Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T00:12:55.307Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Reading, Writing, and Initialing: Female Literacy in Early Modern London

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2015

Eleanor Hubbard
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article reopens the vexed question of how many women in early modern England could read by calling attention to the precise ways in which women marked, initialed, and signed legal depositions in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London. It shows that initialing and signing were closely correlated skills, and it argues that women who wrote their initials had begun to learn how to read. Using initials as a proxy for elementary reading literacy, it goes on to map female literacy in early modern London, showing that urban upbringings fostered female literacy and that reading literacy was far more broadly socially diffused than the ability to write. Changes in initialing patterns as women aged suggest that women found reading to be useful and relevant to their lives, and that literacy carried social prestige.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 553 - 577
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Mary Swainie, 1611, DL/C/220, fols. 462–63, London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA).

2 See Cressy, David, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), 36–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Spufford, Margaret, “Women Teaching Reading to Poor Children in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Opening the Nursery Door: Reading, Writing and Childhood 1600–1900, ed. Hilton, Mary, Styles, Morag, and Watson, Victor (London, 1997), 47–62Google Scholar. For criticisms of schoolmistresses, see Clement, Francis, The petie schole with an English orthographie, wherin by rules lately prescribed is taught a method to enable both a childe to reade perfectly within one moneth, & also the vnperfect to write English aright (London, 1587), 4Google Scholar. More generously, Clement counted seamstresses among the other artisans who could teach children how to read while at work. See Clement, The petie schole, 9. In 1646, William Dell asserted that no women “but such as are most sober and grave” should be permitted to teach children to read. See Dell, William, “The Right Reformation of Learning,” in Several Sermons and Discourses of William Dell (London, 1709), 642–48Google Scholar, at 643.

3 Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 37.

4 Fox, Adam, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), 15Google Scholar.

5 Oral and literate culture were not completely separate, of course, as Adam Fox has persuasively argued; stories, phrases, and information cycled between spoken communication, manuscript, and print. Yet even in Fox's account, ordinary women's vernacular culture, exemplified by nursery rhymes, charms, and fairy tales, “remained relatively untouched by the influence of the written word.” Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 211.

6 See Earle, Peter, “The Female Labour Market in London in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” Economic History Review 42, no. 3 (August 1989): 328–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Capp, Bernard, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hubbard, Eleanor, City Women: Money, Sex, and the Social Order in Early Modern London (Oxford, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Herbert, Amanda E., Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 53–54. Similarly, Roger Schofield suggested that the precise level of literacy measured by signatures hardly matters, as long as they provide a consistent means of comparing different populations. Schofield, Roger S., “The Measurement of Literacy in Pre-Industrial England,” in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Goody, Jack (Cambridge, 1968), 311–25Google Scholar, at 318–19.

8 Cressy, David, “Literacy in Context,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. Brewer, John and Porter, Roy (London, 1993), 305–19Google Scholar, at 314.

9 Thomas, Keith, “The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England,” in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. Baumann, Gerd (Oxford, 1986), 97–131Google Scholar, at 99–101.

10 Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 54–55. For French literacy, see Furet, François and Ozouf, Jacques, Lire et Écrire: L' Alphabétisation des Français de Calvin à Jules Ferry (Paris, 1977), 1:19–28Google Scholar.

11 Charlton, Kenneth, “Women and Education,” in A Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing, ed. Pacheco, Anita (Malden, MA, 2002), 4Google Scholar.

12 Johansson, Egil, “The History of Literacy in Sweden,” in Literacy and Social Development in the West: A Reader, ed. Graff, Harvey J. (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar, cited in Thomas, “Literacy in Early Modern England,” 102–3; Laqueur, Thomas, “Toward a Cultural Ecology of Literacy in England, 1600–1850,” in Literacy in Historical Perspective, ed. Resnick, Daniel P. (Washington, 1983), 43–58Google Scholar, at 45.

13 Thomas, “Literacy in Early Modern England,” 100.

14 Spufford, Margaret, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981), 27Google Scholar.

15 Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, 34–35. Similarly, J. Paul Hunter argues that signature literacy was particularly likely to undercount women's reading literacy, compared to men's, in Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (New York, 1990), 73Google Scholar.

16 Thomas, “Literacy in Early Modern England,” 103.

17 Earle, “The Female Labour Market,” 334–36; Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 128.

18 Ford, Wyn, “The Problem of Literacy in Early Modern England,” History 78, no. 252 (February 1993): 22–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Ferguson, Margaret, Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago, 2003), 77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Hackel, Heidi Brayman, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge, 2005), 58Google Scholar.

21 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 72.

22 Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 408–9.

23 Capp, When Gossips Meet, 367.

24 Dolan, Frances E., “Reading, Writing, and Other Crimes,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture, ed. Traub, Valerie, Kaplan, M. Lindsay, and Callaghan, Dympna (Cambridge, 1996), 142–67Google Scholar, at 144.

25 Despite Brayman Hackel's interest in expanding the study of reading to include “ordinary” readers, because of limitations in the sources her chapter on women readers deals primarily with gentle and aristocratic women, most notably Lady Anne Clifford and Frances Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater. See Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 196–255.

26 Donawerth, Jane, “Women's Reading Practices in Seventeenth-Century England: Margaret Fell's Women's Speaking Justified,” Sixteenth Century Journal 37, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 968–1005CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Knight, Janice, “The Word Made Flesh: Reading Women and the Bible,” in Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Hackel, Heidi Brayman and Kelly, Catherine E. (Philadelphia, 2008), 169–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 See Pearson, Jacqueline, “Women Reading, Reading Women,” in Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700, ed. Wilcox, Helen (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar; Snook, Edith, Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England (Aldershot, UK, 2005)Google Scholar; Mary Ellen Lamb, “Inventing the Early Modern Woman Reader through the World of Goods: Lyly's Gentlewoman Reader and Katherine Stubbs,” in Reading Women, ed. Brayman Hackel and Kelly, 15–35; Smith, Helen, “‘More Swete vnto the Eare / Than Holsome for Ye Mynde’: Embodying Early Modern Women's Reading,” Huntington Library Quarterly 73, no. 3 (September 2010): 413–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Even gentle and aristocratic women left frustratingly few traces as readers. Thus the diary of Margaret Hoby, an exceptionally full account of a godly gentlewoman's reading practices, has been extensively scrutinized for evidence of women's reading as a social activity and as political activism. See Lamb, Mary Ellen, “The Sociality of Margaret Hoby's Reading Practices and the Representation of Reformation Interiority,” Critical Survey 12, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 17–32Google Scholar; and Crawford, Julia, “Reconsidering Early Modern Women's Reading, or, How Margaret Hoby Read Her de Mornay,” Huntington Library Quarterly 73, no. 2 (June 2010): 193–223CrossRefGoogle Scholar, respectively.

29 See Bianca F.-C. Calabresi, “‘You Sow, Ile Read’: Letters and Literacies in Early Modern Samplers,” in Reading Women, ed. Brayman Hackel and Kelly (Philadelphia, 2008), 79–104; Wall, Wendy, “Literacy and the Domestic Arts,” Huntington Library Quarterly 73, no. 3 (September 2010): 383–412CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frye, Susan, Pens and Needles: Women's Textualities in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 See Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories; Watt, Tessa, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar; Clark, Sandra, “The Broadside Ballad and the Woman's Voice,” in Debating Gender in Early Modern England, ed. Malcolmson, Cristina and Suzuki, Mihoko (New York, 2002), 103–20Google Scholar; Capp, When Gossips Meet, 366–69.

31 Whyman, Susan E., The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660–1800 (Oxford, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 See Daybell, James, ed., Early Modern Women's Letter Writing, 1450–1700 (New York, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Adam Fox, “Ballads, Libels, and Popular Ridicule in Jacobean England,” Past and Present, no. 145 (November 1994): 47–83, at 52, 59.

34 Earle, The Female Labour Market, 343.

35 Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 144–45.

36 Because deponents provided only their parish of residence, the geographical definition of London used here is necessarily imprecise: some large parishes on the boundaries were urban in parts and rural in others; the rapid growth of the capital during this period meant that the real boundaries of the London area were always in flux. For this study, St. Clement Temple Bar, St. Giles in the Fields, St. James Clerkenwell, St. Katherine by the Tower, St. Leonard Shoreditch, St. Martin in the Fields, Whitechapel, St. Mary le Strand, St. Margaret Westminster, and Stepney are counted as being in London, as well as the city proper and those parishes that were at least partially within the Liberties.

37 Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 59.

38 While Ford suggested that paying attention to well-formed initials could help scholars avoid misclassifying people who were simply disinclined to sign their full names, he warned that penmanship was an unreliable guide to literacy and that reading ability remained impossible to measure. Ford, “The Problem of Literacy in Early Modern England,” 32, 34, 37.

39 Women who wrote a single initial almost always wrote the first letter of their first name. Similarly, those who signed only one name almost invariably chose their Christian name. This suggests that women identified more strongly with first names that remained constant over the course of their lives than last names, which were usually acquired by marriage. Both single initials and single names have been counted as initials and signatures, respectively.

40 Even some women who could write may have been reluctant to do so in public. See Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 201–2.

41 Here and elsewhere in this article, percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number.

42 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 63.

43 See Sanders, Eve Rachele, Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1998), 173Google Scholar; Hackel, Heidi Brayman, “Reading Women,” in The History of British Women's Writing, 1500–1610, ed. Bicks, Caroline and Summit, Jennifer (New York, 2010), 20–21Google Scholar.

44 See Calabresi, “‘You Sow, Ile Read,’” 87.

45 Walls were enticingly blank spaces, as Samuel Daniel noted in 1585: “euen litle children as soone as they can vse their hands at libertie, goe with a Cole to the wall, indeuoring to drawe the forme of this thing or that.” See Daniel, trans., The worthy tract of Paulus Iouius (London, 1585)Google Scholar, sig. A1v. Indeed, Juliet Fleming argues that “the whitewashed domestic wall” may have been “the primary scene of writing in early modern England.” See Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (London, 2001), 50Google Scholar.

46 See Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 55.

47 Bridget Matthews, 1614, DL/C/222, fols. 35r, 36r, LMA.

48 Alice Sutton, 1615, DL/C/223, fol. 160v, LMA.

49 Joan Ellesmere, 1615, DL/C/223 fol. 351v, LMA.

50 In manuscript writing, separations between letters and thick lines resulting from pressing down hard on the quill and dragging it slowly across the paper testify to the conscious effort required by the writer.

51 DRO D331/10/15, Dorothy Soresbie/Roger Soresbie, 18 August 1689, D5202/10/16, quoted in Whyman, The Pen and the People, 84.

52 Mary Swainie, 1611, DL/C/220, fols. 462–63, LMA; Elizabeth Burroughs, 1634, DL/C/630, fols. 212–13r, LMA; Elizabeth Ellel, 1616, DL/C/224, fol. 82, LMA.

53 Bridget Hollet, 1610, DL/C/220, fol. 450v, LMA.

54 Alice Dorrington, 1614, DL/C/222, fol. 130v, LMA. Interestingly, Alice Dorrington seems to have aspired to write her initials: her mark is made up of a number of small letter-like shapes that bear some resemblance to A's and D's. See fol. 128v.

55 Sixty-nine female deponents have been excluded from the sample because they marked their depositions in ways that could not be confidently classified as marks, initials, or signatures. Often, these women wrote letters or words that were not obviously related to their names. Rebecca Jackson, for example, signed her deposition with the letters Bm, Elizabeth Frier wrote the word “and,” and Margaret Comendale marked her deposition with a B and her interrogatory with a D. Seemingly random letters may have been copied from nearby text, the only letters the deponents knew how to form, or they may have referred to unusual nicknames, maiden names, or previous husbands’ names; unfortunately, there is no way to tell. Only marks that were clearly intended to be letters were excluded for this reason: common zigzag marks resembling the letters M or W have been counted as plain marks.

56 Cressy originally found that London women were hardly more literate than their provincial peers until they rapidly began to improve in the late Stuart period, but he did not distinguish between London-born and immigrant women resident in the capital. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 147–49.

57 Rebecca Jackson, 1617, DL/C/225, fol. 90r, LMA.

58 Some and perhaps many literate mothers taught their children to read, but evidence of the practice is fragmentary. See Charlton, Kenneth, “Mothers As Educative Agents in Pre-Industrial England,” History of Education 23, no. 2 (June 1994): 129–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Margaret Spufford, “Women Teaching Reading.”

59 For London immigrant women's origins, see Hubbard, City Women, 18–20.

60 A never-married woman might be classified as famula domestica (domestic servant or maidservant, sometimes apprentice), filia (daughter), puella (maiden), soluta (single woman), “spinster,” or some combination thereof. These labels and other contextual information make it possible to identify maidservants and girls or young women living with family. The remainder have been grouped together in Table 8 as “independent women.” The categories puella, soluta, and “spinster” may well have conveyed different nuances, either about the character or status of the women in question, or the preference of the clerks for moral or economic terminology, but without more information it is hard to draw firm conclusions. For the changing ways in which unmarried women were conceptualized and labeled in early modern England, see Beattie, Cordelia, Medieval Single Women: The Politics of Social Classification in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Froide, Amy, Never Married: Single Women in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2005), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 156–59.

61 Goulde Pettie, 1615, DL/C/223, fols. 298v, 299v; Jane Lewes, 1615, fols. 291r, 293r; Susan Bonner, 1615, fols. 315v, 317r; and Elizabeth Hust, 1615, fol. 311, LMA.

62 Some married women in London had “femme sole” status for the purpose of trade, while others, such as sailors' wives, acted for their husbands in their absence. See McIntosh, Marjorie Keniston, “The Benefits and Drawbacks of Femme Sole Status in England, 1300–1630,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 3 (July 2005): 410–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hunt, Margaret R., “The Sailor's Wife, War Finance, and Coverture in Late Seventeenth-Century London,” in Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and the Common Law World, ed. Stretton, Tim and Kesselring, Krista J. (Montreal, 2013), 139–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 For women's work in early modern London, see Hubbard, City Women, 189-234. Estimates suggest that about half of London wives in their late forties or older had been previously widowed. For remarriage and the economic activities of London widows, see Hubbard, City Women, 238–41, 264–65.

64 Earle, “The Female Labour Market,” 336.

65 Laqueur, “Towards a Cultural Ecology of Literacy in England,” 49. In contrast, Cressy and Spufford argued that the acquisition of literacy took place—or did not—in a brief moment in childhood. See Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 41; Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, 27.

66 Sara Hodgkinson, 1626, DL/C/230, fols. 115v–116r, LMA.

67 Twenty-eight of them recorded their place of birth, and of these eleven, or 39 percent, were London natives, a disproportionate number since less than 23 percent of London women overall had been born in the city. Another three of the seventeen migrants were from Ipswich, Chester, and Lincoln.

68 Mildred Addison, 1628, DL/C/231, fols. 252–253v, LMA. For negotiations about Honor Humble's portion, see Eleanor Hubbard, City Women, 182–83.

69 Margery Downham, 1609, DL/C/218, fols. 394v–395r, LMA; Margery Exall, 1625, DL/C/229, fols. 124v–126r, LMA.

70 Bridewell Minutes of the Court of Governors, BCB 5, fol. 23v. (April 1605), Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives.

71 Ralph Yardley, 1608, DL/C/218, 251, LMA.

72 See Hubbard, City Women, 67–68.

73 Elizabeth Hawkridge, 1638, DL/C/235 fol. 140v, LMA.

74 Joyce Taylor, 1613, DL/C/221 fol. 1543r, LMA.

75 Mary Turner, 1608, DL/C/218, 246, LMA.

76 See Adam Fox, “Ballads, Libels, and Popular Ridicule.”

77 See Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England.