5 - Women and classical education in the early modern period

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The relevance of classical education to women was very much a subject of debate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There is an enormous literature concerned with the proper extent of female learning, much of it in the form of lists, or catalogues, of learned women (to be discussed later in this chapter). Clearly, many were against it: equally clearly, many educators, both male and female, spoke in favour of educating girls, and a good few actually did so. My chapter will attempt to focus on both the debate itself, and its social and cultural consequences.

What complicates this subject is the enormous mass of evidence more or less indirectly about educated women, compared with the small quantity of actual surviving works by women. This means that, even today, discussions of women's opportunities and achievements tend to consist of the bandying about of secondary authorities. The same few names, linked by phrases such as ‘is said by contemporaries to…’ appear all too often. Male defenders of women's education have in effect intruded themselves as spokesmen for early modern women rather than allowing them to speak for themselves, a situation not without its parallels among more recent male feminists.