Literature For Women Literature For Women Author Cali Espinosa Supervising Editor Melissa Walter Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

Intellectual copyright in this entry is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Cali Espinosa, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Cooking and Kitchens Education Home Remedies Education Literacy Science Herbal Remedies Medicine Literature and the Arts Conduct Literature Published file. Updated metadata proofed Review of article finished. updated author respStmt. Created File. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Cali Espinosa Cali Espinosa

Cali Espinosa was a student at the University of Fraser Valley.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 Melissa Walter Melissa Walter

Melissa Walter is Associate Professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley. Her research focuses on early modern English drama and English and European prose fiction. She is the author of The Italian Novella and Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines (U of Toronto, 2019), and co-editor, with Dennis Britton, of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Authors, Audiences, Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018). Her work on English theatre and the European novella has appeared in several edited collections, including Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2008), and Transnational Mobility in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2012). She has also written about Translation and Identity in the Dialogues in English and Malaiane Languages (Indographies, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris. Palgrave 2012). At the University of the Fraser Valley, she is a lead coordinator of UFV’s Shakespeare and Reconciliation Garden.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
Literate Women

Across many ages, including in the early modern period, written or printed information for women has made many societies uneasy. Often, literacy and reading materials for women have been heavily controlled, and women denied education. During the Elizabethan era (1558–1603), girls were less likely than boys to be formally educated, and women could read and write in lower numbers than men. However, an estimated 25% of urban women in the period could both read and write at least their initials, compared to about 40% of urban men. So, the audience of literate women was less substantial, but it was still large enough that books and pamphlets for women were published in increasing numbers in the period. Books about cooking, household management and medicine, and religious instruction were commonly read by early modern women.

Beliefs and Theories

Measuring literacy in the early modern period is not simple, as there are no formal records for the dame schools or petty schools that operated in towns and villages, many of them run by women who taught basic literacy and numeracy out of their homes. Likewise, the definition of literacy itself is in question, with ongoing debates about if reading alone counts as literacy, or if people must both read and write to be counted as literate. Writing was taught as a separate skill from reading in the early modern period, which further complicates the investigation into who could read, as there are few historical records from or about those who could only read. Margaret W. Ferguson and Mihoko Suzuki point out that many definitions of literacy are tightly linked to theories of history that implicitly or explicitly privilege one term in a binary opposition over another: literate vs. oral, Renaissance vs. medieval, modern vs. primitive, cultured vs. barbaric, male vs. female (1). It can be difficult to make a concrete definition when the foundations of a field of study are biased. In recent studies, scholars have increasingly relied on personal documents like diaries, journals, and letters for qualitative evidence of female literacy when quantitative data is unavailable.

Ideal Behaviour

Many books were published in the early modern period that detailed and taught ideal behavior for women, and most were written by men. Many of these books promoted the triad of virtues for women of the era: chastity, silence, and obedience.

Many books for women worked to teach these virtues. Conduct books of the period such as Juan Luis Vives Instruction of a Christian Woman (1529), note the belief that chastity is the principal virtue of a woman, and counterpoiseth with all the rest: if she have that, no man will look for any other, and if she lack that no man will regard other. Other books about female behavior were written by men, often Puritan clergymen, such as Robert Dod and John Cleaver’s 1598 A Godly Form of Household Government or William Gouge’s 1622 Of Domesticall Duties. These conduct books may have been read by or to women of the period to encourage ideal behaviors. The first conduct book written specifically for women as the audience was Richard Brathwaite’s The English Gentlewoman, first published in 1631.

The English Housewife, Gervase Markham

One popular model text for women from this period is Gervase Markham’s The English Housewife, featuring English cookery and home remedies for a variety of illnesses. From homemade recipes for pies to household treatments for common illnesses, this text consists of useful information that women could use in their homes. In the years between its publication in 1615 and its final edition in 1683, The English Housewife went through nine editions and at least two other reprints.

In this handbook, Markham reveals the pretty and curious secrets of preparing everything from simple foods to such elaborate meals as a humble feast—an undertaking that implies no less than two and thirty dishes, which is as much as can stand on one table. He advises the housewife on brewing beer, caring for wine, and growing flax and hemp for thread and even prevention of everything like baldness and bad breath.

Additional Topics for Women Readers

Besides subjects like cooking and household medicine, many women of the era read religious commentaries, sermons, and other spiritual guides. Scholar Georgianna Ziegler notes, that many of the books owned by women were religious in nature, but they also read works of literature and history, dictionaries, books about plants, household books, guides for behavior, and others. Frances Wolfreston (1607–1677), who had one of the largest libraries known for a non-noble woman, claimed a copy of a romance novel titled The Famous History of Montelyon, Knight of the Oracle by writing her name at the top of a page (Ziegler). Women also made humorous, handwritten notes their books. An example includes Elizabeth Benne, who wrote in her copy of Dorothy Leigh’s The Mothers Blessing (1640), a popular pamphlet in the form of a letter from an expectant mother to her unborn child: Elizabeth Benne is my name and with my pen I wrote the same and if my pen had been better I had write every letter.

Key Print Sources Aughterson, Kate. Renaisaance Woman: Constuctions of Femininity in England. Routledge, 1995. Best. Michael R. Gervase Markham. <title level="m">The English Housewife. The American Historical Review, vol. 93, no. 1, Feb. 1988, pp. LVIII, 321. Jack, Belinda Elizabeth. The Woman Reader. Yale University Press, 2012.
Key Online Sources Ferguson, Margaret W., and Mihoko Suzuki. Women’s Literacies and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern England. Literature Compass, vol. 12, no. 11, Nov. 2015, pp. 575–90. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12281. Hubbard, Eleanor. Reading, Writing, and Initialing: Female Literacy in Early Modern London. Journal of British Studies, vol. 54, no. 3, Jul. 2015, pp. 553–577. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24702120. Murphy, Jessica. Virtuous Necessity: Conduct Literature and the Making of the Virtuous Woman in Early Modern England. University of Michigan Press, 2015. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.7685052. O behave! Conduct Books for Women. Trinity College Library, University of Cambridge, 8 Mar. 2021. https://www.trinhall.cam.ac.uk/library/oh-behave-conduct-books-for-women/. Ziegler, Georgianna. What Were Women Reading? A Dive into the Folger Vault. Folger Shakespeare Library, 24 Jan. 2020, https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/women-readers-books-owners-names/.