ABSTRACT
A page from the school notebook of fifteen-year-old Rachel Fane (1613?–1680), granddaughter of Grace, Lady Mildmay, dutifully lists a number of injunctions for modesty and moderation, admonishing those who sleep or drink too much, who “rashly plight thy troth,” or who neglect to hide their parents’ “weakenesse.”3 Fane’s work is a carefully produced transcription of Cato, English versions of which were popular in both early modern homes and schools, but these schoolgirl exercises also supply clear testimony of a young girl’s mature concerns, especially regarding the proper, patient treatment of her parents, whose “errer [might] make them swarve aside.” Such exercises were frequently designed for the daughters of nobles and gentry to foster morality and handwriting as well as to advertise to marriageability or learning, but they might also demonstrate how these attributes were simultaneously tied up with the exacting project of being a daughter: learning without rebellion, ambition that had no real intellectual outlet, precision and rigor put entirely at the service of one’s betters, all pieces of an unusually pliable form of knowledge that could go underground or stay unmoored from any clear sense of the self. Such aims are confidently outlined in schoolmaster Thomas Salter’s 1579 educational treatise. “[W]ho can doubt,” Salter reasons, “the accomplishment of a maiden who, by virtuous instruction and ample evidence, has learned to govern a household wisely?”4 Little wonder that “daughterly love” and thanks, as Princess Elizabeth notes in letters to her stepmother Katherine Parr (excerpted above), might adhere to rather conventional boundaries or respect such obvious limits.
