LEARNING AND VIRTUE: MARGARET MORE ROPER

In their prolific writings about women, sixteenth-century men gave only minor consideration to the question of women's education. Even in those few books devoted exclusively to women's upbringing, authors lingered but briefly on intellectual development before hurrying on to detailed advice about feminine conduct. Such general neglect gives particular prominence to the writings of the humanists, Juan Luis Vives, Thomas More, Richard Hyrde, and Thomas Elyot, who appear to advocate something akin to a liberal education for women. Indeed, the obvious assumption might be that only because certain humanists gave certain women access to books and encouraged their studies did the number of women writers increase so dramatically in the sixteenth century. But if women did indeed gain an education, they also confronted restrictions upon their knowledge. As this chapter will show, Tudor educational theorists were at best ambivalent and at worst prohibitive when considering how women might use their education.

What was the relationship between women's education and the establishment of a women's literary tradition? Part of the answer lies within the books that considered whether and how women should be educated. While these writings were not necessarily closely followed prescriptions, they nonetheless recorded the contemporary attitudes, beliefs, rationalizations, prejudices, and expectations which confronted, and may even have formed, women writers. Whether advocating or proscribing women's education, these writers expressed a devastatingly consistent cultural doctrine on women's function in society, establishing in the process an image of the ideal learned and virtuous woman.

The main problem for women writers evolved from the nature of the virtue that their learning was intended to foster. While male virtue might be expressed by an active life in the world or public service or eloquence, women were taught that feminine virtue meant a private, domestic existence, lived in "obedience, silence, and chastity." Indeed, writers on female education seem obsessed with these three traditional feminine virtues at the very moment when they are considering the untraditional topic of improving women's minds. Discussing change in so important an area seems to have summoned fears that women would step beyond the private sphere, and so these educators compensated by insisting on women's "natural" domestic attributes. As their own writings consistently show, women received this message and often felt compelled to reveal how their learning had indeed increased their virtue.

It is important to realize about these treatises that those who argue for and against women's education proceed from the same assumptions about woman's nature. The belief in woman's inherent intellectual weakness justified both advocating that her mind be improved and insisting that she was incapable of learning. The conviction that woman's sphere was domestic warranted both the prohibition of women's education and the establishment of a curriculum appropriate to her place in society. In considering the works of Juan Vives (as translated by Richard Hyrde), Thomas Elyot, Richard Mulcaster, and Giovanni Michele Bruto (as translated by "W.P."), we will find that while all but Bruto advocate the intellectual improvement of daughters, all four writers assume women are lesser creatures belonging to the private domain. Their advice would pose particular problems for an incipient writer and prohibitions like theirs may well have influenced the kind of writing women did.

An influential voice on women's education was that of Juan Luis Vives, tutor in the service of Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII's highly educated queen. Vives's Instruction of a Christen woman (1523), translated into English in 1529 by Richard Hyrde, a tutor in Sir Thomas More's household, had over forty editions and translations in the sixteenth century, including eight reprintings of the English version between 1540 and 1592. According to Hyrde's preface, More fully approved of Vives's program and had himself considered translating the Instruction. He did in fact oversee Hyrde's work, making corrections and endorsing the final copy.

The humanists did indeed see themselves as women's benefactors, countering the streams of vilification from misogynist writers. Hyrde, in his preface to the Instruction, says he often wonders at the "unreasonable oversyght of men whiche never ceace to compleyne of womens conditions. And yet having the education and order of them in theyr owne handes not only do litell diligence to teache them and bryng them up better but also purposely withdrawe them from lernyng by whiche they myght have occasyons to waxe better by their selfe." Like every other sixteenth-century educator, Vives focuses women's education on the development of her virtue, primarily defined as chastity, and with it, the attendant qualities of domesticity, privacy, and piety. All of his analysis of woman's nature and his recommendations for her upbringing conform to his fundamental insistence on her chastity. For Vives, chastity certainly means physical purity, as the admonitions to girls, wives, and widows to avoid male company and to dress modestly confirm; occasionally he seems to refer to a larger sense of spiritual purity.

In Chapter Six, "Of virginite," significantly juxtaposed to the chapter, "What bokes be to be redde and what not," Vives remarks that even the pagans valued virginity, and cites the example of Pallas who, born of Jupiter's brain, signified that "virginitie and wysedome were joyned together. And they dedicated the nombre of seven both to chastite and wysdome...." This coupling is not new, as for centuries church fathers and ecclesiastical scholars had waged a vigorous battle against women for the cause of a celibate clergy. They too insisted that chastity and wisdom were joined together, that chastity allowed the triumph of the mind over the flesh, and that sex and marriage destroyed the ability to serve God. Women were of course the main temptation, and everyone from Eve on was a potential danger to the holy living of mankind. But where chastity for men was by no means central, for women it was prescribed as the preeminent goal for all, whether celibate, maiden, wife, or widow. "For as a man nedeth many thynges as wysedome, eloquence, knowledge of thynges with remembrance, some crafte to live by, Justice, Liberalitie, lusty stomake, and other...