Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England

Kenneth Charlton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415181488
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134676583
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England is a study of the nature and extent of the education of women in the context of both Protestant and Catholic ideological debates.
Examining the role of women both as recipients and agents of religious instruction, the author assesses the nature of power endowed in women through religious education, and the restraints and freedoms this brought.

1 Attitudes to women

NATURE AND NURTURE

A society concerned (to an almost obsessive degree) with religion and, most immediately, with the scriptural basis of that religion not surprisingly turned first and foremost to the scriptures for statements about the nature of women, from which it would be possible to justify claims about women’s status in society and an education deemed appropriate to that status (albeit in a society with a male Godhead, a male Saviour and a male priesthood, and in a society largely governed by men). Again, not surprisingly, the scriptures served to provide proof-texts for just about every kind and level of claim in the matter. Shakespeare was merely reflecting a common awareness when he had Antonio warn Bassanio that ‘the Devil can cite scripture for his purpose’.¹

Human nature, and the efficacy of education in controlling or modifying it, had for long been a matter of discussion by classical authors, by the early Christian Fathers and by medieval theologians. Much of the ‘pagan’ thought on the matter was assimilated into Christian theology, but always in the context of notions about ‘childhood’ and its modification by ‘original sin’. Even so, theological doctrine was rarely homogeneous, and Reformation theology hardly improved matters, especially when it attempted to simplify the presentation of doctrine to suit the perceived needs and capabilities of the newly enfranchised ‘priesthood of all believers’. Moreover, despite their insistence on man’s post-Lapsarian ‘depravity’, few Reformers wished to abandon their humanist predecessors’ emphasis on the dignity of man, and on man’s ‘natural’ faculty of reason, which above all things enabled him to distance himself from the world of ‘brutish beasts’.

The problem was further complicated by differences of opinion not only about the spiritual state of a new-born infant but also about the nature and length of childhood itself. For most writers, ‘infancy’ took the new-born ‘babe’ or ‘nursling’ up to the age of 7, with, according to the commonly accepted five-fold classification of Galen, ‘childhood’ continuing to 15, when ‘adolescency’ started, continuing to 25. Curiously (to modern ears at least) the period from 25 to 35 was categorised as ‘youth’, which was followed by ‘middle age’ until 49, and an ‘old age’ thereafter. Shakespeare’s ‘seven ages’, ending with ‘second childishness and mere oblivion; Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’ was merely one of several categorisations then current.²

Certainly the age of 7 was taken by most to mark some kind of boundary. William Harrington, for example, insisted that it was the age at which boys and girls should cease to sleep in the same bed.³ Sir Thomas Elyot recommended it as the age at which boys should be taken from the company and oversight of women.⁴ Thomas Wilson noted that ‘every child of 6 or 7 years… is forced to act whereby he gaineth his own living and something beside to help enrich his parents or master’.⁵ It was the age, too, when children were, canonically at least, expected to reach the age of spiritual maturity–‘the age of discretion’–and thus to go through the rites of confirmation, though not necessarily to take communion, which generally had to await physical maturity.⁶ It was about this time too that the other rite de passage for boys–wearing ‘breeches’ in place of ‘skirts’–took place, Isabella Twysden for example, reporting that her son Roger ‘was put into breeches the 15 October 1648, being somewhat above six years old’.

Even more important for our immediate concern, discussions about the first stage of ‘infancy’ (up to 7) rarely made any effort to differentiate between the sexes. Debates about suckling, baptism, bodily care, spiritual development and the like were carried on by reference to the generic ‘child’ or ‘infant’. Not surprisingly in a male-dominated age, any reference to generic ‘child’ or ‘man’ was almost invariably followed by the personal pronoun ‘he’, though, as Calvin found it necessary to point out, ‘Why, even children know that women are included under the term “men”!’⁷

But whatever categorisation was used by Protestant writers in early modern England concerning the length of childhood, the vast majority followed Augustine in indicating its nature. Acknowledging the validity of Psalm 51.5, ‘I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin conceived by my mother’ and, recalling his own youthful sinfulness, Augustine answered his own rhetorical question ‘Is this childish innocence?’ with an emphatic ‘It is not, Lord, it is not.’⁸ Throughout the literature, proof-texts from the Old Testament predominate, often from Proverbs but more especially from Psalms 58.3: ‘For the wicked go astray from the womb; they go astray as soon as they are born’, as in Cranmer’s Catechismus. The point was put in down-to-earth fashion in the mid-sixteenth century Boy-Bishop sermon from Gloucester, when the preacher enjoined his congregation to

Look in his face and you would think that butter would not melt in his mouth; but as smooth as he looks, I will not wish you to follow him if you know him as much as I do… All is not gold that shines nor are all innocents that bear the face of children.⁹

Edward Hake, the puritan Mayor of Windsor, was later brief and to the point: ‘Children are by nature evil, and being evil they are by the example of parents made worse.’¹⁰ Despite a generally benign attitude to children the Comenian schoolmaster Hezekiah Woodward, citing Augustine in support, nevertheless warned that

as we observe Adam’s ruins appearing betimes in the child, so we must be timely in the building against these ruins and repairing thereof… and so much may teach us what infancy is, and that those innocent years (as some have called them) are not innocent. They do show forth many ill and peccant humours lurking within, like poison in a chilled serpent, which must be looked unto betimes by keeping our eyes wakeful over the first three or four years.¹¹

John Downame addressed himself direct to the child in his ‘Prayer for Children’ when he made his child recite:

I humbly confess that I am a most wretched sinner and altogether unworthy to be in the covenant of grace and salvation. For I was not only conceived and born in sin and corruption whereby thy glorious image was defaced in me, but I have added thereunto many actual sins.¹²

Nor was the point confined to the wide variety of ‘godly books’ then currently available. Thomas Wright, in his Passions of the Mind in General (1604) drew on humoral theory to insist that children ‘lack the use of reason and are guided by an internal imagination, following nothing else but that pleaseth their senses; even after the same manner as brute beasts hate, love, fear and hope, so do children’.¹³ The schoolmaster Thomas Granger, in his ‘Epistle to the Reader’ in which he sets out his ‘Generall Theorike or True Grounds of Teaching’, went into more detail:

children are phantastical and full of imaginations, their understandings weak, their apprehensions confused, and reason imperfect, and because their blood is hot and boiling, they are fickle and restless, minding nothing but varieties and novelties.¹⁴

It is against such a background that any consideration of women, their nature and nurture, has to be set. Without doubt, women in the early modern period ‘enjoyed’ (as we say nowadays) ‘a bad press’. In much of the literature they not only shared with men the stigma of being ‘born in sin’, but they were additionally and crucially the direct descendants of Eve, the initiator, as it was claimed, of the events which led to the banishment from Paradise. A commonplace feature of most discussions about the nature of women, therefore, would be its starting point, Eve-woman the seducer, and its proof-text, the story of the Fall as told in Genesis, Chapter 3, repeated in 1 Timothy 2.13–14 and usually glossed as the fall of Adam at the hands of Eve. At the same time, however, woman was described as ‘the weaker vessel’, the comparative adjective of which should remind us that for the most part the debate about the nature of women was determined by reference to the nature of men, a procedure as common at the end of our period as at its beginning. The words of the Elizabethan Homily ‘Of the State of Matrimony’, ‘for the woman is a weak creature, not endued with like strength and constancy of mind’, are echoed a hundred years later, for example, in Richard Baxter’s Christian Directory:

It is no small patience which the natural imbecility of the female sex requireth you to prepare. Except it be very few that are patient and manlike, women are commonly of potent fantasies, and tender, passionate, impatient spirits easily cast into anger or jealousy or discontent, and of weak understandings and therefore unable to reform themselves. They are betwixt man and child. Some few have more of the man, and many more of the child.¹⁵

Commonly, too, the ambiguity of the adjective ‘weaker’ was conveniently ignored by those who wished to present a misogynist point of view, though the literature of misogyny was far from homogeneous in its treatment of the matter. On the one hand, women were regarded as objects of ridicule, derision or contempt. They were by nature idle, garrulous chatterers, brainless, indiscreet gossips, unable to keep a secret; they were querulous, wayward, prodigal, capricious, obstinate, contrary and contentious. In one sense, then, their ‘weakness’ could be dismissed as of no great importance, as a mere inconvenience. As Zanthia complains in Marston’s The Wonder of Women (1606):

• We things cal’d women [are] only made for show
• And pleasure, created to bear children
• And play at shuttlecock¹⁶

In another, more reflective sense, however, their ‘weakness’ was a matter of concern, something to be warned against. Idleness, for example, meant the neglect of that traditional charge to ‘keep’ the goods that it had been the responsibility of the husband to ‘gather’, a neglect of the role of the ‘good-wife’, the ‘huswyf’, etc. Proverbs 31 provided the appropriate proof-text for treatise and sermon, with Aristotelian dictum thrown in for good measure.¹⁷ Moreover, idleness and garrulity in a woman inevitably led to gossip, which would endanger the secrets of her husband’s trade or office, his ‘misterie’. ‘Trust a woman? Never! Never!’ exclaimed Flamineo in John Webster’s White Devil (1612), and Portia’s agonised asides in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar would have struck a chord in many members of the Shakespearean audience:

• Constancy, be strong upon my side!
• Set a huge mountain ‘tween my heart and tongue!
• How hard it is for woman to keep counsel!

and later

• ….. Ay me! how weak a thing
• The heart of woman is!

Sir John Harrington, on the other hand, congratulated his wife Mary on

thy good silence… for thanks to the sweet god of silence thy lips do not wanton out of discretion’s path, like the many gossiping dames we could name who lose their husband’s fast hold on good friends rather than hold fast on their own tongues.¹⁸

In the same way, ‘inconstancy’ as an aspect of the condition ‘weaker’ was treated not only at a relatively frivolous level–forever changing her mind as to the best colour for her dress–but also as an exemplification of the inconstant love, leading to cuckoldry, which was treated as a subject for bawdy humour, and adultery, which was certainly not regarded in the same lighthearted way.

Another aspect of a woman’s nature, her propensity for ‘contention’–treated as a matter for humour in John Heywood’s collections of epigrams (1566) or in Anthony Copley’s patently chauvinist Wits, Fits and Fancies (1595)–was for others of much greater significance, potent of danger not derision, and certainly nothing to be scoffed at, for it symbolised that disturbance of harmony and concord which was considered essential not only to the well-being of personal relationships but also to the stability of family and commonwealth. Richard Hooker, for example, characterised it as a general social and political ill.¹⁹ Shrewish wives abound in the literature–Noah’s wife, Socrates’ Zantippe, Aristotle’s Phyllis, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath are all recalled in the early modern period as exemplars, from A C Mery Talys (1526), Erasmus’ pert Maria in his Colloquy ‘Courtship’ and the story in Pasquil’s Jests (1604), taken from Poggio, of the husband who went upstream in search of his drowned wife because in life she had been so contrary, to their many counterparts in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, as for example in Leonato’s warning to Beatrice, ‘By my troth, niece, thou wilt never get thee a husband if thou be so shrewd [shrewish] of tongue’, and Matteo’s comment in Thomas Dekker’s II The Honest Whore (1630), ‘There’s no music when a woman is in the consort.’²⁰

In all these characterisations of a woman’s nature it was her patent lack of the male’s ability to reason which made her in some sense sub-human when contrasted with her male counterpart. When Julia, discussing her choice of various suitors with Lucetta, her waiting woman, in Shakespeare’s Two Gentleman of Verona, is asked ‘Your reason?’, she replies ‘I have no other but a woman’s reason. I think him so because I think him so.’ The same response is made by Middleton’s Violetta in Blurt Master Constable: ‘I have a woman’s response. I will not dance because I will not dance.’²¹ When women presented a petition to the House of Commons in April 1649 they were told by the Sergeant-at-Arms that

the matter you petition about is of a higher concernment than you understand; that the House gave an answer to your husbands; and that therefore you are desired to go home and look after your own business and meddle with your housewifery.²²

More threateningly, however, there appeared to be an easy transition from chattering scold to shrewish virago–and thence to fearsomely dangerous witch. When men came to portray women as scold, shrew, virago and witch they were coming close to expressing, if not overtly acknowledging, their basic apprehension of the powers of women. Edmund Tilney warned his readers to beware of the ‘masterful shrew’. William Whately claimed that ‘if a husband hath made himself an underling to his wife’ he would at the same time have contributed to the production of a ‘misshapen house’. Discussing the duties of wives in his Of Domesticall Duties, William Gouge stressed that ‘if the fear of God possess not their hearts, though they be the weaker vessel, [they] do oft make their husbands plain vassals to them’.²³

In each of these cases, and there were many more, ‘weaker’ seems not to be the appropriate adjective. When Hamlet exclaimed ‘Frailty, thy name is woman’ he was referring not to that ‘tenderness, soft and mild with a kind of womanly sweetness’ that Castiglione had considered so desirable, nor even to ‘this fair defect of nature’ which Milton referred to in Paradise Lost, but to the other end of the continuum, to woman as sexual predator.²⁴ Woman’s ‘fervency’ was a commonplace of misogynist literature and dramatic personification. Lear’s embittered tirade against Regan was a typical characterisation, to be seen also in Isabella in Marston’s The Insatiate Countess and in Roxena in Middleton’s Hengist King of Kent.²⁵ In this portrayal of woman as lustful, lascivious seducer, what was at the same time being exemplified was her capacity for deceit for ends other than sexual satisfaction, using her s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1: Attitudes to women
• 2: The media
• 3: The methods
• 4: Women as recipients
• 5: Away to school
• 6: Women as agents
• 7: Mothers as educators
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography