ABSTRACT
Strictures against public speaking by women sounded forth from pulpit, conduct manuals and household instruction: nevertheless, some women did speak out in public, through preaching, petitioning,1 or publication of their translations, mother’s advice, household or medical advice or poems;2 or in private through letters, unpublished autobiography3 and in the unmeasurable education of their children at home. The strongest injunctions against public speaking were those of St Paul (chapter 1, p. 14), continually reiterated and extended to cover all kinds of speaking in public places. Vives’s Instruction of a Christian Woman, a supposedly liberal humanist educational treatise (chapters 3 and 6), emphasises the ideal godly woman as one who refrains from speaking.
