'Humanism in exile: Celio Secondo Curione's learned women friends and exempta for Elizabeth Γ, in Protestants, Property and Puritans: Godly People Revisited, edited by S.M. Jack and B.A. Masters (Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, New Series, 14, 1, 1996), 165-85.
188. On the Republic of Letters see Maarten Ullee, 'The Republic of Letters: learned correspondence, 1680-1720', Seventeenth Century, 2 (1987), 95-112.
189. Lynette Hunter, 'Sisters of the Royal Society: the circle of Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh', in Women, Science and Medicine, 178-97;
190. Lynette Hunter (ed.), The Letters of Dorothy Moore, 1612-64 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
191. James Daybell, 'Introduction', in Daybell (ed.), Early Modern Women's letter Writing, 1-15 (pp. 1-2).
192. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (first, published 1928; Penguin Books, 1945), 63.
193. The most recent, edition of Osborne's letters is Kenneth Parker (ed.), Dorothy Osborne: Letters to William Temple 1652-54: Observations on Love, Literature, Politics and Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
194. On Osborne's letters see Sheila Ottway, 'Dorothy Osborne's love letters: novelistic glimmerings and the Ovidian self, Prose Studies, 19 (1996), 149-59;
195. Genie S. Lerch-Davis, 'Rebellion against public prose: the letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple (1652-4)', Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 20 (1978), 386-415;
196. James Fitztnaurice and Marline Rey, 'Letters by women in England, the French romance, and Dorothy Osborne', The Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe: Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 12(1987), 149-60.
197. Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters (London, 1664).
198. In a letter to the Countess of Mar, Lady Montagu wrote, 'It is to be hoped that my letter will entertain you': Clare Brant (ed.), The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (London: Everyman, 1992), 223.
199. Clare Brant (ed.), Ibid., xii-xiii, xvi.
200. On women's letters and the novel see Ruth Perry, Women, Letters and the Novel (1980);
201. Elizabeth V. Goldsmith (ed.), Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature (1989);
202. Katharine Ann Jensen, Writing Love: Letters, Women, and the Novel in France, 1605-1776(1995).