Early Modern Englishwomen and Education

This entry considers traditional notions of education, especially those associated with literacy practices and humanist education, and also gestures to ways in which women’s education extended beyond these categories to consider training for literacies and competencies writ large. To this end, discussion is divided into four main sections: (1) Domestic Education, which includes brief discussions of mother’s advice materials, receipt books, herbals, and other handbooks transmitting information related to healthcare and household management, much of which is quite technical; (2) Schools, Schooling, and Training, which allows consideration of debates about the educability of women often included within the Gender Controversy, alongside treatises outlining how one should educate women; (3) Reading, Writing, and Composition, treating skills, evidence of which is gleaned from life writing, spiritual diaries, diaries, and petitions, and also available via textual addresses to women as audience and from women’s contributions to family networks of circulation; (4) Humanism, Languages, and Rhetoric, requiring the most extensive investment of resources in education and demonstrating the ways that women’s education operates within systems of power in the period.